William Hoffman is a New York filmmaker who put this video together and uploaded it last August. It’s finally getting some viral activity, and rightfully so. It’s “a celebration of life that was inspired by David Eagleman’s book, Sum.”
I do enjoy a perfectly realized edit, and this one’s full of them. William’s website.
R00B0y
This makes me think of: http://vimeo.com/1293253
weddings
I don't know what it is about simple shots of life captured on film that renew my appreciation of those moments, but it gets me every time.
HugsNotDrugs
Can anyone confirm if the music was by Sigur Ros?
Tim Giachetti
I lasted 32 seconds. Then I just shook my head.
Art through symbolism is a waste of time for me. I see these things every day. It's called society. Wow, it doesn't take a film to live in it.
pwscott
I assume this is the "life flashing before my eyes" that people talk about after a traumatic event. :^P
Johnny Cat
The song is "Where Were You" by Parachutes.
zavatone
I looked at the scene with the trees, grass, sidewalk, curb and bus and immediately thought, "New Jersey!" Scrolling the video back to read the license plate on the bus, it was indeed, New Jersey.
e cigarette
Great song in this one!
ted
I got to about 19 seconds and gave up. Just seemed like a random collection of images with no sense of unity or coherence.
Rob
19 seconds Ted? Is this a boast about how quickly you think you can distinguish good from bad? About how very busy you are with more important stuff? Or is this a demonstration of an inability to take the time to look and to see? An example of the fact that although beauty is all around us most people, Ted included, do not take even a moment to notice it and appreciate it. I hope that whatever you had to rush to do in that second half of one minute was more substantial and more meaningful but I doubt it was. But it does not matter and you don't care because you will not have perceived it anyway. Slow down Ted.
LisaL
Meh..... not really impressed with things like this. Most of it looked staged/fake and yeah... just not impressed.
Kifer
This was brilliant. If you cannot appreciate these moments in time, then you are missing out on the major journey that is life. Life is not the end results, for if it was, it would simply be death. Life is all those little in betweens, which is what was captured here.
Imagine you had never experienced this world, that you were in some sort of experience-less purgatory, where you knew words and ideas, but you had no concept of what the world was really like, and for one instance in your existence, you were allowed one glimpse of what life was, but it would only last for 257 seconds. Your entire existence wondering, waiting, and now you have only 257 seconds to see it.
That is what I see in this video.
Trogdar
Can someone mark this as NSFW? There's no nudity, but some questionable scenes that might not go over well with an employer. Thanks.
Dave_Dave
Although it seems that the intention of the video is to make your heart go pitter-patter, I found more value in the discussion it opens up.
I seems as though a moment can be likened to a morpheme in language. Small units that we, in our unaided human perception of time and action, can assign some sense of meaning and intention to in relation to a whole event.
Made me think about how we think. What properties does a snippet of our lives have to possess in order to qualify as a graspable unit that our minds can label as a part going towards a whole or merely a part unto itself. I think that "moments" occur where language can contain an event that lays just within the perceptible boundary of our unaided senses.
ted
Rob:
No, I guess I just prefer to make my own moments, and don't rely on somebody else to tell me what generic moments I should appreciate.
I gave up after 19 seconds because this was just an apparently random scattering of images. If I want that, I'll do an image search on google.
Flux
I liked the message.
Life is wonderful and tragic. Yet there is a certain beauty even in the sad moments of our lives. One day, like a balloon that escapes its owner grasp, its simply gone.
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