Seeing New York City Simultaneously at Night and Day

It might take a minute to figure out something's wrong with this short film about New York. Some buildings beam in the reflected rays of the sun. Others seem to have incurred a strange kind of power outage that left their facades black as night, as if the universe decided not to direct photons in that location that day.

The monochromatic mashup is the result of filming the same locations at different times of the day, then combining the footage digitally with the kind of rotoscoping techniques used in movies like Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. Director Philip Stockton used a combination of time-lapse and animation to complete this cockeyed look at the big city, which he says "explores the relationships between night and day."