Awesome Ocean

The USS Brickster sets sail into the roughest seas a minifig has ever seen. Canvas 23 Studios took a model of the LEGO City Ocean Exploration Ship, fitted it with a GoPro Hero 10 camera, and dropped it into the ocean to see how it and a smaller LEGO craft would withstand the surf.

Artist Ross McSweeney created this beautiful work of moving sculpture, which uses a series of cams to create a wave-like action. A tiny boat rocks back and forth as a wooden ocean moves below, and fish dive in and out of the waves. We also love his caterpillar marble machine.

Motion designer VISUALDON created this hypnotic and soothing video of a NASA astronaut floating in an ocean that looks like a liquid manifestation of space. Whenever we see a video this long, all we can think of is how long it took for YouTube to encode it.

LEGO Certified Professional Jumpei Mitsui created a 3D interpretation of the wave depicted in Hokusai’s iconic Ukiyo-e image The Great Wave off Kanagawa. The brick-built version shows off some really neat LEGO tricks, especially with the foamy wave peaks. The 50,000-piece model is on display at the Hankyu Brick Museum.

Swiss-Danish watchmaker Linde Werdelin teamed up with James Thompson of Black Badger to create this stunning limited-edition automatic dive watch. It features a lightweight aerospace-grade ALW case, and a multi-layer glowing blue dial that gets more saturated as your environment gets darker. It’s waterproof to 300 meters.

Seán Doran combined images captured by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti from the ESRSU image archive to take us on a serene flight above the Southeast corner of North America, passing over Florida, the Bahamas and Cuba for a view of their blue-green waters. Want more? Watch Heaven: The Inner Sound of Outer Space.

After maturing eight years in Kentucky, Jefferson’s Ocean bourbon is aged another 5-10 months at sea on an Ocearch shark-tagging ship, crossing the equator four times, and visiting ports on five continents. Sounds gimmicky, but the salt air, temperature shifts, and the rocking of the ship is your passport to complex flavors.

Photographer Chris Bryan’s short film is comprised entirely of awe-inspiring footage of ocean waves, captured in slow motion using a Phantom Flex 4K camera with Leica Summilux lenses, and custom underwater housings. The level of detail, contrast, and vibrancy of the colors is truly something to behold.

Seaman JeffHK’s latest video is comprised of about 80,000 photos taken in the span of 30 days aboard the container ship where he works. Outside of going to space, sailing the oceans might be the best way to internalize how small we are in the grand scheme of things.

An up-close look at a rig built for the stop-motion film Two Balloons. The animators used an intricate network of strings and push rods to move dozens of shiny plastic layers to create the undulating waves of an ocean. The trailer for the film looks amazing.