A Very Slow Movie Player takes a movie and stretches it over days or weeks. One frame changes every few minutes, turning your screen into something between a painting and a film. This site gives you the free tools to make your own.
Turn your video file into individual frame images, ready to play.
Load your frames and watch your film unfold, one frame at a time.
In 2018, designer Bryan Boyer built the first Very Slow Movie Player: a Raspberry Pi connected to a small e-ink screen that displayed films at 24 frames per hour instead of 24 frames per second. At that pace, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey would take about a year to play. The result was something you couldn't really "watch" in the traditional sense — you could notice it, glance at it, inspect it, but never sit down and watch it. It became a piece of living art rather than entertainment.
Boyer's insight was that slowing a film down this dramatically changes your relationship with it. You stop following the plot and start seeing the light, the colour, the composition of each frame. A movie becomes a series of photographs that evolve so gradually you're never quite sure when the scene changed.
His original build used e-ink and a Raspberry Pi, which is a lovely approach but requires some hardware tinkering. This site offers a simpler alternative: browser-based tools that let you create your own VSMP on any colour screen you already own — an old tablet, a spare laptop, a monitor on a shelf. No coding, no soldering, no special hardware. Everything runs locally in your browser, with no data sent anywhere.
Screen-record a movie playing on your computer using QuickTime (Mac) or the built-in screen recorder on Windows. This gives you an MP4 or MOV file you own.
Open the Make frames page in Chrome. Drop your video in, choose how many frames per second you want, and pick a folder to save them to. It runs entirely in your browser.
Transfer the frames and the player page to your display device — via USB, Google Drive, AirDrop, or however you like. Once copied, the display device never needs internet.
Open the Play page on your display device, drop in the frames folder, set your pace, and go fullscreen. Prop the device on a shelf, plug it in, and leave it running.
The easiest way to capture a film is to screen-record it while it plays on your computer. On a Mac, open QuickTime Player and choose File > New Screen Recording. On Windows, press Win+G to open the Game Bar recorder.
Films with strong visual compositions work best. Think sweeping landscapes, bold lighting, slow pacing, and distinctive colour palettes. The effect is most striking when each individual frame could stand alone as a photograph.
You need a spare screen you can leave running — an old tablet, laptop, or monitor. Anything with a web browser and a colour display will work. The tools here are built for colour LCD/OLED screens, not e-ink readers like Kindles (those need a different approach with a Raspberry Pi).
Not much. Here are some typical sizes for frames extracted at 1 per second, resized to 1280 × 800 (a 10" tablet):
| Film length | Frames | Total size |
|---|---|---|
| 2 minutes (test clip) | ~120 | ~6 MB |
| 30 minutes | ~1,800 | ~90 MB |
| 2 hours | ~7,200 | ~360 MB |
The player lets you set exactly how long you want the film to take. It calculates the speed per frame based on the number of frames you have and how many hours per day your display is on.
Here's a feel for the pacing at different settings, assuming 15 display hours per day (say 6.30am to 9.30pm):
| Film length | Over 2 weeks | Over 4 weeks |
|---|---|---|
| 2 minutes (120 frames) | 1 min 45 sec / frame | 3 min 30 sec / frame |
| 30 minutes (1,800 frames) | 7 sec / frame | 14 sec / frame |
| 2 hours (7,200 frames) | ~2 sec / frame | ~4 sec / frame |