Petrolia is a series of time-lapse videos depicting the various mega-structures of the oil industry, as observed in the Scottish North Sea: tankers, oil rigs, cranes, refineries, and the many small boats that assist their movements. In this film, we view everything at a distance. We hardly see any human beings, except sometimes as tiny dots wiggling and bouncing like tiny fleas upon the decks and platforms. Even though this film is 20 minutes long, I was glued to the screen. Because we're watching the scenes in accelerated motion, we see distant clouds rapidly churning, dusk rapidly turning into night, the slowest of tankers racing across the water, and those massive cranes (that sit atop oil rigs) waving around like little hyper-active robot arms. A feeling of speed is heightened even more when we look at the sea. The waves (which are fairly fast at normal speed) are - here - insanely speedy. At one point (around 09:00), my son and I (he's 9) had to stop the video because it looked like a shark had swam past! When we played it in slow-speed, it was actually a motorboat. There was a cool moment, though. However, the most fascinating moments of all were when the film was showing the oil refineries at night. This produced an astonishingly alien effect. There was something about the combination of architectural convolution in metal, the superabundance of bright lights, and the aggressive emission of smoke illuminated against dark skies... it produced imagery that evoked memories of having seen countless science-fiction movies about majestic alien civilizations. Yet, all of the pictures were entirely real. Amazing.