Awesome Videos

Disney Research created this surreal short film which serves as a showcase for experimental digital production techniques, playing with HDR tone mapping, high frame rates, and pixel-level time-bending along the way. 24p version here.

The esteemed game player and critic TotalBiscuit singles out the year’s best games and calls out a couple of the industry’s black sheep. A polished and straightforward retrospective and recommendation of the year’s video games.

Nike congratulates its Nike+ users while challenging them to do better next year with this animated commercial made by McBess. If you use Nike+, you can watch a personalized version of the video by logging in here.

Industrial Light & Magic shares a few of the 900 or so visual effects shots that it made for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It worked mainly on the climactic scenes, including creating digital versions of Black Widow and Falcon.

Damp Design takes us on a tour of Norway like you’ve never seen it before, with all of the people, boats, cars and vacationers looking like tiny ants. Sure, tilt-shift photography is so 2012, but it’s really well executed here.

Musician Andrew Huang performs six of the biggest pop hits of 2014 using a wide variety of everyday household objects (and his hatchback) as his musical instruments. Andrew’s lead vocals and harmonies ain’t bad either.

“Perhaps these things could explain why they built them. And perhaps they could explain… everything.” Colin West McDonald’s short film is based on Paul Hornschemeier’s eponymous comic strip from the Project: Telstar anthology.

Focus Features shares the final scene of The Boxtrolls, in which Richard Ayoade and Nick Frost’s characters unknowingly break the fourth wall, reminding us that stop-motion animation is incredibly tedious.

YouTube’s gangsta maker Thugify spotted this unholy trinity in one of Whatever’s pranks. There’s the spurned trickster, the guy desperately in need of a break, and of course the way, the truth and the light. Oh the light.

Casey Abrams cranks out snappy vocals, bass and melodica for ths Postmodern Jukebox retro jazz version of Fountains of Wayne’s pop hit Stacy’s Mom. They should cover the entire Welcome Interstate Managers album in this style.

Alden Gleason shot this captivating video of the assembly line at Julie’s Organic Ice Cream. We dare you to watch the whole thing without running to your freezer to see if you have any ice cream bars. That chocolate bath looks so good.

On April 1, 1957, BBC news show Panorama talked about a town of spaghetti farmers in Switzerland. Since the dish wasn’t famous in the UK at the time, the joke fooled millions of viewers, including a BBC boss.

Watchfinder & Co.’s Head Watchmaker Tony Williams will slowly but surely unhinge your lower jaw from your skull as he takes apart a Rolex Submariner. Then – get this – he successfully puts it back together. Tony, you da real MVP.

(NSFW: Language) YouTuber leftyfl1p was playing Destiny when the game glitched out, leading to this funny sequence of events. Leftyfl1p saw a story there and decided to weave the tale of Billy the Thrall.

(NSFW: Language) The guy behind the camera is the David Attenborough of suburbs. Watch as he documents a real life Dennis the Menace running wild in a dollar store, until finally someone gets fed up enough to deal with the kid. Also, here.

Monty Python’s John Cleese sums up in about a minute exactly why those without a particular capacity are completely incapable of judging whether or not they are capable of that very thing. Watch the complete interview here.

(NSFW: Language) “I think he’s gonna make it – oh he didn’t oh oh oh” That sums up FailArmy’s compilation of this year’s mishaps. There are both lame and extreme entries here, but the kid on the Slingshot at 15:38 made it worth it for us.

UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner doesn’t believe that humans evolved – or will progress further – through “survival of the fittest” schemes. On the contrary, it appears our bodies are built for cooperation and compassion.

If you’ve ever been on a road trip, you know just how nasty service station restrooms can be. But this one Shell station bucks the stereotype and has one of the most surprisingly nice bathrooms you’ve ever seen. Now you just need to find it.

John Oliver’s hilarious HBO news show may be on hiatus, but that doesn’t mean he can’t drop the occasional YouTube clip. Here, he teaches us why New Year’s Eve is the lamest of all of the holidays, and how to get out of participating.

…because it’s delicious, that’s why. Thankfully, Minute Earth also answers what makes food such as beer, bread and cheese possible: harmless bacteria and fungi that convert food into their awesome versions.

(NSFW: Language) NewsBeFunny presents the best of the worst that news networks had to offer this year. There’s a ton of cringe-inducing stuff in here: slips of the tongue, slips on the ice, stupid news and stupid anchors.

Animation Domination HD sums up 2014 with a series of gifs made by different artists, highlighting news such as the infamous Sochi olympics, Solange Knowle’s elevator fight with Jay-Z, the Ebola outbreak and the Sony hack.