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Tilt-shift photography is a pretty cute trick in itself, although overuse by eager Flickr acolytes sort of turned the technique into a bit of a cliche. But the combination of time lapse footage has pumped new life into the withering novelty. I’ve seen a few pretty impressive examples of it so far in the past year, but this short film by Sam O’Hare is definitely the longest and best put together.

The Sandpit is a day in the life of New York City, only miniaturized. The incredible thing about it is that there was no video footage shot for the project. Get ready to shit — the entire thing was pieced together using still photography… over 35,000 individual photos to be more precise.

It’s a fitting treatment for such a massive, bustling city where one can easily feel a bit like a lowly insect in a huge, complicated colony. My girlfriend astutely noted that particularly the footage of traffic looked like blood flowing through a network of veins, which is another good metaphor for how all these thousands of individuals going about their daily routines fills a city with life.