Time Passes Montage

A montage where the position of the camera typically (although not necessarily, thanks to digital editing) remains the same, in order to emphasize the passage of time. This is a subset of the Time Compression Montage.

Common uses will show things like:
 * Different seasons at the same location.
 * The hands of a clock (much like Spinning Clock Hands).
 * An object getting buried under dust.
 * Day and night at the same location.
 * Fast-forwarded clouds moving in the sky, might overlap with the day/night change.
 * Under-cranking.

A variation of this is a montage showing the pages of an old-fashioned paper almanac of days flipping over rapidly or being ripped off and fluttering away so that the printed numbers and names of the months seem to change in rapid sequence, to showcase how time flies. Common spoof: to reveal that in fact very little time (or at least, not as much as the montage would have implied) has passed. Frequently accompanies a Fast Forward Mechanic in video games.

Advertising

 * Used in a recent Citroen advert in the UK to show the passage of time from the designing of the first coupé cabriolet to the release of the current model.

Anime and Manga

 * Done in Episode 40 of Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. For bonus points, the camera is situated in front of a window (which cycles through day and night very fast) and in front of an hourglass.
 * Azumanga Daioh has Sakaki petting Chiyo's huge dog for hours and hours and hours as the day turns into afternoon.

Film

 * Bella has one in one of the Twilight movies. The camera sweeps around her as the window shows the seasonal changes.
 * There is one in Blindness except the camera sweeps through the scene.
 * City of God uses this to show the history of drug-dealing in an apartment.
 * In The Hudsucker Proxy, during the montage of Norville's invention being made, there are periodic shots of the door of the marketing department as they come up with names for the new product. The secretary in front of the door is reading War and Peace. By the last shot, when they finally come up with a name, she's reading Anna Karenina.
 * Pride and Prejudice (2005), where Lizzy Bennet seems to be sitting on a swing for several months.
 * In the Disney comedy Rocket Man, the main character falls asleep inside a stasis chamber made for a monkey (the monkey has taken the main character's chamber) preceding a montage of space nebulae, before then showing him waking up and finding that he hasn't even been asleep for a whole day (out of the many months of stasis intended).
 * In the 1960 American Film of the Book of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, the protagonist sees a dummy in the window of a fashion store across the street go through changes of clothes and fashions in rapid succession.
 * Several decades pass in the first few minutes of Up.
 * Titanic invokes this trope by fading the titular ship as it was to its sunken form in the present.
 * The song "Strange Things" from Toy Story shows Andy gradually abandoning Woody in favor of Buzz Lightyear.
 * Ralph Bakshi puts a notable one of these in his animated The Lord of the Rings. "Seventeen years passed in the Shire..." the narrator solemnly informs us. Cue image of the Shire going through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter...repeatedly...and eventually sped up to near strobe-like swiftness.

Literature

 * Terry Pratchett noted in Wyrd Sisters that the hardest part of Time Travel is finding a laboratory opposite a fashion store that would keep the same dummy in its window for years (parodying The Film of the Book The Time Machine (1960)).
 * In Sarah Waters' Tipping the Velvet, Nan gawps out of the same window onto the garden, which quickly shuffles through all the seasons.
 * Scrooge's visit to the past in A Christmas Carol is a very broad version of this, but the moment when he witnesses his childhood passing in moments is most explicit.

Live-Action TV

 * Stargate SG-1's final episode used one of these to reflect the passing of 20 years of the marooned crew of the Odyssey.
 * Used on The Amazing Race when teams are sitting around, waiting for something to open.
 * Kamen Rider Kiva is set both in the '80s and the present, and invokes this trope often - one notable scene has a wall in a cafe, decorated with commemorative annual plates, which suddenly multiply till they cover half the wall as the story shifts to the present.
 * Battlestar Galactica Reimagined does it twice. First one is near the end of Lay Down Your Burdens. After hearing the news of wearily puts his head over the table and the camera slowly closes up while a song begins to play. Suddenly, there is light coming in from the windows and the camera pans back to reveal that.
 * The second one is after the Fleet . The shot shows Hera wandering around . She looks up and the camera pans to show a variety of landscapes while the aforementioned music plays. The sequence ends in  and it is revealed that  years have passed.

Web Comics

 * Penny and Aggie, in this strip.
 * Parodied in Keychain of Creation, here

Web Original

 * Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog shows a seasonal medley of Dr Horrible getting beat up and humiliated (in the same location) throughout the four seasons.

Western Animation

 * A Codename: Kids Next Door ep ("AWARDS") spoofs the Spinning Clock Hands version, where the spinning clock hands turns out to be just Numbuh 4 playing with his watch.
 * Spoofed in Hey Arnold!!, albeit as only a Time Compression Montage, with an episode showing Stinky growing a pumpkin.
 * Spoofed in South Park, when Cartman injures himself by attempting to fly off a roof, and is taken to the hospital to recuperate. A voiceover sings: "Seasons change / time passes by / As the weeks become the months become the years...", and when the camera returns to his hospital bed, the doctor informs Cartman that only two days have passed and removes a beard-like face warmer from his face.
 * In the pilot episode of Futurama, New York City is destroyed by aliens twice during the 1000-year time period shown in the montage.
 * Used to soul crushing effect in "Jurassic Bark", where Fry's dog is seen waiting for him on the curb outside his old workplace for 15 or so years, until he lies down and dies.
 * Both of these were among the things nodded to in The Movie Bender's Big Score. Both times, a time-traveling Bender was responsible. It also shows that the dog was being watched after by an alternate Fry, making it something of a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming when you realize the dog was treated right after all.
 * Also used breathtakingly in the climax of The Late Philip J. Fry when Fry, Bender and the professor witness the end and beginning of the universe.
 * Spoofed in The Simpsons, in a parody of One Hundred and One Dalmatians. The family watches as a dog gives birth to Santa's Little Helper's puppies: "22, 23, 24..." [montage] "...25!".