What does a snowfall look like? Not as it floats down from a gray sky to land upon an outstretched tongue, but as it grows from a single molecule? It looks like some kind of crystal flower, blossoming from a singularity in space-time.
Backed by a soft piano nocturne taken from Aphex Twin, Russian filmmaker Vyacheslav Ivanov (not to be mistaken for the famous Russian poet) microscopically grew snowflakes and then filmed them with an ultra-high-speed camera to show what they look like as they form.
From our perspective of time, a snowflake forms in the blink of an eye, yet from the perspective of Ivanov's cameras, it's a far more poetic event: an almost ballet-like genesis of geometry that happens a million times per second in the winter clouds.
We've written about the design lessons of snowflakes before, and how it teaches us about the fractal beauty that lies beneath everything: life's uniqueness, patterns, and nearly infinite level of detail. It's nice to find an equally beautiful way to be reminded of it all over again.