Videos

Philips Fixables

This is such a great idea - Philips are offering the files so people can 3D print replacement parts as needed. This feels like the future I actually want.

Cabel Sasser, Panic - XOXO Festival (2024)

I must have sent this privately to at least a dozen people but I realise I’ve never actually posted this on my own website. So I’ll say the same thing I did in all of those private messages: please, if you haven’t seen it already, take 19 minutes out of your day to watch this. I guarantee your day will be improved by this talk. I mean, yes it’s a story about a silly piece of McDonalds art but it’s also about value and legacy and wanting to be seen, and every time I watch it, it leaves me absolutely sobbing.

Best Movie Soundtrack Draft LIVE with Yasi Salek, Rob Harvilla, Sean Fennessey, and Chris Ryan - YouTube

Rob Harvilla and Yasi Salek are my favourite music podcasters and Chris Ryan and Sean Fennessy are my favourite movie podcasters. So this special live episode was a delight.

Ed Zitron - Why Are All Tech Products Now Shit? - YouTube

In my house, we’ve started singing “everything is broken all of the time” instead of “little bit of everything all of the time” line from Bo Burnham’s “Welcome to the Internet”. We do it every time we encounter a problem with our tech (“Hey Siri what’s 5 times 3?” “I found some web results, I can send them to your phone” - great stuff, thanks Siri).

So Ed Zitron’s recent Web Summit talk about why all tech is so terrible now really resonated with me (tl;dr it’s because of greed). It’s great to see someone else so passionate and angry about it.

Shrek ASMR | (Full-Length Movie Remake) - YouTube

ASMR isn’t really my thing but the amount of work that must have gone into this is really staggering.

The Scratch - Pull Your Jocks Up - YouTube

This is currently on hard rotation in my house.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

I let out the biggest FUCK YES when I found out the first trailer for Furiosa just dropped. And immediately out came all the haters to say “it looks too CGI – I loved the practical effects of Fury Road”.

Ah yes, Fury Road, the film that didn’t have any CGI at all.

One thing I noticed while looking over the old trailers for FR was this shot from the Comic-Con trailer (released July 2014)

Compare this with the same shot from the final trailer (released December 2014)

Yep, no CGI at all.

Double Fine PsychOdyssey

Wait, shit, speaking about Tim Schafer, I should also throw some love at Double Fine’s PsychOdyssey which was released earlier this year! It’s an epic warts-and-all, 6 year long behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of Psychonauts 2. The BTS stuff we usually get for most games is part of the promotion of the game, and the PR people would never allow anything bad to be shown. PsychOdyssey, on the other hand, shows a company at its best and at its worst and it’s absolutely insane to me that a company would allow itself to be so candid. By the end, I was sobbing. Sobbing.

Honestly, even if you’re not into gamedev, this is worth your time, just because I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like it again.

Why Everything You Buy Is Worse Now

Or, if you don’t like Vox’s video essays, you can check out the article that inspired it.

tl;dw: companies cheap out on products because the cost of everything (labour, materials) has risen and as consumers we probably wouldn’t pay a fair market price.

Riding Japans 7 Star Luxury Sleeper Train Seven Stars in Kyushu

Solo Solo Travel is one of my favourite YouTube channels to watch before bedtime. It’s a type of ASMR, I guess, like a soothing digestif to help me wind down for sleep – mostly-wordless videos of someone traveling around Japan on various forms of transport. The thing I love most about the videos are the captions the filmmaker has added to describe what they’re doing/seeing. This person is an underrated comedy genius. Perfect timing, perfect phrasing. My wife and I watched this one the other night, where the person is traveling around one of Japan’s islands on one of the most exclusive trains in the world (pretty niche content!) and belly-laughing our way through the entire thing.

Everyone Everywhere Needs Waymond Wang (and Ke Huy Quan)

This is a wonderful essay about Everything Everywhere All At Once’s portrayal of masculinity. I hadn’t consciously picked up on Waymond’s lack of a character arc, but it makes so much sense.

Also EEAAO (as no-one is calling it) was unexpectedly one of the best films I’ve seen so far this year. If you’ve been putting off watching it, please do check it out.

Did People Used to Look Older?

I was watching Thief the other night and couldn’t get over how James Caan (RIP to a real one) was only 41 in that film but looked so much older. This is a great explanation of why that is.

Alternate Realities

2,400 CG artists were all given the same basic animation and this is the 100 best renders. They’re all great, but some of them are jaw-dropping.

Mmhmm

I have no doubt this will eventually get sherlocked because it’s such a great idea: use your video’s virtual background for actually useful stuff, like presenting slides, so that the audience don’t have to choose if they want to see the presenter or the slides.

2019 Movie Trailer Mashup

While we wait for David Ehrlich’s video of his best films of 2019 (which are still the high water mark for this kind of thing - 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012), Sleepy Skunk has put together a pretty great mashup of some of the trailers from the year.

I’ve probably seen maybe a quarter of the films in this video, and of the one’s I’ve seen, not all of them were particularly great (I wasn’t, for example, a fan of Midsommar. In fact, I think Ari Aster might be a complete charlatan), but in the context of this mashup, they all looked amazing. Which made me think maybe Errol Morris was right when he said

I believe that there are no good movies, no good books, no good music compositions just great scenes, great passages, great moments.

(Except for Mad Max: Fury Road. That is a perfect movie.)

Inside the Tiny Bedroom Where Finneas and Billie Eilish Are Redefining Pop Music

Over the summer, I watched the Showtime documentary series Shangri-La, which is all about Rick Rubin and creativity and inspiration and his Malibu studio, which is treated like some holy place by everyone in the documentary. For example, when they are between artists, Rubin has his interns repaint the studio floors - I dunno, to make it feel like some blank page for the next artist that’s going to use it?

By contrast, Billy Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? was produced in her childhood home, by her brother, using prosumer-level equipment. And, for my money, it was one of the best-produced albums of 2019.

This video is a really great companion piece to Shangri-La - both emphasise how important the space is to the creative process, but they approach the topic from entirely different ends of the spectrum.

How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content

Okay look, this video kind of goes a little “maybe the real books we read were the friends we made along the way” at the end, but it’s got a wonderful (if slightly obvious/well-trod) set of central messages: make time for more reading and you’ll read more; there’s no “canon”, just read widely; enjoy it.

But the thing that really blew my mind was how these enormous, gorgeous book stores are thriving in the 21st Century. Ateneo Gran Splendid was only opened in the year 2000. And the thing I noticed was how they aren’t just places to buy books - they have cafes and bars and patisseries to help you enjoy your time in the space, not just get in and get out as fast as you can.

How Animators Created the Spider-Verse

There are so many great things in this video. My favourite is the tiny detail about how the characters are animated on every second frame (animated on 2s), and how they used this in the forest scene where Miles and Peter are swinging through the trees but they’re both animated on different 2s to indicate how their personalities aren’t in sync yet.

Titanic in Unreal 4

We visited the Titanic museum in Belfast last year and it was a great museum but honestly, this connected with me on a much deeper level. There’s a good reason the narrator keeps saying “just imagine”.

Because just imagine.

The Night Watch

This is some pretty cool news - the Rijiksmuseum in Amsterdam will be livestreaming their restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.

If you don’t know much about this painting then you can do a lot worst than checking out Peter Greenaway’s film Night Watching, which is a weirdly mesmerizing primer on the history behind the painting, told as if it was a Rembrandt painting itself.

The end of Predator but with the Grange Hill theme

I spent way too long on this dumb joke.

Moonlight

There are two times when it’s appropriate to use Clair de Lune: over amazing high-resolution videos of sunrise on the moon, and the ending of Ocean’s Eleven.

That’s it.

Ice Cube Celebrates The Eames

RetroAhoy: The Secret of Monkey Island

This is very good, if 70-minute documentaries about Monkey Island are your kind of thing.

(They are very much my kind of thing.)

Can These Robots Build an Ikea Chair?

Spoiler: yes they can.

(My favourite part was the jiggle to get the dowel into place.)

See also: Hikea, where people take LSD and try to assemble Ikea furniture.

This City's Got Love

Not kidding, this video made me so homesick, my heart actually hurt.

The Apprehension Engine

The Apprehension Engine from Mark Korven on Vimeo.

The composer of The VVitch designed an analogue instrument designed to create disturbing sounds. And I’m so jealous - this looks like so much fun. More about the background of the instrument.

Binging with Babish: Kevin's Famous Chili from The Office

Andrew Rea’s Binging With Babish is my new obsession. He’s a filmmaker and amateur chef who deadpans his way through recreating dishes from films and TV. Like, I was tempted to share the video where he made the “Moistmaker” Thanksgiving leftovers sandwich from Friends, where he went out and cooked an entire 20lb turkey just for ONE sandwich. Instead, I’m highlighting the video where he recreates Kevin’s chili from The Office and serves it authentically: on a sheet of cheap office carpet.

David Ehrlich's 25 best films of 2016

THE 25 BEST FILMS OF 2016 from david ehrlich on Vimeo.

This is SO good. A great list, in a really great video.

SO good.

Tom Waits for No One

In 1979, Tom Waits made a music video for “The One That Got Away”. 5,000 rotoscoped frames of animation. Here’s one of the live-action videos they used to make the animation, proving that in the 70s, Tom Waits was as close to a horny cat from a Looney Tunes cartoon as any human would be.

BMW Films: The Escape

In 2001, BMW hired a bunch of amazing directors like John Frankenheimer and Tony Scott to create some short films for them. Branded content. The two common threads in each film were the make of car (obviously) and Clive Owen as “The Driver”

Fifteen years later, we’ve got a new one. This time it’s been directed by District 9’s Neill Blomkamp and starring Dakota Fanning and Jon Bernthal.

In case you missed it, here’s Tony Scott’s one from the original series, starring Gary Oldman as the Devil. It’s mid-career Tony Scott in all his most bonkers.

Ten Bullets

I have a bit of an obsession with Casey Neistat. Or rather, I’m obssessed with Casey Neistat’s process. He’s messy but organised, chaotic but meticulous. Watching this video made in 2010 about the 10 rules for Tom Sachs’ studio (Casey Neistat was one of Tom Sachs’ studio assistant), you can really see where he got a lot of his ideas.

Trailer for Rogue One

No more teaser trailers or trailer teases, this is the real thing. And here’s my HOT TAKE, basically my thoughts as they happened watching the trailer:

Forrest Whitaker doing a weird breathy accent is super distracting. Is that supposed to be a British accent?
Oh God, what if they try to make Ben Mendelsohn do a British accent?
This looks every inch a Gareth Edwards film.
It looks like they’re trying to set up K-2SO as the comic relief. If those are the best laughs they could pick out for the trailer, oh dear.
Felicity Jones seems like she’s stuck in the Tomb Raider school of action acting.

Overall, I’m cautiously optimistic about this one. It looks great, really nailing the 70s aesthetic with a cinéma vérité feel. But Edwards’ last film, Godzilla, was let down by its characters and nothing in this trailer suggests things have improved.

Write a tune. Fuckin' start with that

I’ve said it before, but Noel Gallagher gives the best interviews.

A Brief History of John Baldessari

Four little words that guarantee I’ll drop whatever I’m doing to make time for: “narrated by Tom Waits”.

John Baldessari was Tumblr before the internet was ever a thing, and this is a terrific introduction.

Drop whatever you’re doing and make time for this.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Writing

This is so good. And I feel like a lot of what Ta-Nehisi Coates says in this video is applicable to any sort of creative work.

Aaron Draplin on Logo Design

Old one, but still fantastic. Always amazing to see the process of someone who is just great at their job.

John Waters RISD Commencement Speech

The Unofficial Lord Mayor of Ballymun

A couple of weeks ago, Jamie Harrington appeared on Humans of Dublin talking about how he helped save a suicidal man by just asking if he was okay.

I was just on my way to the American sweet shop to buy some Gatorade, when I saw this guy in his 30s sitting on the ledge of the bridge. I just thought, “wow…” I stopped and asked him if he was okay, but I knew from the look in his eyes he wasn’t, and he didn’t say anything either, but I saw tears coming from his eyes. I pleaded with him for a while to come down and sit on the steps, and eventually he did. We sat on the sidewalk on the south side of the Liffey and talked for about 45 minutes, about what was happening to him, why was he feeling that way…

(If you’d rather hear him tell the story, he was on the August 8th edition of RTÉ’s Playback - skip to ~30'00)

Trailer for the Hateful Eight

From the IMDB’s trivia page for The Hateful Eight:

According to Quentin Tarantino, this show is inspired by the Western television shows Bonanza (1959), The Virginian (1962) and The High Chaparral (1967): “Twice per season, those shows would have an episode where a bunch of outlaws would take the lead characters hostage. I love it in a Western, where you would pass halfway through the show to find out if they were good or bad guys, and they all had a past that was revealed. Just a bunch of nefarious guys in a room, all telling backstories that may or may not be true. Trap those guys together in a room with a blizzard outside, give them guns, and see what happens!”

I wasn’t crazy about Django Unchained, but I’m pretty sold on this.

(Also, it’s hard to believe this is only Tarantino’s eighth film.)

The Good Dinosaur

Pixar are pretty great at pulling at my heartstrings, but this is the first time they’ve made me cry during the trailer.

This looks amazing.

Flying Through an Eclipse

David Carr taking no shit from those Vice dickheads

RIP.

PT: The Movie

Someone put together all the best bits of PT (one of my favourite games of last year) and cut them together as a ‘found footage’ horror film. And you know what? It still scares the pants off me.

The Fleshlight Model Visits the Fleshlight Factory

My favourite part of this video is where she’s standing next to the owner of the fleshlight factory and the interviewer asks the owner “have you ever used the fleshlight?” and he’s like “of course!” then realises he’s standing next to the lady whose fake vagina he masturbated into. I haven’t seen anything that awkward in ages.

This is Water

A while ago, I went through a rough patch, both mentally and emotionally and this speech – specifically the audiobook version – helped get me through it. I’d listen to it at night when I was more likely to be hit with a panic attack and it helped calm me and also helped me think outside of myself, which was exactly what I needed.

God, I miss DFW.

Atropa

ATROPA -- Sci-fi Short from Eli Sasich on Vimeo.

Neven Mrgan on Why Skeuomorphism Is Like a Classic Car

Neven Mrgan on Why Skeuomorphism Is Like a Classic Car from Story & Pixel on Vimeo.

God Only Knows

The Eyes Of Alfred Hitchcock

GIF's Visual Language In Music Videos

Star Wars Minus Williams

Gentlemen of Letters

Gentlemen of Letters - A Dublin Sign Painting Film from Colin Brady on Vimeo.

It’s easy to take for granted just how important hand-painted signs are to the visual identity of Dublin city. This is a lovely documentary that shines some light on the people whose work we see almost every day.

Jodorowsky's Dune

Jodorowsky’s version of Dune is right up there with Kubrick’s Napoleon as one of the most famous films that never was. This documentary is an amazing glimpse at what could have been.

This Is a Generic Brand Video

Warriors. Come out to pla-ay.

Fan-made trailer for The Warriors. Spot on.

Highway Sing-along

This is lovely. Who couldn’t use a few more moments of pure, uncynical joy in their lives?

London to Brighton - 1953, 1983, 2013

The Irish Pub

Cyndi Lauper - Money Changes Everything

This is on heavy rotation in my house right now.

This is Water

Is it weird to miss someone you never met? Because I really miss David Foster Wallace.

Only God Forgives

Lemons

I never really understood the point of Vine before. Now I get it. I totally get it.

The Last Mile

Blown away.

Journey - The Annotated Score

Journey’s composer, Austin Wintory, gives a fascinating annotated walkthrough of the game’s orchestral score.

To This Day

Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Tegan and Sara - Closer

Tegan and Sara have spent years putting out what I can only assume are perfectly fine indie records. I wouldn’t really know, because they never really appeared on my radar (I listened to Sainthood a bit, but it didn’t grab me). Now, they put out an album of amazing pop and I can’t get enough.

Bullshit indie bands: more amazing pop, please.

Paperman

Just Saying

Tom Waits - Austin City Limits 1978

Watch Tom Waits on PBS. See more from Austin City Limits.

PBS have a video of Tom Waits’ concert from Austin City Limits in 1978. Such a great show.

DIY Bacon

This changes everything.

One small step for man

Ireland’s late entry into the space race.

Wil Wheaton's new board game webseries

wilwheaton:

My new show, #Tabletop, premieres today. Episode 1, Small World, with @day9tv, @grantimahara, and @jennabusch is LIVE!
Table Top Episode 1: Small World (by geekandsundry)

Disturbing

thedailywhat:

Early Bird Special: YouTuber danielbwilson writes: “Discovered completely by accident by putting the toys away, it just had to be recorded and shared. Alone these toys seem innocent, but together, it is just wrong. Elmo Live and Tickle Me Extreme Cookie Monster.”
[reddit.]

Confrontation Mashup

48 films’ worth of ownage in two minutes.

Or, FUCK YEAH BLOOD, GUTS & CGI.