Someday

Last week's short, Persistence of Vision, was an example of a replacement animation with a narrow concept—taking a single, static image and using the patterns in it to give it life. Páraic McGloughlin's video for "Someday" by Weval also uses the same sort of found-image replacement, including some cathedrals that recall Persistence, but there's nothing narrow about it. It uses the entire world as its fodder, from plants and forests to streetscapes, tiles, tourists sites, stock photography and more.

McLoughlin has played with some of these ideas before—his Arena uses satellite imagery to create a dramatic portrait of human landscapes, and Chase does something similar from a more grounded perspective. As impressive as both of those are, neither is anywhere near as ambitious as "Someday." This film is big.

In fact, it's one of very few videos where I might actually recommend seeing it on a smaller screen, just to make the imagery a little more manageable. Watch it maxed out, too, but be ready for a barrage of nonstop, sensory-overwhelming imagery—it can be disorienting and dizzying, but it's also absolutely engrossing. McGloughlin explores a range of environments and themes, changing the vantage point and subjects in a way that somehow manages to feel coherent despite it all. A journey through the ordinary and extraordinary, the natural and man-made, it's a portrait of an interconnected world—something all the more striking in this disconnected moment.

In that sense, it makes for a good pairing with Anastasia Melikhova's Eternity and David O'Reilly's Everything, two more shorts that play with scale to create a sense of grand connectivity, in completely different ways.