This timelapse was made over the course of three weeks in December of 2012. The construction of a new pavilion at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans, LA, incorporated the assembly and rigging of six WWII-era aircraft.

I used three GoPro Hero3 Black cameras set in timelapse mode at the highest resolution (12MP) and captured at 30 second intervals. I left the white balance and gain settings at default automatic due to my lack of time to do extensive testing (the cameras came out right before I started shooting).

The GoPro will only record about 2 hours of timelapse video using its battery, so I had to purchase some extra batteries, but most importantly I purchased external USB charger packs: Snow Lizard brand “Power Tek” (7000mAh capacity, DC5V — 1A) and hooked them up to the GoPros, extending the life to about a 8-9 hour max recording time.

The assemblers and riggers would usually start around 7AM and quit at about 7PM, so that meant I had to do a rotating schedule as far as changing out batteries – once at 6:30AM and once at 2:30PM. I had enough extra batteries, battery packs and an additional GoPro to ensure that I always had batteries charging while the others were in use.

You will see a North American B-25 Mitchell, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, a Grumman TBM Avenger, a Chance Vought F4U Corsair, a Douglas SBD Dauntless and a North American Aviation P-51 Mustang … plus a whole lot of construction going on!

The music you hear is a stock purchase from Pond5 called “Whatever Fear Invents” by Beautypharma. You’ll also hear excerpts from Franklin Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor “Infamy” speech.

The main stars in this video are the riggers at LA Proproint. Those guys are incredible (nerves of steel) as you’ll see in the video.

You can also see the remarkable end result below, for those who have not yet seen it (or want to see it again!)