Awesome Black And White

What you’re looking at isn’t a video effect. Artist Joshua Vides masterfully hand painted these cars atop matte vinyl wraps to look like the black and white artwork from comic books. The three fully-drivable cars and their backdrop are part of Joshua’s solo show, Check Engine Light, recently displayed in LA and heading to NYC.

George Lucas got his inspiration for Star Wars from a variety of sources, among them, vintage serials like Flash Gordon. Abandoned Films used generative AI to imagine what a Star Wars movie might have looked like had it been created 40 years earlier. The ship design and voiceover are spot-on, but the creepy AI-generated characters are nightmare fuel.

Filmmaker James Parris pokes fun at those 1950s and 1960s educational films with an etiquette lesson on how to properly use a sidewalk so you don’t bump into people walking in the opposite direction. But what do you do if there are three or more people coming at you, James?

A faction of the computer graphic Demoscene prides itself on creating visuals with the least code possible. Programmer Alcatraz turned up at the Revision 2024 demo party with this surreal scene – a post-apocalyptic black-and-white city created with just 256 bytes of Gopher code running on DOS. Revision posted some competing 256-byte demos here.

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.

Here’s a different take on Disney’s Steamboat Willie now that it’s in the public domain. d o g took Ub Iwerks’ 1928 classic cartoon and converted it into retro pixel art animation. You can play the video now, or, of you’re feeling more ambitions, load up the DOSbox emulator and load this XDV file into XDC Play.

Do you like challenging jigsaw puzzles? This detailed monochrome image of gears should keep you busy for a while. The 1000-piece puzzle has precision-cut curved pieces that radiate out from its center. Unlike other circular puzzles we’ve seen, this one has no color coding or lettering on the back to ensure it remains difficult.

Fumi Games’ FPS combines the black-and-white, rubber hose animation style of 1930s cartoons with high-intensity action. Think Cuphead meets Serious Sam. It doesn’t drop until 2025, but this early gameplay footage is promising. Add it to your Steam wishlist today. In case you’re wondering, Mickey’s Steamboat Willie look loses copyright protection in 2024.

Daniel Zvereff’s award-winning animated short film follows a few moments in the life of a lonely old man. As the widowed watchmaker finds himself caught in a loop of his everyday life, he eventually finds peace in the memories of his life.

Tattoo artist Allan Graves created this awesome series of zines celebrating horror illustrations and advertising from the 1970s and 1980s. Each issue has 100 pages packed with gruesome and graphic imagery that is definitely not for kids. Monsterama #4 hits 8.30.2023, and you can grab the first three issues here.

Alfred Hitchcock loved to inject himself into scenes in his movies. In this cleverly edited black-and-white short film from Fabrice Mathieu, he made it look like the Master of Suspense was the one true killer in his films, making Hitch’s cameos much more ominous.

Filmmaker Conner Griffith scanned more than 1400 vintage engravings to create this meditative short film. It tells a series of abstract stories by isolating objects into individual frames. Conner’s effective sound design helps drive it along. The entire library of public domain images is available for download here.

Nike offers a fresh take on its classic 1990s b-ball shoe, with a graphical treatment that looks like a rippling pool of monochrome liquid. Made from molded polyurethane for structure with an Air Zoom unit for responsive cushioning on the court. Drops 3.31.23 at 9am ET.

Filmmaker Jennie Williams takes us to the Northern reaches of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, to look at a New Year tradition of the Nunatsiavut, the region’s Inuit people. During the festival, locals emerge from the sea in tattered clothes and scary masks to bring gifts to the good children and chase down the bad kids.

Diatomic studio created and directed this compelling black-and-white short film which uses basic geometric shapes to create hypnotic visuals. By combining, rotating, moving, and scaling the individual objects, hypnotic patterns come to life. Watch it once from a distance, then watch it again, focusing on an specific point.

This fantastic short film by Fabrice Mathieu tells the tale of a shadow who finds himself frustrated with the actions of his wearer and decides to do something about it. Told using black-and-white footage from more than 60 films, the story unfolds much like a classic film noir, with plenty of action and intrigue.