Here’s a nice bit of encouragement for times when you feel like everyone else is coming up with neat ideas while you’re stuck with lame ones.

(via Nice)

Have you been running low on creative juices lately? Fill up again with these 29 simple ways to stay creative.

You can also check out the list of 13 tips for staying motivated in photography we shared a while back.

(via Laughing Squid)

London filmmaker Temujin Doran created this great little video for Lego that doesn’t involve any flashy effects or fancy camera techniques — just a child-like imagination. It won a prize at the prestigious Cannes Lions advertising festival in 2010.

This concept would work great with other toys and small objects, and can obviously be done as a series of photos as well.

OK Go, an LA-based rock band, makes some of the most creative music videos you’ll ever see, from the treadmill video that amassed over 50 million views on YouTube to their gigantic Rube Goldberg machine one that dropped jaws around the world. Their latest video for the song “End Love” is yet another display of pure creativity, as they blend stop motion and slow motion techniques in strange and awesome new ways.

OK Go is pretty much the Pixar of music videos.

This stop-motion video will blow you away. Students in Japan created this video of Super Mario for a school festival using only sticky notes for the animation. Putting together the 1.5 minute video required two weeks of work and about 5,000 yen (~$55). I predict this video will go viral on the Internet in the next few days.

(via Boing Boing)

Sony recently hired Superfad to create a video for its global “make.believe” campaign, and got its money’s worth. This jaw-dropping video was created with a Phantom HD cinema camera shooting at 1,000 frames per second, and blends live action and CGI into ethereal scenes that are sure to leave you take your breath away.

An extra treat is a short behind-the-scenes video of how certain scenes were created. We are in awe.

(via Chase Jarvis)

This amazing pinhole camera is so small that it’s amazing it actually works. It was created by Francesco Capponi (Dippold on Flickr), the same guy who created the nifty printable 35mm cardboard pinhole camera we featured a while back.

Here are a couple more views of this extraordinary camera to give you a better idea of how it works:

To prove the camera is fully-functional, Capponi took the following photograph with it, titled “my little eye“:

The film used to capture this image was simple black and white photo paper.

Sadly, Capponi doesn’t have a tutorial out for making one of these amazing cameras (they would make fun conversation pieces), but hopefully he’ll post some explanation and/or instructions soon!

(via Gizmodo)

Here’s a video that’s so creative and awesome it’s sure to get your artistic juices flowing. OK Go just put up the music video to their song “This Too Shall Pass”, and it’s one of the coolest music videos I’ve ever seen. Basically the whole video shows a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption built in a warehouse, with the timing and placement of every person and element perfectly integrated into the song.

I wonder how many takes this video required.

(via Boing Boing)

Here’s a dose of creative inspiration: a hand animated video of parkour. Created by Serene Teh and Noel Lee, parkour motion reel is a pretty unique take on the flip book style of animation.

While this video isn’t directly related to photography, the concept can definitely be done with photographs instead of being hand-drawn, and might make for some pretty awesome animation. Photographs have already been used in this kind of animation, but usually using stop motion (i.e. The PEN Story and stop motion with wolf and pig.)

If you have any examples of photographs being animated by hand in this manner, please link us!

(via Laughing Squid)