Bloom Dance, a GO motion 4K flower time-lapse

Spend three minutes with dozens of flowers as they wiggle, push open, stretch, and wilt. Then learn the name of each species and how many real hours it took to bloom.

Bloom Dance is a GO motion 4K time-lapse project by Yutaka Kitamura. Species include tulips, magnolias, amaryllises, peonies, lillies, roses, irises, dalias, camellias, chrysanthemums, and more.

Around 360,775 images were captured, with painstaking attention to technical and botanical care, over the course of two and a half years—specifically 4,233 hours or 176 days. Translated from Japanese:

“What I felt after creating this flower time-lapse is that people can only perceive things on the time axis of their own lifespan.

“I was filming while I was working, so I spent every day looking at real flowers blooming. It was a very fresh experience for me at the time to see things that I take for granted every day, but I couldn’t recognize them even though they were moving so vividly. In fact, the world that humans can perceive is only very small, and the world is far wider and deeper. It may be that I was able to continue time lapse for two and a half years because I was able to realize such a thing.”

“There must be a variety of time axes and ways of looking at things, such as the movement of elementary particles, plants, animals, celestial bodies, and the universe, from extremely fast things to much longer times that cannot be seen in the human lifespan. However, with current technology, humans cannot perceive it. Slow-motion and time-lapse are techniques that change the time axis and make it recognizable to humans, and that’s why I’m fascinated by these shooting methods.”

Time-lapse flowers are a classic on TKSST. Previously:
• Flowers opening: a time lapse from thousands of photos
• Spring, an epic 4K flower time lapse that took 3 years
• Wild Plants of Japan: Strange and lovely time lapse videos
• Echinopsis Cacti: Brilliant blooming cactus flowers
• Umwelt – Time lapse flowers mix with real time insects