Norman Porter Co. has been making jeans one pair at a time for over three years now. Dave Stampler runs the business end of the company while his brother Mike designs and crafts every single pair of jeans with his own hands.

Mike’s salvaged quite a collection of machines from Philadelphia’s old textile days: a Reece buttonholer, a couple Singer bar-tackers, even a Union Special. It takes Mike about three hours to put one jean together from start to finish, which gave us an idea.

We wanted to show every single step in the production of raw denim pants but do so in a reasonable amount of time. So we followed Mike around for the crafting of one pair and shot a guerrilla-style time lapse with over 8,000 still photos. We then sped it up to condense the entire process into just four minutes.

Song credit: “Chuco Suaves” by Pachuco José y Los Diamantes, available on Wild Records. Check out Wild’s latest release from the Terrorsaurs.