The tools

• Canon 1000d DSLR camera with a Sigma 10-20mm super wide angle lens
• A Twin1 ISR cable release/intervalometer
• One iMac
• ffmpeg, dcraw, libraw and Raw Photo Processor
• A bunch of shell scripts (notes really)
• One Hahnel Tripod

There's probably plenty of online tutorials on how to setup your camera to do interval shooting with a remote, so I won't go into that here. What is more useful and interesting is how to rename and stitch all the images together (either on linux or on a mac) with ffmpeg.

All you really need is just this

#!/bin/bash
x=1
for i in *JPG;
do
    counter=$(printf %06d $x)
    mv "$i" img"$counter".jpg
    x=$(($x+1))
done

and this

ffmpeg -f image2 -i img%06d.jpg -sameq mytimelapse.mp4

Both of the above was pretty much lifted from the ffmpeg documentation. The generated output should be usable in iMovie.

I'll post the time lapse I did recently once I get permission.