A Reel of Time
Timelapse Sequences & Music by Marc Driessen © 2026
Most people experience a city at walking speed. We rarely notice the rhythms that emerge over hours instead of seconds, or the subtle patterns hidden within everyday movement. Time-lapse photography has the remarkable ability to reveal these invisible layers of time, transforming the familiar into something unexpected.
This short reel brings together sequences from three short film projects: Crosscurrents, Vanishing Points and A Reel of Life. The reel offers a glimpse of how I use time-lapse to explore movement, urban space and the passage of time.
My fascination with time-lapse stems from the work of filmmakers such as Hillary Harris, whose pioneering films in the 1970s transformed ordinary streets into dynamic landscapes of motion. Later, Ron Fricke expanded that cinematic language, creating films less concerned with narrative than with our perception of time, nature and civilisation. Their work showed that the camera can do more than record reality. It can reveal realities we rarely notice with our own eyes.
That idea continues to inspire me. How can we reveal something that is always there, yet rarely seen?
The time-lapse sequences were captured with the Nikon ZR and DJI Mavic 3 Pro, using NiSi Athena Prime lenses and the Nikon NIKKOR Z 180-600mm telephoto lens.
