A history of the guitar solo
The boys of CDZA take us through a history of the guitar solo in pop music, from Johnny B. Goode to John Mayer.
(via ★interesting)
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kottke.org posts about video
Lego calendar
Vitamins is a design studio in London that made a wall calendar out of Lego. They also built a mechanism to sync an online calendar to the Lego one: you just take a photo of the Lego calendar and send it to a special email address and voilà!
(via ★interesting)
Meet the players in the East/West College Bowl
Saw this awhile ago and was reminded of it b/c of a clip on Monday Night Football last night: comedy duo Key & Peele poke fun at the increasingly creative names and alma maters of football players in this sketch.
Nyquillus Dillwad, D’Pez Poopsie, Fartrell Cluggins, Ladennifer Jadaniston, and Benedict Cumberbatch are all on my fantasy team this year. See also last year’s video. (Davoin Shower-Handel!)
Four rules to make Star Wars great again
Disney and JJ Abrams are rebooting the Star Wars franchise. This two-minute video outlines four simple rules that could make Star Wars great again.
The rules are:
1. The setting is the frontier.
2. The future is old.
3. The Force is mysterious.
4. Star Wars isn’t cute.
“True” 3D television
For his Full Turn project, Benjamin Muzzin mounted two screens back-to-back on a rotating platform and spun them fast, creating the illusion of a holographish 3D image.
The animals visit the zoo
Zoo is a short documentary film by Bert Haanstra filmed at a zoo in Amsterdam. It is lovely.
Haanstra cleverly makes the human animal more a part of the film than the rest of the animals. Haanstra also made the Oscar-winning Glas. (via the kid should see this)
Best Chess Sacrifices
Another excellent link from Quora’s weekly newsletter: What is the best sacrifice in the history of chess? A game played in 1934 featured the sacrifice of the queen & both rooks and was over so quickly (14 moves) that it’s referred to as The Peruvian Immortal. I found it easier to follow the game by watching it:
Richard Feynman Explains Rubber Bands
I had no idea that’s how rubber bands worked. Once again, Feynman takes something that seems pretty simple and makes it both simpler and vividly complex.
(via @stevenstrogatz)
How Do They…?
I was poking around on YouTube for “how to” videos (one of my favorite video genres) the other day when I hit a small jackpot: a bunch of How Do They…? videos from the National Film Board of Canada. A favorite shows how chain link fences are made:
You can view all the videos at the NFB site as well. NFB produced one of my favorite “how to” videos ever: how to build an igloo.
Go Pro On a Soaring Eagle
What does it feel like to soar majestically like an bird? Maybe something like this video, shot with a camera strapped to the back of an eagle flying near Chamonix in France.
See also first-person footage of a peregrine falcon diving and killing a duck in mid-air. (via @gavinpurcell)
The Simpsons, deconstructed
Artist JK Keller took an episode of the Simpsons, ran the entire thing through some audio and video filters, and somehow it retains the full character of the show while also seeming like, as Keller puts it, “a frenetic mess of sight and sound”.
After ripping all the frames, I used software to turn the ripped images into vectors. Then I processed the files through Illustrator using the default Alignment & Distribution tools (23 different combinations). With the audio, I used a similar process, making a spectrogram image of the audio from each cut in the episode. Then I applied a variety of processes to the image to mimic the alignment/distribution used.
Wonderful Animated Soccer Vignettes
Richard Swarbrick makes these great impressionist animations of sports events, mostly soccer but also cricket and basketball. Here’s one to get you started…the 5-0 drubbing FC Barcelona handed to Real Madrid during a 2010 Clasico:
It’s amazing how much Swarbrick’s illustrations communicate with so few strokes…Mourinho’s face is my favorite. Here’s the actual match for comparison purposes. And here’s Maradona’s sublime goal against England in the 1986 World Cup (original video):
You can find many other examples of Swarbrick’s work on his web site and on his YouTube channel. (via @dunstan)
A short history of the Pixar logo animation
If you’ve watched a movie in the past 20 years, chances are you’ve seen the animation featuring the Pixar logo and Luxo Jr., the company’s mascot. Luxo hops in, squashes the I, and takes its place; here’s what it looks like:
According to the Pixar wiki, there have been several variations of the logo, including the one where Wall-E comes out to fix Luxo Jr’s busted lightbulb:
Others include 20th and 25th anniversary versions, a 3D version that premiered with UP, and versions from Cars 2 and Finding Nemo that incorporate story elements into the logo.
This particular logo debuted with Toy Story in 1995. For the short films Pixar produced before that, they used variations on the not-very-exciting theme of circular indent in beveled square, a shape borrowed from the look of their Image Computer:
Many of the logo animation variations, including the pre-Luxo Jr. versions, can be seen in this video:
Hot Pepper Game Reviews
Watch as people review video games after eating hot peppers. Here’s Erin Schmalfeld reviewing a Nintendo 3DS game after chewing and swallowing an entire habanero:
(via ★interesting)
Citi Bike tricks
BMX rider Tyrone Williams checks out a Citi Bike and puts it though its paces, first with a wheelie or two and eventually on a dirt track.
(via animal & @claytoncubitt)
Portrait of the child as an old person
Anthony Cerniello took photos of similar-looking family members at a reunion, from the youngest to the oldest, and edited them together in a video to create a nearly seamless portrait of a person aging in only a few minutes.
The effect is as if you sat a child down in front of a camera and filmed them continuously for 65 years and then compressed that down into a 5-minute time lapse. Colossal has an explanation:
Last Thanksgiving, Cerniello traveled to his friend Danielle’s family reunion and with still photographer Keith Sirchio shot portraits of her youngest cousins through to her oldest relatives with a Hasselblad medium format camera. Then began the process of scanning each photo with a drum scanner at the U.N. in New York, at which point he carefully edited the photos to select the family members that had the most similar bone structure. Next he brought on animators Nathan Meier and Edmund Earle who worked in After Effects and 3D Studio Max to morph and animate the still photos to make them lifelike as possible. Finally, Nuke (a kind of 3D visual effects software) artist George Cuddy was brought on to smooth out some small details like the eyes and hair.
Fantastic.
Shakespeare In Its Original Pronunciation
Speaking of inexpensive time travel, listen as David and Ben Crystal perform selections from Shakespeare in the original accent, as it would have been heard at the Globe in the early 1600s. (via @KBAndersen)
Manipulating objects in photos in 3D
This is a bit of a mindblower…this software presented at SIGGRAPH Asia lets you pluck objects out of photos and edit them as if they were in 3D.
(via stellar)
Vocals-only Abbey Road
Here’s a medley of isolated vocals from the Beatles’ Abbey Road:
Many more isolated vocal tracks are available on this subreddit. Here are the instructions for making your own isolated vocal tracks with Audacity, the same open source audio processing app that Tim used to make his slow jams. (thx, tim)
Bleeding Edge book trailer
The book trailer for Thomas Pynchon’s new novel is either brilliant or the dumbest thing ever.
Fun fact: the phrase “I don’t even” was invented to react to this video. (via @GreatDismal)
Teahupo’o: Inside the Monster
Inside the Monster is a 25-minute documentary (in French w/ English subtitles) on Teahupo’o, a Tahitian locale known for its spectacular waves.
Crazy the way those waves rise out of almost nowhere. My favorite photo of Teahupo’o is this one (view larger):
All that water hanging out 14 feet higher than it should be….it ain’t natural!
Powers of Ten x Foursquare
Powers of Ten is now a Foursquare venue. Go there, lay down on the grass, and upload a photo of yourself in the Powers of Ten pose.
Lie on the ground on a sunny day with one hand draped across your torso to recreate the starting point of the film Powers Of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames.
Chicagoans and visitors to Chicagoland, let’s make this a thing. (via ★interesting-links)
How Cranberries Are Harvested
This video seems like it was made specifically for kottke.org. In the first half of it, you learn how cranberries are harvested. In the second half, there’s gorgeous HD slo-mo footage of wakeskating through a cranberry bog.
And with a Tycho soundtrack no less…it’s all too perfect. (via ★interesting)
London to Brighton by train
In 1953, the BBC filmed a train trip from London to Brighton. Thirty years later in 1983, they filmed it again and then again 30 years after that, in 2013. Here are all three films synced up and played side-by-side:
1000 extra bonus points to the Beeb for the Star Guitar soundtrack.
Yo-yo tricks through the ages
Here’s a video of the 2013 World Yo-Yo Contest winner, Janos Karancz. His motion is so delicate and intricate, it’s almost like he’s doing needlepoint or something:
Contrast that with the winner of the 2000 World Yo-Yo Contest, Yu Kawada. Much simpler tricks, more showmanship, like it’s a dance:
Here’s some footage from a 1989 yo-yo contest. Lots of throwing tricks and fewer spinning tricks. Contestants competed in blazers!
And finally, a Duncan yo-yo commercial from 1976. Super simple tricks and more blazers!
Jumpy the amazing super dog
Meet Jumpy the dog. This dog can jump higher than you, skateboard better than you, dive better than you, walk on its front paws better than you, surf better than you, catch a Frisbee better than you, do a backflip better than you, and ride a scooter better than you. Jumpy is better than you.
Ok, this dog is a better skateboarder, but Jumpy is still better than him. Jumpy is better than everyone. (thx, dad)
How Play-Doh is made
A short video about the ingredients that go into every can of Play-Doh:
Sadly, the composition of the amazing fragrance is not revealed, but Wired asked a perfumer about it a couple of years ago:
Hasbro’s patent admits to vanilla, but that’s just to throw us off the scent. The real formula for this iconic odor is guarded like the crown jewels. After talking with New York perfumer Christopher Brosius, who offers a Play-Doh fragrance, we suspect that it draws from the aromatic flowers of the heliotrope, aka the cherry pie plant.
And if you’d like Play-Doh as your signature scent, Demeter makes a Play-Doh cologne. (Off topic, but the word “cologne” always makes me think of this hilarious Twitter search.)
Black Mirror
Jason posting the trailer for “Her” (which I love and feels like my life except I’m the one in the phone?) reminded me a lot of this episode of Black Mirror titled “Be Right Back”. Black Mirror is a modern, British version of The Twilight Zone. The title refers to the dark, reflective surfaces of our smartphones and TVs and how we’re constantly staring into them. There are 6 hour-long standalone episodes of Black Mirror, many of which are available on Vimeo (for now, at least). They’re all great but “Be Right Back” is my favorite.
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