It is debated whether time lapse is a form of animation or photography, nonetheless, it is a popular medium. The definition of time lapse is "a technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured is much lower than that used to view the sequence." In other words, time lapse is when pictures are taken at certain intervals (anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours, or even days) which are then stitched together and played as a video. Below are some examples.
A time lapse of a 3D chalk drawing of Super Mario. This won't have taken long, possibly only half an hour to an hour. A camera would have been set up next to the artist an it would have taken a picture every couple of minutes.
A time lapse of Earth from October 2011 to March 2012 created from images taken by the Electro-L Weather Satellite. This is of course very different from the others as it was taken from a satellite instead of a normal camera. It took much longer to make than the animation above too, about 5 months.
This is a time lapse of a pregnancy. This would have obviously taken about 9 months, and one picture would have been taken every couple of days or weeks, so rather than having a camera permanently there, like the one above, they would have just set a normal camera up to take the picture on a delay.
