Awesome Slow Motion

Gav and Dan, aka The Slow Mo Guys, wanted to see how G-forces affect a human face. Since they didn’t have a fighter jet or a centrifuge lying around, they did the next best thing. Dan jumped on a trampoline while holding a pricey high-speed camera. The expressions on Dan’s face in mid-flight are priceless.

The guys from Australia’s How Ridiculous have made their careers out of destroying stuff. They certainly don’t disappoint in this video, as they test how many panes of glass are needed to variousty of objects, including a tomato, a roll of toilet paper, a Rubik’s Cube, and a throwing axe. The slow-motion footage is pretty epic.

The Slow Mo Guys were joined by Scott from Kentucky Ballistics to test how destructive a .577 Tyrannosaur rifle cartridge is by firing it at close range into thick blocks of ballistic gel. It’s amazing (and terrifying) to see how the bullets deform the gel and the destructive forces at work. No wonder they say these things can stop an elephant.

Springtails are unusual hexapods that have a unique way of escaping danger. In this fascinating nature video from KQED’s Deep Look, they get up close and personal with these little guys to capture their acrobatic movements in slow motion and explain how they spring into the air and land on their feet.

You might think magnets aren’t particularly scary. But once you get a look at the attractive forces between two strong neodymium magnets, you’ll have a new respect for magnetic fields. The Slow Mo Guys show us how energetic they can be, capturing magnetic collisions at up to 187,500 FPS. You definitely wouldn’t want your hand in between those.

Inspired by a pair of Civil War-era bullets that collided and fused together, Destin from Smarter Every Day wanted to see if he could replicate the unlikely situation on camera. It took an impressive amount of planning and engineering to set up the shot and perform the experiment in a safe and precise way.

Cannons are generally designed to fire iron cannonballs. Ballistic High-Speed shows us there’s no good reason they can’t fire bowling balls too. In this satisfying slow-motion video, you’ll see what happens when a bowling ball meets various objects at speeds over 300 feet per second. You definitely would not want to be on the business end of this thing.

It’s a June tradition for The Slow Mo Guys to perform stupid antics with a giant water balloon. This time, Dan dove face-first into the thing as Gav captured slow-motion footage of his crash landings. Not only did he shoot from the outside of the balloon, but he also got the camera’s skinny probe lens inside of it for some shots.

The guys from How Ridiculous, aka the Destroy Things for the Fun of It Channel, spun up their spinning katana machine for another go. This time they turned its destructive blades loose on everything from a bowling ball to an iPad to a crateful of rubber duckies. The 6000 fps slow-motion footage provides the best look at the carnage.

Ammunition blanks are often used in stunt work and military practice exercises. While they don’t fire the same metal projectile as a regular bullet, they can cause serious damage at close range. The Slow Mo Guys shot footage of blanks being fired at various objects, revealing incredible details at speeds up to 82,000 fps.

Belgian filmmaker Gilles Havet sets our screens on fire by capturing an epic stage performance inspired by Norse mythology. The professional fire artists of Pyronix Production portray fire-wielding warriors in a eye-popping nighttime ballet of flame.

Nature filmmaker Lothar Lenz is an expert at capturing macro footage of insects. In this video, we get to watch some hornets competing with a colony of ants for a drink of water. The incredible audio recording puts you right there in the action. The ants get a little feisty in this other video.

Photographer Jens Heidler of Another Perspective points his macro lens at the business end of a snail to see how it eats. For today’s lunch, the little dude is downing a tart and tangy bit of strawberry. We love the little nibbling sounds.

We know that firearms can be dangerous – especially if they malfunction or are mishandled. The Slow Mo Guys got together with Scott from Kentucky Ballistics to witness a worst-case scenario. Loading the wrong ammo into an already jammed gun doesn’t ordinarily happen, but the consequences can be explosive.

Macrofying is an expert at capturing macro and slow-motion imagery. This compilation video shows incredible close-up footage of everyday objects, including a ballpoint pen, a dissolving pill capsule, a cigarette lighter, and salt poured from a shaker. We’re still scratching our heads about how they shot the zooming effect.

We’ve seen footage of a cigarette lighter sparking up in slow-motion, but this video from RentHighSpeed gets us much closer to the action. The clip also serves as a side-by-side demonstration of the frame rates of four Phantom high-speed cameras shot at the same resolution, with a range from 3,200 fps to 28,000 fps.

Thanks to surface tension, it’s possible to skim a bullet across the water like a skipping stone. The Slow-Mo Guys set up an experiment to bounce bullets across an aquarium and captured some amazing 82,000fps footage of the splashes. They also figured out how to bounce bullets off of glass without shattering it.

What you’re looking at is a tiny fire extinguisher called an E-Bulb. Designed to work in small, enclosed spaces, it can be installed inside electronics to prevent a fire from spreading. It works like a fuse and can stop the flow of electricity as well. The Slow Mo Guys captured footage of the invention at speeds up to 150,000 fps.

Ant Lab’s Dr. Adrian Smith is an expert at capturing slow-motion, macro footage of insects in motion. In this video, you’ll get up close and personal with a dozen species of moths and beetles as they take flight. It’s amazing to see the details of each insect’s wings and bodies and the subtle variations in their movements.

Taking a break from chopping things in half with their giant axe, the guys from How Ridiculous dusted off another one of their machines of destruction for a follow-up video. This time, they used their spinning fly swatter of death to smack the life out of everything from Jello to eggs to the non-Newtonian fluid known as Oobleck.

It makes perfect sense that you can mill round objects by turning them on a spindle. But this video from the Titans of CNC shows us how it’s possible to use computer-controlled machines to mill sharply-defined polygonal objects on a spinning machine by synchronizing the spindle and the milling tool.

The 1982 movie Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance was a fascinating experimental film that combined slow motion and time-lapse footage with music by Phillip Glass to illustrate humanity’s impact on the world. Monkeon’s Gifaanisqatsi generates movies using a similar technique, only with random animated GIFs.

The guys from How Ridiculous have yet to run out of ways to destroy things, as proven by their latest bit of industrial machinery. What they built was a motorized rig with two gigantic metal fly swatters attached to it. Once it got up to speed, they dropped various objects into its path to see what kind of damage it could do.