It’s hard not to browse a social media feed without coming across some stunning time-lapse videos and with more cameras adding time-lapse modes, it’s increasingly easy to create them yourself. But to take your time-lapse game to the next level, you have to skip those special in-camera modes and do a bit more of the work yourself.

In this video, produced for our sister publication PDN by David Patino, photographer and time-lapse wizard Neil van Niekerk shares some of his tips for creating cinematic time-lapse videos.

There are a few important takeaways:

• You need movement in both the foreground and background. Foreground movement can be achieved by slowly moving the camera along a slider while background movement is typically the star of the show: clouds rolling by, pedestrians bustling down the street, etc.
• Set your camera to manual, disable image stabilization and, ideally, use a lens with mechanical aperture control to avoid minute shifts in the aperture (which will show up as annoying flicker when you compile your still frames).
• Set your shutter speed to 2/3 the rate of the interval you’re capturing still frames.