Awesome Videos

There are lots of awful things that happen in the wasteland of Fallout, but it’s the gigantic mutant cockroaches that freak us out the most. With some sponsorship bucks from Prime Video, The Hacksmith set out to create a life-size robotic Radroach. Or five. Two of the remote-controlled creepy crawlers roll on wheels, and they’re all filled with nasty green goo.

Like most longstanding structures, the New York City Subway is an urban Ship of Theseus, gradually expanded and reshaped over the last 120 years. This evolution inevitably led to several once coveted corridors and tunnels being rendered obsolete. It’s History takes us through some of these forgotten paths and the stories behind them.

In Fallout, Walton Goggins portrays actor Cooper Howard and his post-apocalyptic incarnation, The Ghoul. This behind-the-scenes video shows the time and effort that goes into applying the prosthetics and makeup to bring his creepy and rogueish character to life, thanks to SFX makeup artist Jake Garber. P.S. Walton’s nose gets removed with CGI.

Robotics company Boston Dynamics just bid farewell to its oddly lovable ATLAS robot, only to reveal a new, more capable version of their humanoid droid. The new ATLAS can stand itself up from lying down and spin its arms, legs, and head around like some possessed demon. It’s awe-inspiring tech but also nightmare fuel.

Mind The Map discusses the fake bus stops outside several senior homes in Germany. Supposedly, they have prevented patients with dementia from wandering off and getting lost should they happen to escape. It seems like a simple ruse, but the longer we think about it, the more we are met by a novel’s worth of metaphors and meanings.

We’ve seen time and time again that there are other ways to move around besides ordinary wheels. LEGO builder Dr. Engine put together vehicles that run on seven kinds of wheels to see how they performed against various obstacles, including a pile of tires, a staircase, and a hill covered with wood chips. It ends with a tug-of-war between the vehicles.

A Thousand Suns is a series of science fiction short films created by BlackMilk Studio and Macgregor, sci-fi fanatics tired of the remake and sequel cycle in mainstream media. Each short is under 5 minutes long, but they all have that imaginative spark and are wonderfully shot. The first six episodes are available at the bottom of this post or on YouTube.

Randall Munroe and Henry Reich’s What If? attempts to answer the hypothetical question of what might happen if every living human stood close together, jumped off of the ground, and landed at the same exact time. While the answer to that question is less exciting than you might think, there would be plenty of unintended consequences of such an event.

This way-too-short film from Yeti Pictures and director Tony Zagoraios features a series of miniature vignettes inspired by classic movie scenes, including The Exorcist, King Kong, Jurassic Park, and more. The animation and modeling team did a great job making it look like it was filmed with models and action figures, but it’s all CGI.

There’s a whole sub-genre of YouTube videos featuring various objects being jammed into industrial shredders. Atomic Marvel went to the extreme and stuck the entire sun into a shredder to see what would happen. We’re surprised it didn’t melt the machine as soon as it hit the gears with its 10,000-degree surface temperature.

It’s hard enough to protect a soccer goal from a single kicker, so what happens to the goalie when a hundred balls are kicked their way? The gang from How Ridiculous tested this and other ideas where the visiting team has way more players than the home team. Every game basically turns into dodgeball on steroids.

Engineer James Bruton adds to his collection of unusual vehicles with the creation of a single-seater that rolls on four 3D-printed mechanum wheels. The not-quite-a-bike uses motors and an inertial measurement unit to remain balanced. By changing the speed and direction of each wheel, it can move forward, backward, sideways, and spin around on a dime. Its agility is quite impressive.

Generative AI can be used for good or evil. In the case of Adobe Premiere Pro, we’re excited about the potential of its AI tools to improve video editing workflows with the ability to add or remove objects with just a couple of clicks and extend scenes if they don’t fit your timeline. They also are testing integration with models like Sora AI to generate entire scenes.

Electric pencil sharpeners are plenty fast. But say you have 100 pencils to sharpen. Shaving a second or two off of each pencil can add up. Current Concept wanted to see how quickly a pencil could be sharpened by rigging up an off-the-shelf sharpener to various power tools. That exposed sharpener mechanism looks terrifying once it gets up to speed.

In this animated short film by Job, Joris & Marieke, a narcissistic social media influencer suddenly becomes invisible and loses the one thing he values more than anything – the ability to garner attention based on his appearance. It’s a funny but sad look of the shallow nature of social media. In Dutch with English subtitles.

A good knife can be a useful self-defense tool. But if you really want to ward off enemies, adding fire to the equation couldn’t hurt. Actually, getting stabbed by a flaming knife would hurt a lot. Integza shows how he made a knife that shoots flames from tiny holes in a porous metal blade. He theorizes that the tech could be used to improve jet engine efficiency.

After seeing the airplane-like shape of Japan’s high-speed bullet trains, aerospace engineer Peter Sripol thought it would be fun to build a model airplane based on the design. It took a lot of experimentation with wing placement, but he eventually got his prototype to fly. Will the scaled-up model stay airborne or will it derail mid-flight?

Long before seatbelts, airbags, and anti-lock brakes, there were plenty of well-intentioned but ill-conceived automotive safety devices. With big trucks and SUVs causing greater concerns about pedestrian safety, I Did a Thing dusted off one such invention – the Pedestrian Catcher – and tested it to see how effective it could be.

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.

We’ve seen artists make chains out of wood, chalk, and even a carrot. In this video from Michigan Rocks, he shows how he took a rock and made a short length of chain from it. He cut the stone into a cross-shaped block, refined it into three main sections, and then drilled and cut away the pieces using rotary tools. It looked like a lot of work – especially the polishing.

Seven years after Ryan Gosling’s character struggled to comprehend the use of the Papyrus font in Avatar, the troubled graphic designer thought he had finally moved on. Then, in an instant, he was forced to confront his demons again after seeing the logo for the sequel. At least they didn’t use Comic Sans.

Whether you’re a snail or a gazelle, you must move around to survive in this world. In the latest comparison video from RED SIDE, they animated the vast differences in the movements of all kinds of animals, from ants to elephants and everything in between. Watch it in 4K if you’ve got the bandwidth, and find out if a human can outrun a hippo.

Movies and TV shows about space travel usually have a big budget for visual effects. Not so with this short film by Caroline Klidonas, who shot an entire short film about a doomed space mission without leaving her apartment. It’s the low-budget, low-gravity effects and Caroline’s commitment to the performance that really sell it. (Thanks, Rob!)