Awesome Slow Motion

The guys from How Ridiculous are always trying to come up with new ways to drop stuff from their 150-foot tower. This time, they placed the world’s largest exercise ball on the ground and dropped stuff onto it to see how high it would bounce back. The slow-mo footage of the water coming off of the exercise ball is especially cool.

Gav from The Slow Mo Guys mounted a fancy high-speed camera to the arm of an agile and precise robot. Combined with a remote triggering mechanism, he was able to capture some unique perspectives on their subject – a colorful fountain made from diet soda, Mentos, and their sponsor MiO’s instant drinks.

Apparently, the guys from How Ridiculous have gotten bored with dropping stuff off of a tower. They recently expanded their destructive repertoire by tossing stuff into the air from an airbag, and now they’re smacking stuff with a giant golf club on the front of a truck. The Phantom slow-mo footage really adds to the experience.

Filmmaker Ben Ouaniche of Macro Room just blew our minds with this wild series of vingnettes which seamlessly combine slow-motion and normal speed footage. The result is something straight from the mind of Christopher Nolan, as time appears to move at multiple speeds at the same time.

Taylor Tries shows off a fun and different perspective on her juggling skills with this mesmerizing top-down view. She says that it makes it look like she’s juggling giant gumballs, and we agree. Check out more of the same point-of-view here and here.

The Beyond the Press channel present a simple but dangerous experiment that you definitely DO NOT want to try to replicate at home. They took an ordinary car tire and wheel, submerged it beneath about 8 inches of frozen lake ice, then overinflated it until it burst. The anticipation of the boom was quite nerve-wracking.

Unless you have a beater you don’t care about, we don’t recommend tossing a spark plug at your car window. Instead, we suggest watching The Slow Mo Guys video, in which Gav smashes sheets of tempered glass and captures the breakage at speeds up to 800,000 frames per second.

From the 1960s to 1980s, the IBM Selectric was the typewriter to get if you wanted to type quickly and accurately. This slow-motion footage from the Hursley Museum and Chronos Cameras shows how the Selectric’s innovative ball rapidly rotated to the correct position, and could type at speeds up to 14.8 characters per second.

Blowing up a real submarine would be costly and impractical, so Gav from The Slow Mo Guys did the next best thing. He took a scale model of a sub, placed it inside a fish tank, and set off mini depth charges. The exterior shots were done with Phantom cameras, but the underwater shots were done with a GoPro Hero9 Black.

Flicking a cigarette lighter takes a fraction of a second. But there’s actually quite a bit going on as the flint sparks up and ignites the butane fuel. This 7,600 fps slow-motion clip shows exactly what is happening as the flame emerges from the lighter. Here’s a similar clip at 20,000 fps.

Most content is shot digitally these days, but there’s something special about the look of movies shot on film. Gav of The Slow Mo Guys shows us the insides of a vintage 16mm camera for an up-close look at how it works as the film rolls past its shutter. It’s amazing how those sprockets keep each frame perfectly exposed.

Back in 2018, Darren Dyk from Beyond Slow Motion met up with world Yo-Yo champ Evan Nagao in Hawaii to record his attempt to pull off a never-before-seen trick. It took Evan numerous tries, but he eventually manages to make the string fly backwards for five rotations around his Yo-Yo’s body before hooking it on its axle.

Solo Slow-Mo Guy Gavin Free turned his macro lens towards a piece of lab equipment called an ultrasonic homogenizer, a device that rapidly vibrates to combine liquids. To capture it moving up to 30,000 times per second, he had to get out the big guns, a Phantom V2511 camera to record movements at 170,000 fps.

YouTube channel Macro Room is known for their incredible macro and slow-motion photography. To celebrate their 1 millionth subscriber, they created this video in which a man sits still as their face is barraged with paint balloons. It’s also an impressive demo of the Chronos 2.1 HD slow-motion camera system.

Dr. Adrian Smith of Ant Lab is the man you want to see if you’ve got a question about bugs. Among his many buggy pursuits is capturing slow-motion footage of insects as they take flight. In this video, you’ll enjoy a variety of bugs lifting off, many of which are less graceful than you’d think.

Gav from The Slow Mo Guys dusted off some of the mousetraps they used in their man vs. mousetraps video, set them up, and poured powdered paint pigments onto each one. After an extensive amount of prep, he triggered the traps, ran away, and recorded the spectacle of flying colors for us all to enjoy in magnificent slow-motion.

The Beyond the Press channel covered an old beater with 70 blasting caps, then detonated them remotely. With the help of their Matrix-style ring Chronos 1.4 cameras, they recorded the sparkly light show in 360º slow-motion. For safety purposes, they couldn’t load the car with explosives, but it’s still fun to watch.

After seeing a slow-motion video where the pattern from dust on a tennis racket appeared to hang in space, Kuma Films wanted to see if they could do the same. With the help of a pricey Phantom high-speed camera and some colorful powders, they replicated that along with a few other visuals based on viral videos.

With just the right amount of compressed air, it’s possible to spin an apple in the air. But there’s only so many RPMs a fruit can take, and eventually, the apple gives up. Gav from The Slow Mo Guys put this physics experiment to the test in front of a high-speed camera so we can see exactly what happens when it disintegrates.

Athlete and physical comedian Daniel LaBelle imagines a world where gravity is strictly optional. He edited his slow-motion footage to never show his feet touching the ground, then got his buddies to participate in an even better part two of the series. That bit with the treadmill is our favorite.

You wouldn’t think that something as innocuous as corn starch could cause a massive fireball, but you’d be wrong. The Beyond the Press channel conducted a series of experiments to show just how flammable various kinds of dust and powder can be when exposed to a flame. They didn’t try non-dairy creamer though.

If you still have any doubts about the benefits of wearing a mask to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, this video from The Slow-Mo Guys and special guest Dr. Anthony Fauci should set you straight. The number of droplets that go flying when speaking without a mask on is particularly illuminating.

Researchers in London, England used a fascinating method to view the aerodynamic properties of flight. Using helium-filled soap bubbles, they were able to visualize the vortices created by birds’ wings, and made interesting observations about the role their tail feathers play in flight. Details here.