You’re an Internet veteran, you know what’s real and what’s not. Anything with Western Union automatically raises your eyebrow. An e-mail promising more length and/or hot girls gets vaporized without a thought. You’re too seasoned for these tricks. But what if all that email spam was actually true? How different would your life look? Would you become a money making, big twig swinging, Nigerian prince relatin’ party animal? Oh yes.
Because we are in the US, I’m not going to call football "American Football" or whatever other people call our version of not-soccer outside of the USA. It’s football here. That’s the end of it. But I get it. To people who know football as some other thing or don’t care to know our football as anything, the sport doesn’t seem to make any damn sense. It’s okay. It’s as silly as America itself.
Before a story about toys, before monsters went corporate, before anyone went searching for Nemo, and before twenty seven Academy Awards, Pixar was a high-end computer hardware company whose clients included the government and the medical community. The story of Pixar isn’t exactly full of superheroes, adorable robots, or talking bugs. The tale of the most profitable and critically adored animation studio in the history of the world (yes, by sheer gross numbers, more so than Disney) is one filled with financial difficulties, fired Apple employees, digital printers, and an animated left hand. And it all started with a Mormon graduate student at the University of Utah.
Christmas is over! The year is almost up! And in days like today when there’s not much going on, it’s always fun to look back at the year that was. Who did something stupid? What silly things happened? What do you remember? ADHD sums up the entire year of 2013 in under a minute in this animation video. Can you recognize everything?
This will be the best video that you see all day. It was made by Bodega Studios, a production company based out of New York and San Francisco. It is called Back to the Holidays and instead of starring Michael J. Fox, it stars a marshmallow.
I assume that you’ve unmuted the video below by now, but if not, what are you waiting for? It’s not everyday that you see a marshmallow driving a DeLorean.
This is the most amusing stop motion movie I have seen since… Sorry. Just got distracted by like a million other Vines. So where was I? Oh yeah, this is basically the coolest Vine you will see all day, maybe even all week. Or all year, since the year is almost over.
[via Laughing Squid]
Maybe it’s the wonderful accent or maybe it’s the tidy timeline the video uses but I’m definitely more captivated with watching Kurzgesagt’s animation on the history of time and the future of everything than I ever was in history class. And I loved history class.
Pottery can be described in many ways, but, unless Demi and Patrick are getting sexy at the wheel, mesmerizing is probably not one of them. That is, until you see this perfect little clip commissioned by the UK Crafts Council, which shows a lump of clay transform into an earthenware zoetrope. I could stare at this thing all day. I have stared at this thing all day! It’s so, so good.
It’s okay to be fooled by these ‘animated’ optical illusions. They totally look like they’re moving. Hell, the cat watching them was fooled too. But the truth is, they’re all just a masterful visual trick. The image isn’t actually moving, the special sheet in front of it just makes it seem that way.
Growing up sucks. Getting older is no fun. Having your body deteriorate to a shell of itself is embarrassing. But wrinkles and brittle bones are a fact of life. But why! PHD Comics and integrative Biologist Joao Pedro de Magalhaes explain in this nifty animated comic on what aging is and how we can use that understanding to extend our lifespan. My brain feels smarter, more wrinkled and I guess, older, just from watching it.
Blade Runner was such a classic movie and so far ahead of it’s time that it has legions of fans, despite having virtually no expanded material aside from the original movie (and various different edits). That’s why fans love to find cool new ways to show their love for the movie.
Artist Anders Ramsell is one such fan. He’s condensed the film into a 34-minute masterpiece that must have been a true labor of love. He created 12,597 watercolor paintings by hand to animate key scenes from the film. To make the feat even more amazing, each individual piece of art measures only about 1.5 centimeters by 3 centimeters.
Check it out and be thoroughly impressed. It will make you crave a sequel that’s for sure. Hopefully one will be coming our way soon.
[The Dissolve via io9]