A hypnotising video animation morphing what appears to be hundreds of faces seamlessly into one another has fast become a viral sensation.
Amalgamation, created by French motion graphics artist Micaël Reynaud, features black and white photos taken by Michael Jang.
The GIF file, made by compressing several images into an animation, is part of a 1:24 long video.
A GIF, or graphics interchange format, is a bitmap image format first introduced in 1987.
They have been most popularly used for small animations or low-resolution clips from TV or film.
The full piece, set to Treeship by Memory Tapes, opens with a series of blurred faces from Mr Jang's 'Summer Weather' portraits, taken of contestants competing to deliver local TV weather reports in 1983.
Old and young, smiles morph to straight faces as their shapes dramatically expand and contract.
Glimpses of soft feminine features evolve into men with handlebar moustaches and freckle-faced teenagers grinning through braces.
Mr Reynaud told MailOnline: 'I like GIF as a discipline of its own. They loop a small selection of pictures again and again, emphasizes the details so intense like a hypnotic very short film.
'So I experimented a morphing inside the morphing with GIF version of amalgamation. Then, I wanted to push the process at its limits with The video Amalgamation.'
Mr Reynaud, through his company Dunun, creates and develops what he calls 'original, interactive and ludic multimedia projects'.
'My objective is to create surprising works,' he writes on his website, adding that he is 'always aiming to reach the best quality even if some will certainly describe me as a maniac.'
The piece has certainly earned the eccentric artist attention since he uploaded it on video sharing website vimeo.com on November 19, where it boasts over 12,000 views.
But on image sharing websites like Reddit and Imgur, it has exploded in popularity, with nearly 8,000 up votes and over 1million views respectively.
Viewers have been quick to praise the work - and some to shun his use of eye-popping technology.
'Your brain is not ready for this', reads a posting on Reddit.
