The film comes from filmmaker and photographer Samuel Orr, who spent nearly two years in a small house at the edge of the woods outside Bloomington, Indiana, while creating nature documentaries for PBS. A peek out his window showed birds swooping into the eaves, orb spiders weaving webs, deer scampering by, and the ever-changing shadows and rustlings of nature.

Orr set up a dedicated camera tripods inside his house that captured more than 40,000 pictures over the course of 16 months. By stitching them together, he produced a wonderful testament showing the full changes of a year: snow melting, grasses growing, rain falling, and the sun shifting in the sky. Orr also added appropriate audio recordings from different times of the year.

“I wove them in seasonally accurate ways, so if you were in these woods say in early march, you’d hear Sandhill Cranes honking overhead as they migrated north to Wisconsin. In April, tree frogs. In the summer cicadas, and so on. I took a few liberties with species gone from the area (elk bugling in the fall, wolves), but they once were here, and I like how they seem to be calling for their lost homes,” he wrote in an e-mail to Wired.

The result races through a world seldom experienced by city dwellers. In a complementary piece, Orr is now working to produce a similar film detailing a year in the life of New York City.

Video: Samuel Orr

Music: johnny_ripper/Soundcloud