New Timelapse Shows a ‘Moving’ Portrait of Boston

When Erik Rojas came to Boston University in 2010, he didn’t have much interest in photography and videography. But by the time he graduated last month, he had enough skills under his (camera) belt to land him two separate job interviews for gigs in the movie and television industry in Los Angeles.

A Lowell native, Rojas credits his desire to create movies and shorts to his close friend Chris Roewe, who loaned him a camera so he could film a concert at the House of Blues for a school project after the duo met for the first time during their freshman year at BU.

That simple act is what set up a four-year companionship forged by a love for the digital hobby, and led to bigger projects that they teamed up together to make. “He sort of helped inspire me to start studying film,” said Rojas, who eventually decided to minor in film at BU, while he took on a course load in advertising.

As the years pushed forward, and their shared passion for the city they spent four years living in grew, Roewe and Rojas decided the best way to finally say goodbye to their college days was to make a lasting memory of all the most iconic spots in Boston. To do that, they created a time-lapse video, called “Moving Portrait: Boston,” and captured areas on film that most people don’t get to see on a regular basis. From the top of the Prudential Building, to inside Fenway Park and the TD Garden, the four-minute tribute, set to music by Explosions in the Sky,  doesn’t fall short of packaging together a string of images that show many of the city’s moving parts.

The film, which they posted online this week after putting more than 50 hours into the project between them, capped off their college careers and served as a send-off as they start the next chapter of their lives. “Over the course of four years, Boston helped us grow a lot. At the end of it, we just wanted to capture what we liked about Boston, and what we thought of as Boston,” said Rojas. “This was just entirely personal, we wanted to do it just to do it. We had done videos of other places, and we thought we should do Boston because it was a place that we loved.”

Rojas and Roewe’s video adds to the growing list of video tributes about Boston’s landscapes and landmarks that have been put together in the last two years.