Sometime back, the director/comedian Stephen Chow made a movie called Shaolin Soccer – in which crazily exaggerated football skills were derived from Shaolin Kungfu. Well, it turns out that it may not really be that far from reality – judging from what this clip shows. Amazingly acrobatic moves in capoeira paired with street football – these people are insane!
Say you have 3 guys and you give them 4 days to reenact one of the epic battles of mankind – the Omaha landing – what do you think they could come up with? How real can they portray the massive scene with hundreds of soldiers, exploding shells and all? Well if you have an astronomical budget you would be able to churn out something somewhat real – but what if you’re on a practically shoestring budget?
Ultimately and fortunately, there’s no limits for human creativity. Here’s how a few guys did it – it’s not a lame production for sure: it was a part of BBC’s Bloody Omaha documentary series. Extremely impressive – watch on to the end to discover their process and the very impressive end results:
After massive interest on the Internet with this very clever and effective ‘making-of’, the BBC is going to rerun the actual show. This is probably the only ‘behind-the-scenes’ that can rally and compel a great desire to watch the actual show itself.
It’s going to be the Chinese New Year soon. For those of you who celebrate, I wish you a prosperous and fulfilling new Year of the Rat. And for those who don’t, check out this video of this Mighty Mouse:
Morality of tampering with genetic materials aside, this experiment is rather intriguing. Researchers at Tokyo University stripped the mouse of its inherent ability to fear cats, resulting in this rodent that is fearless even of its own natural nemesis. Weird, or scientific breakthrough?
I’ve been a great fan of Improv Everywhere (Improv Everywhere causes scenes of chaos and joy in public places – they ‘spontaneously’ do something out-of-the-blue in a public space to bring a short, abrupt but memorable twist to a day in life). But I think they really outdid themselves in their latest mission – the Frozen Grand Central:
On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Over 500,000 people rush through Grand Central every day, but today, things slowed down just a bit as commuters and tourists alike stopped to notice what was happening around them. Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our mission report and photos.
Amazingly fun! I just wished they have it everywhere in the world!
Here’s an advertisement for Philips shaver, set in a sci-fi futuristic setting. I liked the artistic direction and details of the film – but at the same time, I can’t help but to wonder whether it’s (waaaaay) too elaborate for a shaver. If it was for a car, I can still associate the emotional attachment. But for a shaver, it is attempting to give too much of an mystical aura to a shaver – is there anybody that emotionally engaged and invested in their shavers?
Loved the light-hearted, leisurely soundtrack that accompanies this ad encouraging more people to ride the bicycle in London. Perfectly encapsulates the mood of riding, don’t you think?
It seems like 3D modeling is getting easier and easier – trace the overall outline from a video and voila – you’ve got a material-ed and rendered 3d object! Of course this is the promotional video which means that everything works approximately 132 times better than the actual application. But it’s still quite impressive nonetheless to me. I believe that there will be a time where 3D modeling skills are like typing skills nowadays – everybody (kind of) has it, and it doesn’t matter that much anymore since it’s relatively much easier. While we’re probably still years or decades away from that, it certainly looks like software and AI for 3D are heading in that direction…
I came across and was very much inspired by the two ads above from Nike, titled ‘Defy’ and ‘Endure’ respectively. They were really wonderful in many senses. For both videos, a series of really expressive scenes extracted from sports played in slow-motion, coaxing and allowing the emotions from the sportsmen/women to really flow out to the viewer (with matching background music too).
‘Defy’ paints a picture of hope and of celebration of the human body – how great athletes seem to defy gravity and common notions of what is possible – aptly ending with the tagline ‘A little less gravity’. On the other hand, ‘Endure’ takes a straight look at the less glorious part of sports – the agony in endurance, defeat and disappointment, with the tagline ‘A little less hurt’. Juxtaposed together, they show poetically the humanness and the emotions in sports – and that they are very much simply two sides of the same coin.
If you have been inspired and motivated by the strength of human spirit in sports and endurance, be sure to also check out this story which has been floating on the Net recently, chronicling the superhuman feat of a 61-year old farmer who beat professional athletes in a grueling 875-km race, simply because he didn’t know he was supposed to stop and rest.
Sure, we’ve seen the automatic parking stuff from Lexus and all – but a car driving itself? Well BMW has answered that too. On Top Gear they demonstrated a car that drives itself. Apparently you drive it around the circuit once, and the car ‘learns’ and ‘remembers’ it. Mind you, we’re not talking about weak “safe” cruising speeds and all, but full-fledged >100km/h average speeds.
Now they need to figure out how to implement this on the roads…
Wow, talk about scalable and adaptive infrastructure! Train track to market in no time!
