Celebrate Winter's End with Inverted Footage of Melting Snow

With springtime officially here, it’s time to bid adieu to icy precipitation from the sky. Glenn Venghaus’ short video, Threat of Snow, captures those fleeting moments of snow melting, but with a spatio-temporal twist: the video shows the snow rising from the wet ground, and reforming into piles of ice crystals, stopping at plenty of icy, abstract views in between.

The one-minute video was made by inversing, then retiming, images of melting snow over several days. No special effects or animations were used—just a special lighting setup and precise filmography.

The inverse colors give the snow an eerie, abysmal look, while the retiming makes it appear to sprout from puddles of water. The composition and unnatural timing of the shots abstracts the snow, so it’s less like watching paint dry and more like watching some sort of monstrous, generative, natural disaster. The crackling, droning music doesn’t help to make the video any less ominous.

Watch the whole video below, and let’s hope it’s the last glimpse of snow you’ll see until next winter.

Threat of Snow from Glenn Venghaus on Vimeo.

Check out more of Glenn Venghaus’ videos here.

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