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A Girl Ages From 0 To 14 Years Old, In 4 Minutes

A Dutch filmmaker has updated one of the more compelling uses of time-lapse photography techniques online. Frans Hofmeester has filmed his daughter, Lotte, every week since her birth in 1999. He recently posted a video that shows her on a white background, growing from a chubby-cheeked baby into a braces-wearing teenager.

Lotte turned 14 in October; that led her father to make a new "time lapse edit" of the images he has collected since her birth. Hofmeester posted similar videos of Lotte after she turned 12 and 13 years old.

Made up of video snippets that last only a few seconds, the images show flashes of a girl in pigtails; a girl wanting to talk; a girl wanting to be somewhere else; a girl who's happy. They're the images parents sometimes see in a blur, when they look at their children and wonder where the time went.

In a 2012 email to The Los Angeles Times, Hofmeester said he began the project to preserve his memories of Lotte.

"She was changing at such a rapid pace that I felt the need to document the way she looked," he said.

Hofmeester has done a similar project with his son, Vince, releasing a video in February that showed how the boy had changed from birth to age 11.

You might be wondering: What do the kids think? British newspaper The Telegraph reports that Hofmeester says he has discussed the issue with his children and that they're proud of the project.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Bill Chappell is a writer and editor on the News Desk in the heart of NPR's newsroom in Washington, D.C.