Movie intro megamix
A cleverly constructed mashup of all the major Hollywood studio intros — MGM’s roaring lion, Disney’s castle, Paramount’s flying stars, Miramax’s skyline — into one mega-intro.
(via @pieratt)
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
kottke.org posts about video
A Very Murray Christmas
Netflix will air a Christmas special starring Bill Murray and directed by Sofia Coppola. That is an amazing collection of proper nouns all together in the same sentence.
Written by Sofia Coppola, Bill Murray and Mitch Glazer and directed by Sofia Coppola, A Very Murray Christmas is described as an homage to the classic variety show featuring Bill Murray playing himself, as he worries no one will show up to his TV show due to a terrible snow storm in New York City. Through luck and perseverance, guests arrive at the Carlyle hotel to help him; dancing and singing in holiday spirit.
(via several kind people)
Expensive wine is for suckers
Wine ratings are all over the place, particularly when price enters the picture. This video explains that the most expensive wine is not always the best tasting wine, but you might prefer it anyway.
(via @riondotnu)
“I Googled how to be a porn star”
Miriam Weeks was in the news last year as the Duke freshmen who performed in pornographic movies as Belle Knox. In this five-part documentary video series, Weeks discusses her decision to work in the porn industry and how it has affected her life.
I’m 18 years old, and I travel across the country having sex with people on camera, and every dollar I make goes to tuition. I’ve built a name for myself. I’m building a brand. I love the porn industry. It makes me feel like a strong independent woman. It’s given me back my sense of self.
Probably NSFW, although all the nudity appears to be blurred.
The birth of bees
A time lapse of the first three weeks of a bee’s life, from egg to adult, in only 60 seconds.
Some explanation of what’s going on can be found in this video. (via colossal)
Conrad and the Steam Plant
Conrad Milster is the chief engineer at the Pratt Institute, which means he’s in charge of the 19th-century steam engines that provide the school’s heat and hot water. Dustin Cohen made this lovely short film about Conrad, an oddball who fits right into his life.
On the topic of New York, Conrad says, “It sucks, but it’s the Big Apple!” (via acl)
Mining the internet for time lapses
Software from a group at the University of Washington and Google discovers time lapses lurking in photos posted to the internet. For example, their bot found hundreds of photos of a Norwegian glacier on the Web, taken over a span of 10 years. Voila, instant time lapse of a retreating glacier.
First, we cluster 86 million photos into landmarks and popular viewpoints. Then, we sort the photos by date and warp each photo onto a common viewpoint. Finally, we stabilize the appearance of the sequence to compensate for lighting effects and minimize flicker. Our resulting time-lapses show diverse changes in the world’s most popular sites, like glaciers shrinking, skyscrapers being constructed, and waterfalls changing course.
This is like a time machine, allowing you to go back 5 or 10 years and position a camera somewhere to take photos every few days or weeks. Pretty clever.
Steve Jobs movie trailer
I have been doing a poor job keeping up with my Steve Jobs-related media. I haven’t had a chance to pick up the new Becoming Steve Jobs book yet. And I had no idea that the Aaron Sorkin-penned biopic was still in the works, much less that Michael Fassbender is playing Jobs and Danny Boyle is directing. Here’s the trailer:
The trailer debuted during last night’s series finale of Mad Men, which was possibly the most appropriate venue for it. [Slight spoilers…] Draper always had a Jobs-esque sheen to him, although the final scene showed us that, yes, Don Draper actually would like to sell sugar water for the rest of his life.
Update: A proper trailer has dropped. I don’t know how much we’ll learn about the actual Steve Jobs from the movie, but it looks like it might be good.
Update: Another trailer. This is looking like a strong film.
Bird Laughs Like a Supervillain
First the bird laughs like a supervillain, then you start laughing like a supervillain, and pretty soon everyone is laughing like a supervillain.
This is the new goats yelling like people, which I still watch about once a week and it always makes me laugh until I’m crying. (via ★interesting)
Slow motion candle magic
If you hold a lit match an inch or two over the smoking wick of a recently extinguished candle, the candle will light again. If you record that happening with a high speed camera and then slow it way down, it gives you some clues to how that happens:
Hint: wax is a candle’s fuel and smoke is wax vapor… (via digg)
Octobass!
The octobass is a string instrument that’s almost twice the size of a bass, so big that it makes a cello look like a violin. Only a few of these instruments exist and The Musical Instrument Museum made a video showing theirs in action:
(via cynical-c)
Gay Talese’s address book
Writer Gay Talese talks about his address book, in which he has written the names and phone numbers of almost everyone he’s ever had “an encounter” with over the past 50 years.
(via submitted for your perusal)
A short video tribute to the sounds of Star Wars
Watch all the way to the end for some sounds that didn’t make it into the movies.
A titanium rainbow
Here’s a video of a titanium bar being anodized…it cycles through several different colors before settling on a pinkish hue.
Ok neat, but why does it do that? Anodizing is an adjustment of the oxide levels on the surface of the titanium. The colors are caused by the interference of the light traveling through the oxide and reflecting off the shiny metal surface underneath…different thicknesses produce different colors.1 As the voltage is applied to the metal, more and more oxide builds up, producing the color cycling even shown. Pretty cool!
I don’t think the color is due to Raleigh scattering, but it’s definitely a similar principle.↩
Turning wood
From Ben Proudfoot, a short documentary film on master woodturner Steven Kennard.
This is the second of a six part series by Proudfoot called Life’s Work. He’s releasing a video a week until the end of May.
Handdrawn logos
Seb Lester can somehow freehand draw the logos for the NY Times, Honda, Ferrari, Coca-Cola, and many more.
Watching the video, I didn’t even notice any tracing…it’s all freehand. Keep up with Lester’s drawings on his Instagram account.
Augmented hands
Augmented Hand Series is an interactive software system created by Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue, and Kyle McDonald. You stick your hand in and on the screen you see your hand with an extra thumb, one fewer knuckle in each finger, fingers with springs in them, variable sized fingers, and the ultra freaky Breathing Palm.
(via prosthetic knowledge)
Auto-widened Seinfeld and The Simpsons
Artist JK Keller has digitally widened1 episodes of The Simpsons and Seinfeld to fit a 16:9 HD aspect ratio. Watching the altered scenes is trippy…the characters and their surroundings randomly expand and contract as the scenes play out.
Keller also HD-ified an episode of the X-Files and slimmed an old episode of Star Trek into a vertical aspect ratio. (via @frank_chimero)
At least I think that’s how they were created. The videos were posted without explanation — aside from their titles “LEaKeD TesT footagE frOM seiNfelD RemaSter In hiGh-defiNiTiON” and “animAtORs rEdraw old SimPsons epIsodeS fOr hdTv” — so it’s hard to say for sure.↩
Berlin in 1945
Seven minutes of color film footage of Berlin in 1945, right after the end of World War II. Lots of bombed out buildings, soldiers, bicycles, rebuilding, and people going about their daily business.
Be sure to watch all the way to the end…there’s an incredible aerial shot of the Brandenburg Gate and the Unter den Linden that shows the scale of damage done to the city’s buildings. More of that aerial footage here. (via devour)
The backwards bike will break your brain
Do you think you could ride a bicycle that steers backwards…aka it turns left when you turn right and vice versa? It sounds easy but years of normal bike riding experience makes it almost impossible. Destin Sandlin of Smarter Everyday taught himself how to ride the backwards-steering bike; it took months. Then he tried riding a normal bicycle again…
Loved this video…great stuff. (via ★interesting)
Jamie Oliver: how to chop an onion
Chef and TV personality Jamie Oliver shows three different techniques for chopping onions, including the dead simple “crystals” method.
A Tour of Antarctica by Drone
This 8-minute video of a drone’s eye tour of the coast of Antarctica is just flat-out gorgeous.
Black Mass trailer
Black Mass stars Johnny Depp as Whitey Bulger, real-life Boston mobster and FBI informant. The trailer is damn good and I’m hoping the rest of the movie lives up to it.
The full-sized Lego car
Raul Oaida built a full-sized car out of half-a-million Lego pieces that actually drives. The 256-cylinder engine is powered by compressed air. Top speed is 20 mph.
This is a stunning and insanely clever achievement. My favorite part, aside from that 256-cylinder engine, is the windshield built out of two dozen tiny Lego windshields. (via devour)
This baby’s butt is a cash machine
I don’t know what this is, who made it, or why, but it is the perfect Friday thing. (via @triciawang)
Update: Alright, the readers have spoken and they hate the baby ATM. So I unembedded the video clip. If you want to have a laugh or be appalled, you can click through.
An animated history of 20th century hairstyles
From The Atlantic, a history of hairstyles from 1900 to the present.
Hairstyles featured include the Gibson Girl, bob, conk, pompadour, beehive, Jheri curl, and hi-top fade.
How the sausage gets made
As the old saying goes, it is sometimes unpleasant to watch the sausage being made. But not as unpleasant as watching the olive loaf being made.
(via digg)
4K dreamtime
Technically, what you’re looking at here is a video shot in 4K resolution (basically 2x regular HD) and at 1000 frames/sec by a Phantom Flex 4K camera which retails for $100,000+. Skateboarders ollie. Dirt bikes spray dirt. Gymnasts contort. Make this as fullscreen as possible and just sit back and enjoy.
My favorite bits were of the gymnasts. In super slow motion, you can see how aerial flips are all about getting your head down as quickly as possible, then snapping your legs around as your head stays almost completely motionless — like a chicken’s! Mesmerizing.
Treasure Trove of Over 1700 Mechanical Animations
Whenever I watch videos of how things are made, I marvel at the cleverness of the manufacturing machines. Retired engineer Duc Thang Nguyen has created over 1700 3D animations showing how all sorts of different mechanisms work…gears, linkages, drives, clutches, and couplings. Here are a few examples to whet your appetite.
(via make)
Tomorrowland trailer
Ok, even though George Clooney’s character says “you ain’t seen nothing yet” in the trailer, I am cautiously optimistic that Tomorrowland won’t actually suck. Brad Bird is directing, for one thing.
Interesting thing about Clooney: even though he’s one of the biggest movie stars in the world, aside from Gravity, he’s never really had a big summer blockbustery sort of hit. Only six of his films have grossed more than $100 million…compare that with Will Smith or even Matt Damon, both of whom are younger.1 Perhaps Tomorrowland will be Clooney’s Pirates of the Caribbean or Bourne.
The list of actors sorted by box office gross is fascinating, btw. The top five: Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, Samuel L. Jackson, Harrison Ford, and Eddie Murphy, three of whom are black. The first woman on the list is Cameron Diaz at #13 (and then Cate Blanchett at 21, Helena Bonham Carter at 22, Emma Watson at 25, and Julia Roberts at 26). Sorting by average gross isn’t working for me, but I scanned through and found the top five (who have been in 6 or more films): Emma Watson (whose movies gross $191.6 million on average), Daniel Radcliffe, Taylor Lautner, Rupert Grint, and Liam Hemsworth. ↩
Socials & More