Above is the beautiful video by Pau García Laita. Summer Barcelona is produced using a tilt-shift photography effect. It took me a few scenes to realise I was watching the real thing and not just a model. It’s Barcelona in miniature!

Summer Barcelona by Pau García Laita

Filmed during the summer of 2012 this video has just been released on Vimeo. It uses a great track by Croquet Club called If You Really Care.

Pau is a 22 year-old freelance film-maker from Barcelona whose main interest is extreme sports filming. I asked him about the video and the techniques he used.

“This project came to mind after watching the well-known tilt-shift video “The Sandpit” which inspired me to do the same here in Barcelona.

The project took about 5 months, wandering the city looking for high spots. It was quite difficult because Barcelona isn’t New York but not impossible at all. Another important fact is that this kind of video requires a special lens that makes the blur effect naturally. Instead of that, my tiny budget and I decided to do it in post-production with Adobe’s After Effects visual effects software, which didn’t look too bad.

So this technique consists of mixing time-lapse filming (shooting pictures for a time and putting them together resulting in a fast-forwarded video) with high height spots, and adding some effects with a computer. It’s been very common between photographers these past years and I thought Barcelona needed a decent one.”

However it was done I think it looks fab. A great soundtrack too!

You can check out Pau’s other work on Vimeo or at www.paugarcialaita.com. Watch the original inspiration for this work, The Sandpit. And read more about tilt-shift photography on Wikipedia. Also check out 50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography on the Smashing Magazine website.