Awesome Videos

Filmmaker Paul Trillo used OpenAI’s generative video tool Sora to help create the music video for The Hardest Part from singer-songwriter Washed Out. Rather than attempting to replicate reality, the video takes us on a surreal and dreamlike journey through the lives a young couple. We think it’s a smart use of AI to bring a creative vision to life.

Postmodern Jukebox dusted off The Romantics’ 1980 hit What I Like About You and sent it even further back in the time machine. Their fresh interpretation gives the pop hit a 1960s sound, straight out of Motown, and clearly inspired by The Way You Do the Things You Do. That’s singer Tia Simone belting out the soulful vocals.

In James Gunn’s Suicide Squad, there’s a pivotal scene where one character shoots another by firing a small bullet through a bigger bullet. While that cool trick was performed with CGI, The Slow Mo Guys attempted to replicate a bullet-through-bullet collision in real life. It required precision, but they did make it easier by keeping the larger bullet stationary.

Celebrate Star Wars Day with a little musical interlude, courtesy of MayTree. The Korean a cappella group performed their playful interpretation of the jazzy tune that Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes’ was playing when we first visited Chalmun’s Cantina in A New Hope.

Japanese swordsmiths have been making bladed weapons for centuries. Veritasium offers a scientific explanation of the process, starting with a charcoal smelting method that produces steel from tiny deposits of iron sand collected from riverbeds. After that, a swordsmith forges, folds, and welds different kinds of steel to create a beautiful and sharp blade.

The unofficial frisbee throwing speed record is 89.5 mph, and the furthest a disc was ever thrown was 1109 feet. We Make Machines attempted to beat both of these records with the help of a motorized disc launcher. After developing a mini disc launcher, scaling up the design to throw a regulation disc was significantly more challenging and dangerous.

How It’s Made presents a creepy compilation of factory videos showing how we get mannequins, marionnettes, crash test dummies, dress forms, and other humanoid replicas. We can only imagine walking through one of these factories at night must be like the Cold Storage facility in Westworld.

(PG-13: Language) Mysterious creator and probable spacetime traveler Obscurest Vinyl exploded onto the scene by unearthing this song. It’s precisely about what it says in the title. We don’t know what’s more hilarious – the song itself, the fact that the image is a mishmash of trends across decades, or that its lyrics have annotations on Genius.

Our friend Tim Esterdahl from Pickup Truck +SUV Talk took a 180-mile road trip in the all-electric 2024 Nissan Ariya. He had a lot of ground to cover in the Ariya, facing the battery-busting trifecta of cold weather, high speeds, and elevation gains. You can see the stress on his face as he shares his experiences. But was his range anxiety justified?

After looking at his house cat, artist Bobby Duke was inspired to sculpt a model of a feline skull out of an 8-ball. Rather than going with the domesticated model, he transported back to prehistoric times and crafted a sabertooth cat skull. Coincidentally, Bobby used tools from Saburrtooth to carve the sculpture. He ended up making its teeth out of a cue ball.

To celebrate the launch of their awesome Mini-Saber Gen 2 torch, Logan from The Hacksmith created a larger-than-life model of the butane-powered beauty, complete with packaging. Their 7-foot-tall Mega Saber runs on propane and uses a set of seven nozzles to focus its jet-like flame. It’s overkill for roasting marshmallows or popping popcorn, though.

Ever wonder why statues and other geeky collectibles cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars? Watch artist Chie Izuma in action, and you’ll understand. Watch her meticulously paint the $700 Sideshow Collectibles Batgirl statue, eyeballing it all the way. Remember, she does this for each statue, and this is just one step in the whole process.

Old Things Never Die picked up a rare and rusty U.S.A.F. GEMINI X-5 toy spaceship on eBay. After disassembling all of its parts, he got to work sandblasting away the rust, polishing the plastics, and then painstakingly reapplying paint to make it look as good as new. He also had to replace its motor and rebuild its driving mechanism.

China makes the widest variety of cars on the planet, from 6-figure executive sedans to crappy little things like the $1300 Chang Li Tank city car. After performing a durability test and testing it off-road, the guys from Grind Hard Plumbing Co. completely rebuilt the 2-horsepower car, outfitting it with four-wheel drive and a pair of 28,000-watt electric motors.

Woodworker Neil Paskin recently made a bunch of beautiful patterned wood veneers. After making a small box that incorporated them, he ramped up the challenge by building a tabletop covered with the patterns. Neil estimates that the pattern has 55,000 individual slivers of wood in it. It looks like a laborious process, but the finished table looks fantastic.

There are good reasons that vehicles are driven on pneumatic rubber tires. But after seeing a rusty bike wheel wrapped in springs, the guys from Garage 54 thought it would be fun to test the idea by creating a set of tires from thick coil springs. They mounted them on a Mercedes G-Wagon to see if they could improve traction and off-road capabilities.

Norteño music is known for its catchy and danceable sounds, and Houston-based EZ Band masterfully melds the genre with popular songs. In this video, they deliver a Mexican Rick-Roll with their fun and original cover of Rick Astley’s inescapable pop hit, Never Gonna Give You Up.

This quirky short film by Ft. Langley follows the story of a strange little man obsessed with conspiracy theories. When he loses his internet connection, he calls the cable company, and they send a man claiming to be a technician to help troubleshoot. Of course, the man’s suspicions run wild with this stranger in his home.

Craving coffee at your desk? It’s easy enough to pick up a Keurig that brews on demand. But that wasn’t good enough for Martina from Nerdforge. Her idea? Make a PC with a built-in coffee maker. What she fabricated was a working gaming PC that grinds beans and brews a single cup off coffee. She built it into the enormous Corsair Obsidian 1000D tower case.

We’ve never heard of the song Bling Bang Bang Born, but it sounds pretty amazing played on this 27-note street organ. Like a player piano, this music-making machine reads notes from a roll of paper, but it plays them on pipes like a calliope. Yuki Kojima has filled his YouTube channel with covers, including Thunderstruck, The Entertainer, and the Nyan Cat theme.

Musician Otu Suurmunne of Moonic Productions took Dolly Parton’s trademark track, Jolene, and imagined what it might have sounded like if Ozzy Osbourne and his mates from Black Sabbath had created it instead. While Dolly’s softly-sung original will always be a classic, Otu’s angry take seems more appropriate for a tale of jealousy and desperation.

How Ridiculous have a long history of destroying stuff. So when they got their hands on a bunch of goo-filled lava lamps, their first instinct was to see how many they could break by throwing various projectiles at them. After breaking some glass, they moved on to garden gnomes, tiles, and other fragile items. As expected, the slow-mo footage is the best part.

There’s no question that cars have improved in terms of safety tech, they’ve also created new problems by removing buttons and knobs, reinventing gear shifters, and making vehicles bigger. Commentator Drew Gooden talks about some of these backward steps in automotive design, then roasts the vehicle that’s the worst offender – the Tesla Cybertruck.