kottke.org posts about video
Richard Sherman is a football player for the Seatt…hey, HEY!, you nerds that were about to wander off because I’m talking about sportsball, come on back here. Like I was saying, Sherman plays cornerback for the Seattle Seahawks, who won the Super Bowl last year. The thing is, whatever it is you do, Richard Sherman is way better at his job than you are at yours. And he’s able to explain how he does what he does, which, if you’ve ever been to a technology conference or read more than a thing or two linked from Hacker News, you know is even more rare.
Sherman is, by his own admission, not particularly athletically gifted in comparison to some others in the NFL, but he’s one of the top 5 cornerbacks in the game because he studies and prepares like a mofo. In this video, he explains how he approaches preparing for games and shares some of the techniques he uses to gain an advantage over opposing quarterbacks and receivers.
Sherman is obviously really intelligent, but his experience demonstrates once again the value of preparation, hard work, and the diligent application of deliberate practice.
How to Build a Time Machine is a documentary about two men on separate quests to build their own time machines. Here’s a teaser trailer:
Ronald Mallett’s reason for his search for a way to travel through time is quite poignant…he shared his story in a book and on an episode of This American Life back in 2007. (via ★interesting)
What do you do when you have a seaplane without wheels, no water, and you need to take off? You put it on a trailer, drag it down the runway until you get the proper speed, and just pull back on the stick:
Damn, that’s cool. I knew it was gonna take off and it still baked my noodle a little bit. I think this is why so many people (myself included) had trouble with the airplane on the treadmill question. All that really matters for takeoff and continued flight is the speed of the plane relative to the air — how it gets to that point or what the surface is doing isn’t really relevant — but when you’re observing it, it seems impossible. (via @deronbauman)
So, this showed up on Vimeo last night and will likely be pulled soon (so hit that “download” button while you can), but here’s the deal. In 2012, actor Topher Grace showed an edit he’d done of episodes I-III of Star Wars to a bunch of friends, trimming the 7 hours of prequels down into 85 action-packed minutes of pure story. This Vimeo edit is longer (2:45) and is “based on the structure conceived by actor Topher Grace”, which you can read about here.
Grace’s version of the film(s) centers on Anakin’s training and friendship with Obi-Wan, and his relationship with Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman). Gone are Trade Federation blockades, the Gungan city, the whole Padmé handmaiden storyline, the explanation of midichlorians, the galactic senate and the boring politics, Anakin’s origins (a backstory which never really needed to be seen in the first place), the droid army’s attack on Naboo, and Jar Jar Binks (Ahmed Best) appears only briefly for only one line of dialogue, used as a set-up to introduce us to the Queen.
(via @bursts)
Watch this octopus open a jar from the inside:
Octopuses are wicked smart. I like how, after he gets the lid off, he’s content to just hang out in there. (via @tylercowen)
During the 1930s, animators at Walt Disney Studios developed a list of 12 basic principles of animation through which to achieve character and personality through movement. These principles were laid out in The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. #6 is “slow-out and slow-in”:
As action starts, we have more drawings near the starting pose, one or two in the middle, and more drawings near the next pose. Fewer drawings make the action faster and more drawings make the action slower. Slow-ins and slow-outs soften the action, making it more life-like. For a gag action, we may omit some slow-out or slow-ins for shock appeal or the surprise element. This will give more snap to the scene.
Animator Vincenzo Lodigiani recently visualized the principles using a simple cube shape. You can see them individually here or all together in this video:
In a nod to the increasing prevalence of animation in app design, Khoi Vinh notes:
It’s a good reminder that as the overlap between interface design and animation grows wider, designers would do well to take note of the many decades of insight and knowledge that animators have accrued.
(via hn)
The Daily Overview offers up an interesting satellite photo every day. The site’s name is inspired by the Overview Effect:
The Overview Effect, first described by author Frank White in 1987, is an experience that transforms astronauts’ perspective of Earth and mankind’s place upon it. Common features of the experience are a feeling of awe for the planet, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment. ‘Overview’ is a short film that explores this phenomenon through interviews with five astronauts who have experienced the Overview Effect. The film also features important commentary on the wider implications of this new understanding for both our society, and our relationship to the environment.
The Planetary Collective made a short documentary about the Overview Effect:
(thx, pavel)
A Japanese TV show took three expert fencers and pitted them against 50 amateurs.
I honestly didn’t think this would be that interesting and expected the Musketeers to easily get taken out right away or, if they survived more than 30 seconds, to handily finish off the rest of the crowd…nothing in between. But it’s fascinating what happens. The crowd, being a crowd, does not initially do what it should, which is rush the experts and take them out right away with little regard for individual survival. But pretty much every person fights for themselves. And instead of getting easier for the Musketeers near the end, it gets more difficult. The few remaining crowd members start working together more effectively. The survival of the fittest effect kicks in. The remaining experts get sloppy, tired, and perhaps a little overconfident. The ending was a genuine shock. (via digg)
I have not done an exhaustive search, but this intersection in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia has to have some of the craziest traffic in the world.
Once you get the gist of what the cars are doing, pay attention to the pedestrians. !!! My other favorite crazy traffic locale is Saigon, Vietnam…here’s how you cross the street there:
Move slowly and purposefully across the street and just let the traffic flow around you. It’s an odd sensation giving up so much control over your personal safety, but it’s the only way to cross so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I haven’t worn a watch in more than 25 years and I have no plans to wear one ever again, but I will watch videos on how to make watches until the heat death of the universe.
Plenty of tradition and handcraft — combined with high-tech, where it outperforms handcraft.
(via daring fireball)
A nice appreciation of Barry Sanders by Andrew Sharp at Grantland.
“Barry Sanders is my new idol,” Bo Jackson said after a Raiders-Lions game in 1990. “I love the way the guy runs. When I grow up, I want to be just like him.”
The Raiders won that game, and the Lions were 4-9 at the time, but it didn’t even matter.
All anyone could talk about afterward was the “little water bug” who “might rewrite history.”
This wasn’t necessarily a metaphor for Barry’s entire Lions career — he was on more playoff teams than people remember — but it definitely covers about half the years he spent in Detroit. Even when the Lions were awful, Barry would still have a few plays every game that would keep people gawking afterward.
Bo Jackson had a similar effect on people, which is part of what makes that old quote so cool. The Bo Jackson combination of speed and power is something we’d never seen before and haven’t seen since. He was a cult hero then, and the legend has only grown over the years.
I’ve always been an atypical sports fan. I grew up in Wisconsin rooting for the Packers & Brewers but switched to being a Vikings & Cubs fan sometime in high school. But despite following the Vikings at the time, my favorite player in the NFL was Barry Sanders. For my money, Sanders was pure symphonic excellence in motion, the best running back (and perhaps player) the NFL had ever seen and maybe will ever see. I wonder if one of the reasons why I like Lionel Messi so much is because he reminds me of Sanders; in stature, in strength, in quickness, in skill. Compare and contrast some of their finest runs:
Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise) took 12 years to make his new movie, Boyhood. The star of Boyhood, Ellar Coltrane, was seven years old when filming started, and Linklater returned to the story every year for a few days of shooting to construct a movie about a boy growing from a first-grader to an adult and his changing relationship with his parents.
This looks amazing. What an undertaking.
From the incredible British Pathé archive, film footage from 1893 of the New York City fire brigade rushing to a fire.
Filmed nearly 120 years ago, this is quite possibly the first ever footage of the New York Fire Brigade. The film is very grainy but it clearly shows firemen rushing through New York on horse drawn engines. Behind them, you can see some sort of electric powered streetcar or trolley system with ‘Clinton Avenue’ on the back.
By Louis Paquet, the opening titles of Forrest Gump if it were directed by Wes Anderson.
(via @kyledenlinger)
Programming sorting techniques visualized through Eastern European folk dancing. For instance, here’s the bubble sort with Hungarian dancing:
See also sorting algorithms visualized. (via @viljavarasto)
Swiss artist Zimoun used a bunch of fans and packing peanuts to make it look like an angry foaming ocean inside this building:
Zimoun’s piece is on display through July 11 at la Limonaia di Villa Saroli in Lugano, Switzerland. (via coudal)
We all know Michael Jackson invented the moonwalk on-stage during a performance of Billie Jean at the Motown 25th Anniversary show. What this video presupposes is, maybe he didn’t?
What the video shows is that as early as the 1930s, performers such as Fred Astaire, Bill Bailey, Cab Calloway, and Sammy Davis Jr. were doing something like the moonwalk. Now, Jackson didn’t get the move from any of these sources, not directly anyway. As Jackson’s choreographer Jeffrey Daniel explains, he got the moves from The Electric Boogaloos street dance crew and, according to LaToya Jackson, instructed Michael Jackson.
Which is to say, the moonwalk is yet another example of multiple discovery, along with calculus, the discovery of oxygen, and the invention of the telephone. (via open culture)
Film shot of London street scenes, mostly from the 1890s and 1900s.
There’s also a brief shot of Paris in 1900 right at the end. See also the extremely rare footage of Queen Victoria visiting Dublin in 1900. The Victorian era seems so long ago (and indeed she began her reign in 1837) but there she is on the modern medium of film. Yet another example of the Great Span.
SRI International and DARPA are making little tiny robots (some are way smaller than a penny) that can actually manufacture products.
They can move so fast! And that shot of dozens of them moving in a synchronized fashion! Perhaps Skynet will actually manifest itself not as human-sized killing machines but as swarms of trillions of microscopic nanobots, a la this episode of Star Trek:TNG. (via @themexican)
The small village of Ciocanesti in Romania produces the most beautiful hand-painted Easter eggs I’ve ever seen. This video is a wonderful look at the process and tradition.
Here’s how it works:
First, the (duck, goose, chicken, or even ostrich) egg is drained, through a tiny hole. Then, using a method akin to batik, it is dipped in dye and painted one color at a time, with the painter applying beeswax to those areas she wants to protect from the next round of dying. The painting implement, called a kishitze, is a stick with an iron tip. (Previously, egg-painters would have used thorns or pig bristles.)
And then the wax is melted and wiped off the egg, revealing the colors underneath. So cool. (via @colossal)
Data visualization of Citi Bike trips taken over a 48-hour period in NYC:
Love seeing the swarms starting around 8am and 5:30pm but hate experiencing them. I’ve been using Citi Bike almost since the launch last year and I can’t imagine NYC without it now. I use it several times daily, way more than the subway even. I hope they can find a way to make it a viable business.
Drone Week on Kottke continues with this beautiful drone video of NYC from Randy Scott Slavin.
I found two more videos and a bunch of stories about a drone crashing a crime scene last year. (thx, noah)
Newsreel archivist British Pathé has uploaded their entire 85,000 film archive to YouTube. This is an amazing resource.
British Pathé was once a dominant feature of the British cinema experience, renowned for first-class reporting and an informative yet uniquely entertaining style. It is now considered to be the finest newsreel archive in existence. Spanning the years from 1896 to 1976, the collection includes footage — not only from Britain, but from around the globe — of major events, famous faces, fashion trends, travel, sport and culture. The archive is particularly strong in its coverage of the First and Second World Wars.
I’ve shared videos from British Pathé before: the Hindenberg disaster and this bizarre film of a little boy being taunted with chocolate. The archive is chock full of gems: a 19-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger at a bodybuilding competition, footage of and interviews with survivors of the Titanic, video of the world’s tallest man (8’11”), and the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. And this film from 1956 showing how cricket balls are made by hand:
A dronie is a video selfie taken with a drone. I featured Amit Gupta’s beautiful dronie yesterday:
Other people have since taken dronies of their own and the idea seems like it’s on the cusp of becoming a thing. Here’s one taken by Joshua Works of him and his family on the shore of a lake in Nevada:
The Works clan sold most of their worldly possessions in 2011 and has been travelling the US in an Airstream ever since, logging more than 75,000 miles so far.
Adam Lisagor took this dronie of him and fellow drone enthusiast Alex Cornell standing on the roof of a building in LA:
Adam was inspired to begin playing with drone photography because of Alex’s recent video on Our Drone Future.
Have you taken a dronie? Let me know and I’ll add it to the list.
Update: Jakob Lodwick reversed Amit’s dronie from a pull back shot to a Spielbergesque close-up. This reel from Antimedia begins with a dronie. Steffan van Esch took a group dronie. This video opens with a quick dronie. I like this one from Taylor Scott Mason, if only for the F1-like whine of the receding drone:
Here’s a Powers of Ten-inspired dronie that combines a Google Earth zoom-in with drone-shot footage covering the last few hundred feet:
Adam Lisagor wrote a bit about drone photography and how photographers always come back to the human subject, no matter what format the camera takes:
There’s a reason that you’re going to see a lot of these from drone flyers like me, and it’s this: once you get past the novelty of taking a camera high up in the air, getting a bird’s eye view of stuff is actually a little boring.
What birds see is actually a little boring. Humans are interesting. Getting close to stuff is interesting. I bet if we could strap tiny cameras to bird heads, most of what we’d want to look at would happen when they fly close to people. If we could, we’d put cameras on bird heads to take pictures of ourselves.
The company that Amit runs, Photojojo, is going to start doing rentals soon, including kits for drone photography. And they’re gonna do flying lessons as well. For now, there’s a tutorial on the page about how to make “the perfect dronie”. (thx to everyone who sent in videos)
Update: More dronies from David Chicarelli, SkyCamUSA, and Bob Carey.
Update: From Joshua Works, a pair of new dronies, including one shot from a moving vehicle:
What a great way to record his family’s travels.
Update: DroneBooth is a drone photobooth project from a quartet of ITP students.
If Aaron Sorkin (Sports Night, The West Wing, The Newsroom) wrote a TV show featuring McDonald’s as a workplace, it might go something like this:
Top notch parody right there…you’ve got the fast dialogue, the walk-and-talks, and the patented Sorkin sermonizing.
What feels are these? Is this poignant? Disturbing? Whatever you take away from it, this video of an obviously inebriated man trying to negotiate a fence is a metaphor for something.
(via ★interesting)
Super-cool video from i-D of dance styles for each letter of the alphabet.
(via @Han)
HBO put the entire first episode of Mike Judge’s new show Silicon Valley up on YouTube:
Using Google Earth, dialect coach Andrew Jack gives a tour of the accents of Great Britain and Ireland.
The audio is originally from this BBC program. See also Peter Sellers doing various English accents. (via devour)
Slow television is the uninterrupted broadcast of an ordinary event from start to finish. Early efforts included burning Yule logs on TV around Christmas and driver’s views of complete British rail journeys (not to mention Andy Warhol and the pitch drop experiment), but Norwegian public television has revived the format in recent years. The first broadcast was of a 7-hour train trip from Bergen to Oslo, which was watched at some point by ~20% of Norway’s population. You can watch the entire thing on YouTube:
Not content with that, in 2011 an entire ship voyage was broadcast for 134 continuous hours. The entire voyage is available for viewing, but you can watch a 37-minute time lapse of the whole thing if you can’t spare the 5½ days:
As the show progressed and the ratings climbed (half of the Norwegian population tuned in at some point), the show became an interactive event, with people meeting the ship along to coast in order to appear as extras in the cast. Some even followed in smaller boats, filming as they went along in the ship’s wake.
Other shows included 12 hours about firewood (including 8 uninterrupted hours of a burning fireplace), 18 hours of salmon swimming upstream (which some felt was too short), 100 hours of Magnus Carlsen playing chess, a 30-hour interview with a noted author, and several continuous hours of sweater production, from shearing to knitting.
Shows currently in the planning stages include A Day in the Life of a Snail and “a 24-hour-long program following construction workers building a digital-style clock out of wood, shuffling planks to match each passing minute”. The slow TV concept might soon be coming to American TV as well.
P.S. Does this 10-hour video of Tyrion Lannister slapping Joffrey count as slow TV? Either way, it’s great.
Newer posts
Older posts
Socials & More