Stranded on a whale
A couple in a kayak gets too close to a whale and then the whale raises them right out of the water. And not just for a moment either.
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kottke.org posts about video
Walking City
Walking City is a slowly evolving walking video sculpture by Universal Everything. A walking tour of modern architecture, if you will.
File this one under mesmerizing. A deserving winner of the Golden Nica award at Ars Electronica. (via subtraction)
Copying is my way of learning
From Portraits in Creativity, a video profile of Maira Kalman, doer of many wonderful things.
Kalman’s newest book is Girls Standing on Lawns, a collaboration with MoMA and Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket).
This clever book contains 40 vintage photographs from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, more than a dozen original paintings by Kalman inspired by the photographs, and brief, lyrical texts by Handler. Poetic and thought-provoking, Girls Standing on Lawns is a meditation on memories, childhood, nostalgia, home, family, and the act of seeing.
I once saw Kalman while I was eating lunch with my son in the cafe on the second floor of MoMA. She came in and sat opposite us a few tables away and started sketching. What a thrill to watch her work. (via @curiousoctopus)
The Imitation Game
The Imitation Game is a historical drama about Alan Turing, focusing on his efforts in breaking the Enigma code during WWII. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing. Here’s a trailer:
The Anti-Wonka Candy Factory
In 2011, Magnum photographer Martin Parr visited the Teddy Grays candy factory near Birmingham, England that makes old-fashioned candy with Wonka-esque names — Mint Humbugs, Nutty Brittles, Spearminties. The result is this ultra-charming 20 minute film profile of the company and its candy-making process.
Charmingness evidence, exhibit A: When asked if the company would ever modernize, company director Teddy Gray responds, “Imagine coming to work in the morning and looking at all them faxes, oh no.” Even his modernization references need modernizing.
Charmingness evidence, exhibit B: The lingerie calendar behind Gray as he talks on the phone, and the beefcake calendar behind his daughter in the very next scene.
Charmingness evidence, exhibit C through exhibit ZZZ: Every other scene in the film.
I know 20 minutes for a web video sounds daunting, but it’s worth the while. At the very least, skip to 14:00 and watch how they make “lettered rock”, hard candy sticks with words written on the inside of the candy. As shown in the video, the individual letters start out 3-4 inches high, are arranged into words when rolled up into a massive tube of candy a foot in diameter, and end up a fraction of an inch tall when pulled out into small sticks, like so:
And you thought laying out type for the web was difficult. (thx, nick)
A theory on Jon Snow’s parentage
If you’ve been paying attention to the promos for HBO’s Game of Thrones series, there’s been a lot of Jon Snow sitting on the Iron Throne. When the show started, Snow seemed like a relatively minor character, but his uncertain parentage hinted at possible greater things on the horizon. Here’s a video explanation of one of the more popular theories about Snow’s parents:
BTW, if you, like me, haven’t read the books and have only seen the TV show, the video doesn’t contain any outright spoilers, only enriching context. So watch away. And if you’ve read the books, you probably don’t need to watch the video because you’re probably already aware of this old theory. If you’re interested, there are more theories (and crazy spoilers) where that came from.
12 Monkeys TV series trailer
The first season of a new series based on 12 Monkeys (and La Jetée) is set to debut on Syfy in January; here’s the trailer:
(via the verge)
Elevating bread and butter
Bread and butter is often an afterthought at restaurants…the bread can be meh and bland butter served too cold to spread. Chef Dan Richer takes the bread and butter offered at his New Jersey restaurant as seriously as any of the other items on his menu.
Cultured butter is delicious…Per Se serves it as well. (via digg)
Airship hangar waterpark funtimes
In his new video, Casey Neistat and his son visit a German waterpark housed in a giant former airship hangar.
Some information on the structure from the waterpark’s web site:
The Tropical Islands Dome is gigantic. In fact, it is the largest free-standing hall in the world: 360 metres long, 210 metres wide and an incredible 107 metres high.
That is big enough to fit the Statue of Liberty in standing up and the Eiffel Tower lying on its side. The Tropical Islands Dome covers an area of 66,000 m², the size of eight football fields. And it is high enough to fit in the whole of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, with all its skyscrapers.
(via john hodgman)
The Forest Man of India
Since 1979, Jadav Payeng has planted every single tree in a forest that covers some 1360 acres of an island in the Jorhat district of India. The forest helps prevent the erosion of the island and is now home to elephants, rhinos, tigers, and other animals. Forest Man is a short documentary film on how this forest came to be. (via @AdmiralTwombly)
How ramen noodles are made
Sun Noodle makes the ramen noodles for a host of the top ramen shops in NYC, LA, and elsewhere (Ivan, Momofuku, etc.)…here’s a look at how the noodles are made in their New Jersey factory:
See also how to make hand-pulled noodles and Sun Noodle’s fresh ramen kits are available for retail (via devour)
Distance Over Time
In his mid-20s, James Golding was diagnosed with cancer. In the hospital, he weighed 84 pounds and was given a 5% chance of living. Five years later, he embarked on a journey to France to break the record for most distance ridden on a bike in 7 days. This video follows Golding through his record-breaking attempt.
The video was produced by the same team that did the lovely Experiments in Speed video.
If Doctor Who were American…
Back in February, Smug Mode chose American counterparts for all of Doctor Who’s past incarnations. We’re talking Dick Van Dyke as the 2nd Doctor, Gene Wilder for the 4th Doctor, and Donald Glover as the 11th Doctor. Here’s a nicely done faux 50th anniversary video celebrating those Doctors:
(via @moth)
The Bike Brothers
In 1986, the BBC produced a short documentary film on the Taylor brothers, a trio of professional cyclists from the 1930s and 40s. The three of them operated a bicycle shop, which turned out handmade bikes for decades.
Delightful. Don’t miss one of the brothers putting the racing stripes on a frame by hand starting at around 12:00. You can read a bit more about the brothers here and here. (via @cdevroe)
Ten most memorable film edits
From CineFix, a collection of ten of the most iconic and memorable editing moments in cinematic history.
(via @brillhart)
The unfinished films of Stanley Kubrick
Narrated by Malcolm McDowell and featuring interviews from many collaborators and colleagues, Lost Kubrick is a short documentary on the films that Stanley Kubrick never finished.
Through interviews and abundant archival materials, this documentary examines these “lost” films in depth to discover what drew Kubrick to these projects, the work he did to prepare them for production, and why they ultimately were abandoned. Some of the unfinished project discussed here are “Napoleon”, “The Aryan Papers” and also “A.I” (which we know finally made by Steven Spielberg).
World’s fastest pancake flipper
Everyone has a superpower. This guy’s superpower is that he can flip mini-pancakes faster than I thought humanly possible.
I love watching stuff like this…here’s a guy chopping lemons in half 20 times quicker than Superman himself would.
ps. This is still the world’s best pancake recipe.
Palletskateboardspotting
Man rides the rails on a giant skateboard made out of a wooden pallet:
That worked way better than I would have expected. (via digg)
Game of Thrones season 4 visual effects
This is a reel from Mackevision, showing the visual effects they did for season 4 of Game of Thrones. I wasn’t expecting all the boats to be fake.
This reel does a better job than most in showing the process and how all the different elements fit together. Also interesting to see how much the digital greebles make everything seem way more realistic.
Update: And here’s another reel of VFX from season 4 by Rodeo FX.
Affinage
A short film about how Neal’s Yard Dairy, a top seller of cheese in London, works with producers to make cheese.
I had a tour of the caves below Murray’s in the West Village where they do the same sort of thing as at Neal’s Yard. Pretty cool to see the process in action and to taste the same cheeses at different ages.
Worn away
Oh, this is wonderful: Laurin Döpfner took an industrial sander to objects like logs, electronics, a camera, and a walnut, shaved off 0.5 mm at a time, and made a time lapse video of the results.
This is like a full-color MRI process. Could watch it all day. (via colossal)
Urban Giants
In the early 1930s, Western Union and AT&T built two new buildings in lower Manhattan to house their telecommunications infrastructure. Here’s a short film about their construction and ongoing use as hubs for contemporary telecom and internet communications.
Amazing that those buildings are still being used for the same use all these years later…they just run newer and newer technology through the same old conduits.
One woman, 17 British accents
Watch actress Siobhan Thompson do 17 different British and Irish accents:
Much better done and more entertaining than this tour of British accents I featured back in April. (via @Atul_Gawande)
Halt and Catch Fire titles
Speaking of Halt and Catch Fire, the title sequence is pretty awesome:
I am also currently trying (and mostly failing) not to have a giant crush on Mackenzie Davis, who plays crack programmer Cameron Howe on the show, reads Infinite Jest in Brooklyn coffee shops, gets anxious about talking on the phone (me too!), and has recently read The Soul of a New Machine (me too!). Am I wrong to think we’d totes be BFFs?!
Update: The Art of the Title did a feature on the H&CF titles, which includes 55 photos of storyboards. Pretty cool to see the process. (via @ScottIvers)
Update: Halt’s opening sequence was nominated for an Emmy in Outstanding Main Title Design!
The Putter Togetherer
A person who makes scissors by hand is called a putter, short for putter togetherer. The Putter is a four-minute silent film by Shaun Bloodworth that shows putter Cliff Denton making scissors.
You can order a pair of these handmade scissors at Ernest Wright & Sons; a pair of 6-inch desk scissors are £23, but they come with a lifetime guarantee and I bet you won’t find a better pair of scissors anywhere. The wonderful music in that video is by The Black Dog. (via colossal)
Scorsese’s silence
Martin Scorsese uses silence very effectively in his films. Tony Zhou explains:
(via dot info)
Tree-eating machine
This terrifying machine, called a DAH Forestry Mulcher, eats an entire 30-foot tall tree in less than 15 seconds.
Ok humanity, now invent a machine that plants 30-foot tall trees in 15 seconds… (via digg)
The Gunfighter
Clever little short film. Meta. Inappropriate.
I enjoyed this conversation about the film. I have no idea which three edits Adam thought were late, but then again I am not a fancypants filmmaker. (via @gruber)
Paper to pixels
Nice little video essay on information theory and Claude Shannon, “the most important man you’ve probably never heard of”.
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