Time Lapse Captures Seattle’s Impressive Growth

Want to know why a 4-mile drive in Seattle now takes nearly an hour? A recent GeekWire feature has the answer, in the form of a time lapse that illustrates just how much the Emerald City has grown over the past three years alone. The footage, which was taken from a camera mounted to the Space Needle, shows the coming and going of buildings all over the city, in what GeekWire calls “an almost cartoonish representation of the massive growth taking place in Seattle.”

The piece was created by Ricardo Martin Brualla, a VR/AR engineer at the Seattle Google campus. Though the camera took a photo of the city about every 10 minutes over the course of three years, Brualla tells GeekWire the final piece is made up of 2 photos per day, which amounts to nearly 2,200 shots. Once he selected images, he used a custom formula to stabilize weather and lighting conditions, camera shakes, and other factors, in order to produce the final version.
The most prominent changes occur on a pattern, in neighborhoods such as South Lake Union and the urban core, where major tech companies such as Amazon have increased their footprint year after year. Reflecting on the Emerald City’s changes, Brualla expressed amazement at Denny Triangle and South Lake Union. “I can still remember the car dealerships that were 10 minutes away from Westlake,” he said. “Seeing the changes through the Space Needle webcam is really cool, and my video just makes them a bit easier to watch.”

For more on Brualla’s time-lapse of downtown Seattle, read the full GeekWire feature here.