When The Slow Mo Guys and How Ridiculous got together, they didn’t just crush some heads. After all, if you’ve got a cannon that fires bowling balls at 500 MPH, you want to destroy all the things. With the help of the cannon’s maker, BealsScience, they tested the strength of bulletproof glass and polycarbonate along with a fiberglass-lined safety door.
Gav and Dan of The Slow Mo Guys met up with Brett and Scott from How Ridiculous to see what kind of damage a bowling ball cannon can do. Their subject: ballistic gel heads filled with fake skulls. For something a little less gruesome, enjoy some bowling balls vs. trampolines.
If you’ve ever handled gold leaf, you know how fragile the thin metal sheets are. The Slow Mo Guys used this to their advantage by placing gold leaf inside a jar, removing all the air, and then letting air back in to make it shatter into tiny particles. Naturally, they captured the explosive decompression with a high-speed camera at 80,000 fps.
Medical professionals use a special power saw to cut through casts when it’s time to remove them. While the high-speed saw blade slices effortlessly through a hardened cast, it does nothing to your body if it makes contact with your skin. Steve Mould investigates the physics that allows this ingenious device to work without causing bodily harm.
More than a decade ago, a grainy black-and-white video turned up of a bullet hitting steel at 1 million FPS. The Slow-Mo Guys were inspired to replicate the experiment using a modern Phantom TMX 7510 camera. While Gav and Dan’s footage is “only” 800,000 FPS, they did capture full-color shots at 400,000 FPS. The explosions looks like tiny fireworks.
Destin from Smarter Every Day and his pals got together for an unusual competition. The goal? Evaluate the power and durability of eight kinds of weed eater lines as they whack into each other at full speed. The battle took place in front of a high-speed camera to see exactly what happened in slow-motion.
Popcorn: there aren’t any other foods we can think of which must explode to be enjoyed. This high-speed footage from The Slow Mo Guys is almost as tasty as a bucket of the buttery stuff is. They used a dangerous-looking popcorn pressure cooker to get a bunch of kernels to pop simultaneously, then fired up some puffed rice.
If you set off an explosion next to a bullet, would the shockwaves affect its path? That’s the question that The Slow Mo Guys and the Colorado School of Mines sought to answer in this fascinating experiment. It took several tries to get the timing right between the explosion and the passing bullet, but it gave them an excuse for more explosions.
For the art installation, Colapso in Bilbao, Spain, SpY created this simple yet effective display. Sitting inside a cube, a 10-meter balloon gradually inflated over four days. When the balloon burst, it revealed it was filled with colored smoke. The cloud lingered for only a few seconds but produced the perfect red sphere captured in this slow-motion video.
Inspired by Smarter Every Day’s slow-motion tattoo video, The Slow Mo Guys wanted to get an even more detailed view of what’s going on when a tattoo gun lays down its ink. With the help of their Laowa probe lenses, they captured some incredible macro footage of ink being injected into a sliver of ballistic gel, which they used as an analog for human flesh.
Hitting molten metal with a bat seems like a bad idea. But The Slow Mo Guys are happy to take that risk if it entertains viewers. After melting some nails into a crucible, they tossed the liquid steel into the air, whacked it with a cricket bat, and captured the fiery spectacle at 10,000 FPS. Watch in 4K if you can.
The guys from How Ridiculous are always thinking of new ways to break stuff. Their latest method: drop stuff from a 150-foot tall tower and a crane onto sharpened metal spikes. After a few misses, they managed to poke holes in a steel and concrete safe and a junkyard convertible.
Gav and Dan, aka The Slow Mo Guys, wanted to see how G-forces affect a human face. Since they didn’t have a fighter jet or a centrifuge lying around, they did the next best thing. Dan jumped on a trampoline while holding a pricey high-speed camera. The expressions on Dan’s face in mid-flight are priceless.
The guys from Australia’s How Ridiculous have made their careers out of destroying stuff. They certainly don’t disappoint in this video, as they test how many panes of glass are needed to variousty of objects, including a tomato, a roll of toilet paper, a Rubik’s Cube, and a throwing axe. The slow-motion footage is pretty epic.
The Slow Mo Guys were joined by Scott from Kentucky Ballistics to test how destructive a .577 Tyrannosaur rifle cartridge is by firing it at close range into thick blocks of ballistic gel. It’s amazing (and terrifying) to see how the bullets deform the gel and the destructive forces at work. No wonder they say these things can stop an elephant.
Springtails are unusual hexapods that have a unique way of escaping danger. In this fascinating nature video from KQED’s Deep Look, they get up close and personal with these little guys to capture their acrobatic movements in slow motion and explain how they spring into the air and land on their feet.
You might think magnets aren’t particularly scary. But once you get a look at the attractive forces between two strong neodymium magnets, you’ll have a new respect for magnetic fields. The Slow Mo Guys show us how energetic they can be, capturing magnetic collisions at up to 187,500 FPS. You definitely wouldn’t want your hand in between those.
Inspired by a pair of Civil War-era bullets that collided and fused together, Destin from Smarter Every Day wanted to see if he could replicate the unlikely situation on camera. It took an impressive amount of planning and engineering to set up the shot and perform the experiment in a safe and precise way.
Cannons are generally designed to fire iron cannonballs. Ballistic High-Speed shows us there’s no good reason they can’t fire bowling balls too. In this satisfying slow-motion video, you’ll see what happens when a bowling ball meets various objects at speeds over 300 feet per second. You definitely would not want to be on the business end of this thing.
It’s a June tradition for The Slow Mo Guys to perform stupid antics with a giant water balloon. This time, Dan dove face-first into the thing as Gav captured slow-motion footage of his crash landings. Not only did he shoot from the outside of the balloon, but he also got the camera’s skinny probe lens inside of it for some shots.
The guys from How Ridiculous, aka the Destroy Things for the Fun of It Channel, spun up their spinning katana machine for another go. This time they turned its destructive blades loose on everything from a bowling ball to an iPad to a crateful of rubber duckies. The 6000 fps slow-motion footage provides the best look at the carnage.
Ammunition blanks are often used in stunt work and military practice exercises. While they don’t fire the same metal projectile as a regular bullet, they can cause serious damage at close range. The Slow Mo Guys shot footage of blanks being fired at various objects, revealing incredible details at speeds up to 82,000 fps.
Belgian filmmaker Gilles Havet sets our screens on fire by capturing an epic stage performance inspired by Norse mythology. The professional fire artists of Pyronix Production portray fire-wielding warriors in a eye-popping nighttime ballet of flame.