Thursday, January 15, 2015

Video Round-Up: January 15, 2015



Welcome to The Geek Art Gallery's daily Video Round-Up, in which we collect the geekiest videos from around the web each day for your enjoyment.  Why slog through page after page of kitten and baby videos to find what you're looking for on video aggregators when you can cut straight to the chase here?  Comedy sketches, countdowns, movie parodies, nerdy music, science in action, and supercuts - we've got it all!





We all know Chewbacca, Groot, and Hodor have what we'll call a limited vocabulary. But while we can't always understand exactly what they're saying, it seems that they can at least understand each other. Filmmaker Kevin Ulrich and his team at Brotherhood Studios have unveiled a video that features Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi walking into the Mos Eisley cantina and listening in on a conversation between three of the most unlikely drinking buddies you'll find in a galaxy far, far away.
"A Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and Marvel mashup, in which our three favorite taciturn sidekicks are allowed to express how they really feel."



I love the 8-bit aesthetic of classic video games. While this pixel animated Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser trailer is really more like 16-bit, it's still well done. Animator Mauri Helme released this video a month ago and I'm surprised it took this long for it to get discovered.




A laptop sets off a recurring sequence of objects interacting in both the real world and inside its operating system in this creative take on the Rube Goldberg machine by animator Evelien Lohbeck.
"Deskloop is a short film presenting a chain reaction that takes place on a desk(top)."



LEGO Fan Kleinraum42 wants to make this LEGO set a reality. For those interested, vote the project up on LEGO Ideas and the company might take notice!
"This set brings you a lot of playability in form of an action packed marble run and brick build dominoes. It’s a challenge every time you set it up. And it’s rewarding to watch the action happen. Two hundred dominos and a feature packed dynamic marble run."



One of the things that makes Blade Runner so great is its cyberpunk vision of Los Angeles, a mishmash of architecture, language, and culture. This fascinating video essay takes us through the various components that make up this futuristic noir city and what they suggest about the history of Blade Runner's world.

Colin Marshall, author of A Los Angeles Primer, is working on a series of video essays titled The City in Cinema, examining how Los Angeles is presented in different films. Here, Marshall talks about not just what we're seeing on the screen, but also the historical and cultural events that might have arisen in Ridley Scott's alternate future LA. We've always known that the city is central to Blade Runner, but Marshall forces us to consider the city's backstory as well as its current on-screen status.
""Blade Runner"'s future noir, proto-cyberpunk vision of a Los Angeles both post-industrial and re-industrial, both first-world and third-world, has remained in the more than 30 years since its unsuccessful first run the definitive image of the city's future. Using a combination of studio backlots, scale models, matte paintings, and actual Los Angeles architectural landmarks, the film imagines a "retrofitted," Japanified Babel of a megalopolis that, through the name of the film, still stands for a thoroughly realized dystopia — and, increasingly, a tantalizing one.

The video essays of "Los Angeles, the City in Cinema" examine the variety of Los Angeleses revealed in the films set there, both those new and old, mainstream and obscure, respectable and schlocky, appealing and unappealing — just like the city itself."



The Templeton Foundation asked some heavy-hitter thinkers to answer the question, “Does the Universe Have a Purpose”. Some said “Yes” and “Certainly.” Others concluded “Unlikely” and “No.” Neil deGrasse Tyson — astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science — gave an answer that falls technically in the “Not Certain” camp.

Above, you can watch a video where Tyson reads his answer aloud, and the makers of Minute Physics provide the rudimentary animation. One thing astrophysicists have is a knack for putting things into a deeper context, often making “big” human questions look remarkably small (if not somewhat absurd). Carl Sagan did it remarkably well in his famous ‘The Pale Blue Dot’ speech. And Tyson picks up right where Sagan left off.
"Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked by the Templeton Foundation to answer the question "Does the Universe Have a Purpose". Then he read his answer aloud and I drew some pictures for it."



You can more or less deduce what Artoo-Deetoo is saying half the time in the Star Wars movies, but Eclectic Method finally sat down to translate the lines, and reveal the astromech droid's bad attitude.


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