Viral video: Dutch girl ages 12 years in 2 minutes, 45 seconds
It took Dutch filmmaker Frans Hofmeester’s daughter Lotte 12 years to grow from a full-cheeked infant to a coy 12-year-old girl on the brink of adolescence. But you can watch this incredible (and inevitable) evolution take place in less than three minutes, thanks to Hofmeester’s video “Lotte Time Lapse: Birth to 12 years in 2 min. 45.”
Hoffmeester filmed his daughter once a week, every week, since her birth in October 1999. As she was about to enter adolescence, he decided it was time to share this visual history of his daughter’s growth with the world.
He strung the videos together and sped them up, creating a time-lapse video of sorts that has gone viral on the Internet. In the last week it has racked up close to 2 million views on Vimeo and YouTube.
“She was changing at such a rapid pace that I felt the need to document the way she looked, to keep my memories in tact,” Hofmeester said in an email to the Los Angeles Times.
The images in the video are not static -- so the video lacks that creepy slow morph that we’re familiar with from people who take their picture everyday.
Hofmeester said it wasn’t always easy to get Lotte and her younger brother Vince to sit in front of the camera every week.
When they didn’t feel like it, Hofmeester said he’d ask them questions about their lives, trying to stall them until he got the shot.
Hofmeester said he decided to share the video with the world now because Lotte is entering puberty. “She’ll be changing a lot over the coming years, but primarily on the inside,” he said.
But of course, he will continue filming.
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