Speeding up time can make even the most mundane events seem interesting. Take, for example, watching paint dry. See?

Erik Solheim also demonstrated time-lapse's ability to amaze by fast-forwarding through the changing seasons in his backyard.


He snapped a picture of the same exact spot every 30 minutes for an entire year and ending up with 16,000 photos. He then edited down his images to 3,500 and set them to a video, showing a whole year passing in just two minutes. (Spoiler alert: There's snow and falling leaves.)

Keep reading for this and more incredible time-lapse videos of otherwise boring circumstances.




Still life becomes still death, as a decaying bucket of fruit and veggies is photographed every 40 minutes over a 74-day period:




Taking us through the life cycle of a moustache, we see a clean-shaven man go from beard to goatee to soul patch to fu manchu to something resembling a unnervingly attentive geography teacher in just 45 seconds:






From this famous New Yorker story comes the time-lapse video of a man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. He spends his time pacing and climbing around the lift, playing with the contents of his wallet and sleeping -- until the very end when he can't take it anymore and frees himself by sawing off his arm with a pocket knife. Oh, wait. That's a different story.






In 25 seconds, a girl named Natalie ages from infancy to 10 years. You can almost feel the pre-teen annoyance developing.






A dead gecko becomes an all-you-can-eat buffet for some ravenous ants, who are clearly not picky in the least: