A Single Block Of Wood Becomes An Absorbing Stop-Motion Animation In "Waves of Grain"

In the carefully-crafted Waves of Grain, filmmaker Keith Skretch uses a single block of wood to create an absorbing piece of "strata-cut" animation. The wood was planed down one layer at a time until it was just dust to create the mesmerizing timelapse of shifting patterns.

Set to the sounds of Ennio Morricone's track "The Big Gundown," the changing grain of the wood—whittled away step by laborious step and photographed over a three hour period—takes on a pareidolic quality, revealing the secret, transitory forms hidden in the wood at each stage of removal.

"The painstaking process revealed a hidden life and motion in the seemingly static grain of the wood, even as the wood itself was reduced to a mound of sawdust," notes Skretch on his Vimeo page. We can determine the age of a tree by counting its rings, but with Waves of Grain we can actively witness its inner life through gorgeous movement.

GIF via

via Colossal

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