This stop-motion masterpiece was made with 12,000 pressed leaves

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m a sucker for stop-motion animation. I also love fall and all its colors, and running through rustling fallen leaves. Photographer Brett Foxwell brought together stop-motion and fallen leaves and turned them into a hypnotizing video titled The Book of Leaves. He used as many as 12,000 pressed leaves for this video, so it took many walks through fallen leaves and plenty of effort to put it all together.

The Book of Leaves is actually a part of another film Bret created, titled LeafPresser. This is only the leaf sequence on its own, showing you leaves and their transformations.

“While collecting leaves, I conceived that the leaf shape [of] every single plant type I could find would fit somewhere into a continuous animated sequence of leaves if that sequence were expansive enough,” Brett writes. “If I didn’t have the perfect shape, it meant I just had to collect more leaves.”

But collecting the perfect leaves was only the beginning. Brett pressed all of them and then photographed each one lit from the front and the back before assembling the stop-motion sequence. “There was such a stunningly diverse compendium of forms, shapes and textures to be found that it began to seem as though there were an underlying visual vocabulary I could scarcely grasp,” Brett explains. “Each ‘word’ took hours to decode and I could only collect such a vanishingly small portion of all the leaves that I worried I would not get the whole message.”

Brett describes the entire process as a “laborious a task,” but thanks to his obsession, he managed to pull it off and create this mesmerizing work. You can watch it above, and make sure to follow more of Brett’s work on his website, Vimeo, and Instagram.

[via Laughing Squid]