Local photographer makes stunning 3-minute film of Lucerne at night

Zug photographer Oliver Schmid, who works mainly as a web designer, has made a stunning hyper-lapse film showing Lucerne and surrounding area at night time. Called “Sleepless in Lucerne”, it only lasts about three minutes, but it took him between 150 and 200 hours to make on the computer, and that is not including the 50 hours he spent taking the original photographs.

This is not the first hyper-lapse film he has produced, having made one last year set in the Ticino, central Switzerland and the Bernese Oberland. This new one features mainly night-time scenes of Lucerne and surrounding area as well the Pilatus mountain under the Milky Way. As anyone who watches this video will see, using the hyper-lapse technique rather than just the time-lapse one makes for a much more stunning result. As the journalist who wrote this article mentioned, it has a far greater “wow” effect. Just watch, for example, how you see an illuminated ship leave Lucerne harbour.

The original photographs, some 20,000 of them, were taken in 50 hours spent in Lucerne and environs between November of last year and March of this year. Then it was a matter of putting them all together and editing them on the computer, which, as mentioned, took between 150 and 200 hours.

“Something I definitely wanted to include was the Milky Way above the Pilatus,” he said. Indeed, he was able to do this on only his second night there. On a more problematic side, while photographing in Lucerne, some 30 Christmas party-goers, albeit well-meaning ones, wanted to be included in the photographs, which ruined the desired effect.

It is only understandable that the director of the Lucerne Tourist Board was delighted with the results, hoping the film will lure lots more visitors to the city. Some of Schmid’s other films have been seen as many as 20,000 times, though as this particular film features one city only, he is not expecting so many. He may be surprised.

See it for yourself on http://sleeplessin.ch.