Shoot movies like Wes Anderson or Godard? Instagram has an app for that

SINGAPORE - Despite being a longtime Instagram user, the social network’s video posting features on its app didn’t quite pique my interest when it was first launched a year ago. Instagram videos, limited to just 15 seconds, have not gotten as much mainstream success as Twitter’s video-sharing Vine app either, as evidenced by the multitude of 6-second World Cup videos shared by my friends on Facebook.

However, this feature surprised me recently when I took some Instagram videos while on holiday in Vietnam. The app’s video stabilisation feature transformed my jerky videos, sometimes shot while I was on an all-terrain vehicle or jeep, into super-smooth montages - the resulting videos were so fluid that it was almost dream-like.

As a cinema buff, this reminded me of the long tracking shots (a scene when the camera follows a specific person or event) favoured by the likes of film directors such as Wes Anderson or Jean-Luc Godard. Unlike the greats though, I used a smartphone instead of an expensive and elaborate rig.

This feature has been hived off into Hyperlapse, a video capture app only available for Apple’s iPhones and iPads that Instagram launched globally today (Aug 27). The app allows you to capture high-resolution 1080p videos augmented by its stabilisation feature - as opposed to the low-resolution and square-format that the Instagram app employs for video. You are no longer limited to capturing 15 second videos and you can also speed footage up to 12 times to make a time-lapse video. Time-lapse filming is a technique that speeds up footage taken over a long duration into a shorter clip. Users can then share the videos on Instagram or Facebook.

The app is currently unavailable for users on Android handsets. According to Instagram, Android apps are unable to tap into the data generated by a smartphone’s gyroscope, which is needed to stabilise videos.

Instagram wants users to utilise the app for more creative film-making, said the company’s communications manager Gabe Madway.

Speaking yesterday to the media here via a video conference, he said: “We wanted to give people a little more leeway ... We thought that it deserved to be out on its own, to be able to create content that was bigger than just Instagram.”

Ultimately, Instagram hopes that Hyperlapse will be a creative tool for everyone.

“The quality of amateur film-making on mobile devices is really incredible now, but this gives people an extra tool to do things that were previously expensive and difficult to do. It’ll be really interesting to see if it does have a further impact on film-making. We hope it does,” Mr Madway said.