High-tech cameras and lighting, devoted crew members, intricate set props are among the several necessities emphasized by stop-motion animators. One vital piece of equipment they often leave out of this package of suggestions is patience. Filmmakers will often spend weeks if not months working with the same props to craft one single scene, that’s because every movement in a stop motion film, down to the simplest hand gestures, is hand molded. For every 2 seconds of footage, in a relatively high-end stop motion film set, there are anywhere from 40-60 frames that need to be filled for the moving image to look smooth. This mean 40-60 individual photographs where the props are moved ever so slightly as to translate, on screen, as fluid motion. You can imagine the time commitment needed to complete such a feat.
Sebastian Schipper’s 2015 film Victoria, in a mix of pulsing strobe lights and gang fights, captures the invincibility of youth when confronted with the inevitability of mortality-all in one take!
Victoria opens with a deeply synthetic, schizophrenic, beat paired with a buzzing reverb that pervades ceaselessly throughout the song. The beat stays steady as the reverb grows more urgent. A subtle sense of panic peels in the opening scene—Victoria dancing in a strobe light lit dance club. She filters in and out of the frame of the camera, and slowly ties up her hair, eyes closed the entire time, never losing sync with the beat, which has grown to be a pulsing phantom limb in the viewers perspective at this time.
YouTube’s famous The Slow Mo Guys duo is no stranger to slow motion video’s – hence their name. Throughout the years, they have been recording dozens of videos, capturing anything from a fully automatic assault rifle to last year’s condom challenge, usually at rates between 1,000 and 18,000 frames per second. But for their latest video, they went overboard – in a good way.
Three decades ago, Rodney Mullen almost singlehandedly invented many of the tricks on which modern skateboarding is based. He quickly became a skating legend, but stepped away from the spotlight after his last major release of footage, 12 years ago. But he’s back now.
At NASA, scientists were looking at the sky on Independence Day for other reasons than fireworks. On the 4th of July, their Juno spacecraft finally entered Jupiter’s orbit, after having traveled for more than 5 years. But before being brought into orbit, Juno’s JunoCam ha captured a unique time-lapse movie of the Galilean “satellites” (moons) in motion about Jupiter.
In its most recent drone video, the French film making duo BigFly captures breathtaking footage from inside the Saint Louis Byzantine Church in the French commune of Paimboeuf. The indoor flight resulted in two minutes of visual magic, definitely deserving the many awards it has gathered so far.
What’s it like to receive too much information in everyday situations, as people with autism do on a day to day basis? By answering that question with a virtual reality experience, the British National Autistic Society (NAS) aims for greater understanding towards autism.
People with autism are overloaded by everything around them, experiencing the outside world as a terrifying place. That’s also the life story of Alex Marshall, the 10-year-old autistic star in the video above. It gives you a taste of what a day at the mall is like for Alex (be sure to use your headphones), but to fully experience sensory overload, you should grab your headphones, download the app from iTunes or Play Store, and get the Google cardboard goggles.
Let’s just assume humanity suddenly disappears off the face of the earth – for whatever reason. YouTube-channel #Mind Warehouse figured out how that would impact our planet. Turns out, it takes about three hundred million years to completely forget we ever wandered around here.
“How do you know when to cut?” When thinking thoroughly about that question, Tony Zhou found it not that easy to come up with an answer. It’s a matter of instincts, thinking and feeling, but how does an editor think and feel? In a nine and a half video, co-written and -edited Taylor Ramos, Zhou explains what, to him, the key points of focus for the editor should be.
As a San Francisco aerial photographer and aerial videographer, I always have one ear to the ground when it comes to advancements in camera technology designed for flight. I like to think I’m prepared for most innovations, but this one totally caught me off guard. Peter Degerfeldt of Blue Sky, and aerial filmmaking company, challenged a Gyro-Stabilization company based in Grass Valley, CA to build a GSS 520 5-axis system that would be capable of producing perfectly rock solid and smooth images at a speed of more than 300 knots an hour to allow them to capture fighter jets in action for their client, Saab Defence and Security, and their multirole fighter, the Gripen.