Filmmakers Derek Kwok and Henri Wong of Parabucks created this ridiculously awesome stop-motion short film titled “Batman: Dark Knightfall” using highly-realistic 1/6-scale collectible action figures by Hong Kong toy company Hot Toys. Be sure to turn on HD when you watch it.
The cinematic lighting and sound effects give this film a realism that you’ll be hard pressed to find in a stop-motion video — at times you won’t believe that what you’re seeing isn’t showing real actors. Read more…
On Monday, a group of four friends went on a fishing trip in the Pacific Ocean. Taking their boat “A Salt Weapon” 20 miles west of Santa Cruz, Mark Peters, Jeremy, Dave, and William were expecting a fun-filled day of albacore tuna hunting. What they ended up capturing was so much more.
Wanting to save some memories of their trip and film their battles with tuna from underwater, Peters decided to bring along a GoPro Hero 2 camera fitted inside a $50 custom-made torpedo. Read more…
This fascinating TED talk was given last month by MIT researcher Ramesh Raskar on his femto-photography camera that snaps images at a whopping one trillion frames per second — a rate so fast that it can capture light in motion. The technology may one day be used to build cameras that shoot around corners or see into the human body without X-rays.
Photographer Tom Warner shot this slow motion incredible video of lightning at 7,207 frames per second. APOD writes,
The above lightning bolt starts with many simultaneously creating ionized channels branching out from an negatively charged pool of electrons and ions that has somehow been created by drafts and collisions in a rain cloud. About 0.015 seconds after appearing — which takes about 3 seconds in the above time-lapse video — one of the meandering charge leaders makes contact with a suddenly appearing positive spike moving up from the ground and an ionized channel of air is created that instantly acts like a wire. Immediately afterwards, this hot channel pulses with a tremendous amount of charges shooting back and forth between the cloud and the ground, creating a dangerous explosion that is later heard as thunder. Much remains unknown about lightning, however, including details of the mechanism that separates charges.
It’s amazing how much action goes on in just a blink of the eye.
Here’s a video overview of some interesting research that’s being done in the area of video processing. By taking standard video as an input and doing some fancy technical mojo on it, researchers are able to amplify information in it to reveal things that are virtually invisible to the human eye. For example, you can detect a baby’s heartbeat by simply pointing a camera at his/her face. The method is able to visualize the pulsating flow of blood that fills the face.
Photographer Jack Long has an absolutely amazing series of photographs titled Vessels and Blooms that features liquid flowers captured by shooting high speed photographs of splashes. The images are not faked with Photoshop, but are instead single exposures that result from months of planning and testing. Read more…
Feast your eyes on this amazing stop motion music video idea for the song “Rivers and Homes” by electronic music artist J.Views. After filming a traditional music video in upstate New York, the production team had 2000 of the individual frames printed out. The prints were then distributed during a recent tour in Israel to 300 fans, who held them up and posed for new photographs. The resulting photographs were then re-animated into a video showing the original music video running in stop motion in the hands of the fans. No computer fakery was involved in the production, and the final video is quite mind-blowing.
From Love to Bingo in 873 Images is an amazing short film created by AlmapBBDO to advertise Getty Images. The team spent 6 months sifting through 5,000 Getty stock photographs to create this beautiful 1-minute story that shows 873 images at 15 images per second. And you thought flipping through your own personal photo archives was difficult…
Bellamy Hunt of Japan Camera Hunter recently got his hands on this amazing handmade camera pendant by jeweller Luke Satoru. The attention to detail is amazing: it’s a tiny Olympus Trip 35 camera crafted from multiple pieces of brass, and the various components actually work! You can open up the back to look at the film plane, turn the rewind knob, move the advance winder, and the whole shebang. Read more…
The new BlackBerry 10 operating system was unveiled BlackBerry World 2012 today, and one of the amazing new features that wowed the crowd was the camera app. It features a seemingly-magical “timeline” lens that lets you rewind sections of photographs in order to recover moments that your fingers weren’t fast enough to capture. Did your subject blink in the photo? No worries… simply rewind their face and you’re good to go! Basically, the camera is constantly capturing frames as soon as the app is loaded, so there’s always a small buffer of previous moments stored for you to recover. Read more…
