The Very Slow Movie Player shows films at a fraction of normal speed

There’s surely a movie you love enough that you wish you could put it on your walls.

The Very Slow Movie Player (VSMP) is a device that plays films at 24 frames an hour, rather than the usual 24 frames a second. 

In a Medium post, designer Bryan Boyer explained that he put the project together to “celebrate slowness.” The device consists of an ePaper display, hooked up to a Raspberry Pi computer with custom software, and housed in a 3D-printed case. 

Every 2.5 minutes, one frame from the film stored on the computer’s memory card is extracted, converted to black-and-white, then displayed on the screen.

It means a regular film, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, would take 8,220 hours (or nearly a year to complete), rather than its usual running time of 2 hours and 17 minutes.

Boyer explains that slowing things down helps one show more appreciation. After all, you’d have so much time to inspect the details from each frame from a film.

“Films are vain creatures that typically demand a dark room, full attention, and eager eyeballs ready to accept light beamed from the screen or projector to your visual cortex. VSMP inverts all of that,” he writes.

“It is impossible to ‘watch’ in a traditional way because it’s too slow. In a staring contest with VSMP you will always lose. It can be noticed, glanced-at, or even inspected, but not watched.”

It’s certainly a neat twist on the digital photo frame, although there appears to be no plans to make this device a reality.