The roughly 4500 JPEG pictures (crazy 20 GB) were taken in interval timer shooting mode with a Nikon D300 on a tripod, the interval set to 1 second. As lens the Nikkor 18-200mm was used with a Hoya NDx8 neutral density (gray) filter. Post processing was done on a Mac Pro using Photoshop (for photo editing), QuickTime Pro (for image sequencing) and iMovie HD (for "720p" movie making).

The pan and zoom effect in some of the clips was achieved by using a self-made Photoshop Javascript (.jsx) to adjust (rotation, curve, saturation), crop (16:9 ratio), and resize (down to 1280x720 pixels) images in batch before importing them into Quicktime and iMovie. This way I was able to maintain large control over image quality, introduce virtual camera movement and zoom, and use "standard" Apple software without having to invest in expensive movie editing software. Here are more details on how I did it.