Drone ‘Seasonlapse’ Captures the Beauty of Boston Across Seasons

A drone production company has created a sensational “seasonlapse” video showing the changing of seasons in Boston.

Above Summit, which is based in the Massachusetts state capital, spent years compiling drone footage to create a very rare aerial seasonlapse video.

The remarkable video opens at the Bunker Hill Monument before taking in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where viewers get to witness the changes from fall to winter.

The video continues to take in remarkable views of Beantown as the seasons jump seamlessly from the rich, bright colors of summer, to the icy, desaturated cold spells.

The video even contains shots of the same location where one half of the image is wintery and the other half shows lush, green summer.

DPReview spoke with Above Summit’s senior editor Jacob Ballin who said that the post-production process was a challenge for this project.

“Even with the waypoint missions, most of the clips required manual alignment due to slight changes in altitude, heading, or gimbal pitch between the clips,’ he explains.

“I started by aligning the clips from each season by reducing the opacity of one of the clips and manually aligning them, season by season. Then, I added various transitions between the seasons. Some transitions worked better for certain shots, so I tested various different types of transitions before settling on a few select types,” Ballin tells DPReview.

Above Summit, which describes itself as a boutique production company, used DJI’s Mavic 2 Pro drone to capture the video which started back in 2014 when the team used a Phantom 3 for test flights. For the ground shots, the team used a Canon 5D Mark IV, C200, and C70.

“We have filmed Boston from head to toe, drone, helicopters, ground, cars — and so we wanted to show its transformative nature in a way like never before,” Above Summit’s co-founder Jovan Tanasijevic tells DPReview.

“It’s been an exciting decade in cinema — drones, gimbals, stabilization of all kinds — internal, external, multi-axis glory and miniaturization of extremely precise tools.”

More of Above Summit’s work can be found on its website, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.