Awesome Videos

“Your father is dead, young Tampax!” Comedian and actor Alasdair Beckett-King pokes fun at some common tropes in fantasy films. He kicks things off with the start of the journey for our hero – including the thinly veiled exposition and the seemingly endless list of characters you’ll need to memorize for the story to make sense.

3D-printed plastic objects don’t get very shiny. HEN3DRIK shows us how he electroplated a 3D model of Iron Man’s helmet to make it look like the ones in the movies. The process involves preparing the plastic and applying conductive copper paint before electroplating it with copper, gold, and palladium. The red was added using transparent red acrylic paint.

When you start to play this video, you’ll see a line bouncing around the screen. But if you pause it, the line vanishes. Chris Long explores this strange persistence of vision effect, which occurs when a line of pixels changes state between black and white. The method can also be used to share hidden text that can only be seen when the video is playing.

Air travel poses some challenges when it comes to carrying gear and toiletries. In this episode of Everyday Carry’s Carried Away podcast, hosts Bernard and Mikey chat about what you can or can’t bring through TSA checkpoints. Along the way they talk about their travel load-outs and suggest some alternatives to pocket knives and other prohibited tools.

When it comes to living creatures, everything starts small. This fascinating and creepy nature video from Adrian Kozakiewicz’s Insecthaus uses jump cuts to show how insects progress from eggs or larvae to their adult forms. Adrian also has no problem letting his menagerie of bugs crawl all over his face.

The Chiefs might have walked away from this year’s Super Bowl with the Vince Lombardi trophy, but that award has nothing on this handmade trophy by artist Blake McFarland. He crafted this beautiful scrap wood football sculpture for his pals who beat him at fantasy football. While he’s an expert at carving, Blake used the project to learn how to turn wood on a lathe.

Because the theme song from Super Mario Bros. never gets old, here’s a banjo cover version by the trio Foggy Mountain Spaceship. After bringing their twangy styling to World 1-1, they head down the warp pipe for a banjo version of the Underworld theme. But it’s not all bluegrass here, and things head down a psychedelic prog-rock path by the end.

The Dark Knight takes on the Dark Lord of the Sith in a quest to release his Justice League teammate from an Imperial prison cell. Batinthesun’s live-action fan film pulls out all the stops as Batman dons a lightsaber and other Wayne Enterprises gadgets on a quest to take down Darth Vader.

The How Ridiculous guys returned to the Utah Olympic Park to see what else they could roll down the snow-free ski jump. After an attempt to score some basketball hoops and a bottom-of-the-hill round of dodgeball, they played a little mini golf – first with individual putts, then with a cascade of 2000 balls.

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.

UK band Deco took The Verve’s 1997 hit Bitter Sweet Symphony and imagined what it might have sounded like if it came out a decade earlier. Their version replaces the violins with a synth-pop sound inspired by bands like The Human League, OMD, and Pet Shop Boys. Also, their Soft Cell-ized take on Smells Like Teen Spirit is so wrong, it’s right.

If we’ve learned one thing from Buttered Side Down’s first-person videos, it’s that inanimate objects can never be trusted to remain that way. After breaking a ceramic bowl, our POV protagonist decides to break out the potter’s wheel and attempts to throw a replacement. But his clay creation has no desire to be filled with milk and cereal.

If we had to pick our favorite living actor, Sam Rockwell is definitely in the running. His performances in films like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Green Mile, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind are all incredible and all so different. GQ sat down with the actor to learn about his inspirations and how he gets inside his characters.

It’s time to put on your best polyester suit and hit the dance floor. Van Halen meets The Miracles in this fantastic disco-rock mashup by Bill McClintock. Come for the music, stay for the outfits.

Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal because they spread diseases like malaria and dengue. Scientists have developed a fascinating way to reduce this threat – infecting mosquitoes with Wolbachia, a bacteria that limits mosquitoes’ ability to carry other diseases. To jumpstart the process, they’re releasing millions of infected bugs. AsapSCIENCE explains.

The Euthanasia Coaster is an insane hypothetical roller coaster designed to kill its passengers. Until now, it’s only existed as a design on paper and a non-working model. Thanks to Coaster Obsessed, we now have a working version of the killer coaster, made out of K’Nex building kits. It’s the last thrill ride its pint-size passengers will ever take.

Imagine, for a moment, that it was possible to pitch a baseball at 90% of the speed of light. Not only would you easily eliminate the batter, but there would be other major consequences according to this hypothetical physics exploration by the mighty Randall Munroe of xkcd. Weapons makers, don’t get any funny ideas.

The typical cordless drill operates on battery electric power. But in the hands of builder TimWelds, this everyday tool runs on nitromethane, methanol, and oil. Tim took one of Toyan’s working miniature V8 engines and retrofitted it to drive drill bits. The result is the loudest and most satisfying power drill we’ve seen.

An ordinary spray paint can only produce a single color. Ukrainian street artist Vitaly Tesh invented a spray can that can output numerous colors. After an earlier effort to build the system, his updated Graffiti Color Mixer 2.0 produces smooth transitions between four source colors. His custom-built remote control lets him switch colors on the fly.

Mathematician Henry Segerman is back with another fascinating mechanism – a six-axis rack. It’s built with a dozen gears and sticks that look like long, green crinkle fries. The combination of parts locks the structure together, and moving any stick makes all of the others move. Like Henry’s other designs, you can download the 3D printer files Printables.

We recently checked out a supersized LEGO minifig that a maker created with a 3D printer. Not to be outdone, pastry artist Amaury Guichon has gone even bigger – only his giant minifig is made out of chocolate, making it substantially more edible. Amaury’s 4-foot-tall mini-chef showpiece sits alongside a huge chocolate LEGO brick.

We’re lovestruck by Patator’s animated music video for French trip-hop group Chinese Man’s poetic track Too Late. The stop-motion clip drops us into a magical world where horses breakdance and scratch records and storied lives play out on a human-sized hamster wheel.

This CG video from InfoGeek illustrates the history of NYC from 1524 through 2023. The story unfolds through the evolution of its man-made structures, accompanied by the year and approximate population count. It was sad to see the Twin Towers vanish in 2001, and it failed to mention the indigenous population prior to the arrival of Europeans.