Not "that" kind of rock video

July 4, 2010 9:36 AM

Can you help me find a video short about a rock creature that lives so slowly it is unaware of the human life happening around it?

Somewhere in the past couple of years, I saw a video online. The video showed an animate rock creature, sitting on a hillside. The passage of time is sped up tremendously, with seasons and years flickering by in seconds, to show the speed at which the rock "lives". Human time and rock time are so out of synch, the boulder creature barely even notices a city forming in the valley below, and eventually fading away.

Does this ring any bells for the Hive Mind? TIA.

posted by browse to Grab Bag (13 answers total)

Is it this?
posted by adiabat at 9:46 AM on July 4, 2010

Could be Das Rad. I think it's come up in Ask recently, but I'm not sure where.
posted by JackarypQQ at 9:48 AM on July 4, 2010

It's definitely The Rocks/Das Rad... I love that short.
posted by lizzicide at 9:50 AM on July 4, 2010

Wow, that was fast! Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of. Many thanks!
posted by browse at 9:57 AM on July 4, 2010

Yep it was asked before, sort of ;)
posted by iconomy at 9:59 AM on July 4, 2010

Ok, to piggyback since I loved this short: Anything else out there following a different time scale? Films, books, whatever? I've always dug the fact that there are things working on different size scales, (the lives of bugs vs. those of elephants), but this is such a cool idea I can't be satiated with a 9 minute short film, however awesome.
posted by monkeymadness at 1:56 PM on July 4, 2010

You might like my Dad's books; Dragon's Egg and Starquake, by Robert L Forward. The alien species (little creatures living on a neutron star) are evoloving and living much faster than the humans that come to study them, so they go from primitive beings worshiping the "lights in the sky" to equals and beyond in the course of a few days of mission.
posted by The otter lady at 4:18 PM on July 4, 2010

monkeymadness: You might like two Star Trek episodes, the original series episode "Wink of an Eye," and the (IMHO) superior Voyager episode "Blink of an Eye."
posted by googly at 4:47 PM on July 4, 2010

You might also like the "Cosmic Clock" video from this post, as well as the time traveling scene from the 2002 remake of The Time Machine.
posted by Rhaomi at 7:59 PM on July 4, 2010

Awesome, guys, and thanks to browse for the question. There were also a couple Twilight Zone episodes, one with an astronaut worshipped by aliens and another in which scientists create a fast evolving planet complete with protector spirit, but the sped up time frame in those is more just to move the plot forward and doesn't seem as integral to the story. I'll definitely check these out.
posted by monkeymadness at 8:41 PM on July 4, 2010

Fascinating video. Just watched all 8 minutes of it, which I don't usually do with youtube shorts.
posted by arnicae at 9:07 AM on July 5, 2010

So did I. And I didn't even mind the subtitles. Great short.
posted by Splunge at 10:52 AM on July 5, 2010

There was a short story I read in the seventies(? Might have been old even then.)

It concerned a human relating his sadness at the insanely quick lifespan of a group of tiny aliens to a larger alien. He'd just get to know one and the entire generation would die off. The punchline was that the giant alien understood his sadness because to him, the humans were the tiny, quick-to-die aliens.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:54 AM on July 6, 2010