Awesome Effects

Harpist Emily Hopkins has shown us before how technology can make ordinary musical instruments more interesting. In this video, she challenged herself to make video game music with unusual sound-making gadgets. The list includes a musical Tamagotchi, a meowing cat keyboard, and a crazy motorized synthesizer.

In this short video from Posy, he shows off a neat visual effect that takes ordinary footage and highlights solely the parts that move. The resulting footage is artful and reveals aspects of each scene that might otherwise be overlooked. Best of all, Posy shows us how easy it is to replicate the effect yourself.

One place you never want to be when a fire breaks out is a theater. That is unless you’re in this “5D Cinema” theater that produces a real fire that leaps off the screen and across the ceiling above the audience’s heads. We couldn’t confirm where this attraction is, but apparently, it’s somewhere in China.

Fire isn’t the easiest thing to control. But the pyrotechnic experts at ER Productions know a thing or two about bossing around flames. In this short video, they show off a rig they built for UK rock band Bring Me the Horizon that can shoot fire in sequence from its 28 remote-controlled flame heads.

For decades, musicians have used talk boxes to combine guitar sounds and their voices into a robotic effect. Dunlop sent harpist Emily Hopkins one of their analog talk boxes and some other effects pedals, and she gave them a whirl to see what kind of sounds she could make. Mostly, it’s just a video of Emily cracking up.

If you took two minutes to read the manual that came with the effects pedal, you’d know that it plugs in between your guitar and the amplifier. But musician Seiji Igusa came up with a less conventional way to use an effects pedal, to strum and manipulate his guitar’s strings. Whatever works, we suppose.

Apple asked filmmaker Michel Gondry to show off his creativity and the cinematic capabilities of the iPhone 13 Pro. Armed with a dozen eggs, he created this lighthearted short film that plays with our expectations through a series of practical effects, clever editing, and illusions.

Having worked on movies like Kubo and the Two Strings and Missing Link, animator Kevin Parry loves visual effects. When he’s not working on feature films, he makes his own illusion videos. Here’s a compilation of some of his best edits and tricks from the past year. He also owns the world’s only portal trampoline.

One of the world’s leading shops for practical visual effects is Wellington, New Zealand’s Weta Workshop. If you need creatures, miniatures, vehicles, weapons, robots, or just about anything else, they’re your guys. Their 2020 reel showcases just a handful of their many incredible visual accomplishments over the years.

Caravane, Camille Boyer, and Nik Mirus created Club Palace – a mindbender of a video which toys with our perceptions, and will make you wonder if it was created with computer graphics, miniatures, or some combination of the two. Your answer can be found here.

Reminiscent of the best in-camera visual trickery of the mighty Michel Gondry, director Oscar Hudson’s incredible music video for Bonobo and Nick Murphy’s chillwave track was created using forced perspectives with “a very small camera… and a very big set.”

For his latest video, practical effects wizard Joey Shanks shows off how the prismatic effect that occurs on the surface of soap bubbles can be lit and captured to make it look like the gaseous clouds swirling around a planet.

Directed by Alec Berg as part of Lexus’ Amazing in Motion series, dozens of stuntmen were rigged up all over Kuala Lumpur in LED suits to give the illusion of a single parkour athlete crossing the city. Behind the scenes footage here.

Our pal Mark Rober always wanted to shoot Matrix-style “bullet time” footage, but never had the rig to do it right. But somehow he managed to pull it off with a GoPro Hero3, two flashlights, a wood turntable and a ceiling fan motor.

Pro CGI artist Yoshiya Yamada shows off some of his most impressive VFX work, from films including The Avengers, Battle: Los Angeles, and X-Men: Wolverine. Man how far we’ve come since TRON.

A young filmmaker adds an extra gadget to his Amazon cart and gets more than he bargained for. A clever way to advertise Magic Bullet Suite 11, the effects package used to embellish this short film.

The guys behind this brain-twisting video describe the clip as what might happen if the time-bending game Braid were a first-person shooter. Confused? Ask the creators your questions over on Reddit.

We can always count on Freddie Wong to lighten our day with his fun, effects-filled videos. In today’s short and fiery clip, we learn why Freddie should never pleasure himself.

Despite the fact that HBO’s Boardwalk Empire takes place during the 1920s, it’s a very high-tech production. This brief reel shows off some of Brainstorm Digital’s incredible VFX work.

This live-action/CGI short film was created by Uira Lamour for his graduation project using a Canon 5D, 3Ds max, Vray, Rayfire, Zbrush, Nuke and After Effects. We think he deserves an A+.

Photographer Sam O’Hare makes all the attendees at this year’s Coachella festival look really, really tiny, courtesy of the now familiar tilt-shift lens – used to perfect effect in this setting.

While we’re not big Linkin Park fans, this music video directed by DJ Joe Hahn is definitely worth a watch. Created using laser scanning techniques, the video’s a real stunner. The song… meh.