Granted this has nothing to do with design, but this is a visually freaking amazing thing to see. Eighty-eight members of a female skydiving team known as the Pearls of Russia jumped out of a plane, and this is what happened:
According to the YouTube description, the 88-woman “flower” now holds the world’s record.
Film production company Common Machine doesn’t mince its words when it comes to their latest project, for KA-BAR knives: “The company may be more than a century old, but its emerging marketing philosophy is (if you’ll forgive the pun) cutting edge: No more old media, just badass branded entertainment for the Web.”
Which shouldn’t detract from your viewing experience in the least: the sub-2.5-minute short hits that double sweet spot of American manufacturing heritage and superior production value.
If that doesn’t make you want a KA-BAR knife, I regret to inform you that you’re not a blue-blooded American… perhaps you’d be more interested to see the Australian and European alternatives (for manufacturing videos, not knives… Crocodile Dundee has nothing on us).
via aarn_
Here’s a gem from the MCM archives (via Visual News): “‘The Expanding Airport’ was created for the presentation of the new international airport for Washington, D.C. in 1958. Through familiar sounds and experiences, comparisons and basic infographics, the Eameses were able to distill complex concepts into something digestible and clear.”
According to Lin Morris:
Charles and Ray Eames made this film for their friend Eero Saarinen so that he could concisely tell the history of his breakthrough idea for Dulles Airport in Washington DC. Saarinen had only two hours to meet with the heads of the major airlines and he had found in rehearsals of his presentation he used most of that time setting up the history. Charles and Ray did it in less than ten minutes, and lacked nothing in charm and appeal.
With this short, the Eames Studio achieved a different kind of timelessness, at least to the extent that all mistakes offer lessons to posterity. In fairness to Charles & Ray, the animated short was perhaps the most successful part of Eero Saarinen’s concept for an “Expanding Airport,” which was a bit more ambitious than, say, a house of cards, perhaps to its own detriment: today, the notion of a ‘mobile lounge’ sounds more like a padded room for making calls (à la smoking lounge) than a modular waiting area.
Ok, so technically it takes up two suitcases… but, considering that the entire apparatus fits neatly into a pair of mismatched vintage valises for one-man portage, you get the idea.
Of course, it’s not the first time we’ve seen one of these elaborate contraptions from Eindhoven design studio HeyHeyHey; in fact, their latest effort takes the same name as their last, “Melvin the Magical Mixed Media Machine,” albeit with an apt appellation of its own.
When we built our first Melvin late 2010, we built it BIG because it needed to entertain loads of people all at once. After its initial (online) success, a lot of people, companies and festivals inquired about its availability to do a show. After some phone calls and e-mails back and forth the conclusion was always the same: Melvin was simply too big and expensive to rebuild.
Early 2012, we had some time to spare and we felt the need to challenge ourselves once again, so we set out to build a new Melvin. This time around we could determine our own boundaries and that’s why we decided to build a travel version that ‘sends’ its own postcards and interacts (in some way) with the people around it.
In short, this new Melvin is a Rube Goldberg machine specifically built to travel the world, and let’s be honest, we like the idea of going with him whenever and wherever we can.
The film for “Melvin the Mini Machine” is something of a slow build, but I’d recommend watching it in full:
This is a truly heartwarming example of some unintended side effects of product design, and this is your must-see video of the week. In 2001, Apple designed an easy-to-use music player called the iPod. In 2007, the famed author and neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote Musicophilia, a book exploring the effects of music on the human brain. And on April 18th of this year, filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett is releasing Alive Inside, his documentary looking at what happens when you bring iPod Shuffles into a nursing home.
This is no frothy Six Flags commercial nor an advertisement for Apple. This is about how elderly people suffering from dementia, individuals who seem locked out of their own brains, can be contacted and connected with by playing back the music of their youth. We’ll say no more. Please watch.
A beautiful short film about Caine’s Arcade, a 9-year-old’s DIY cardboard dream arcade in East Los Angeles. Built out of his dad’s used auto parts boxes, packing tape and pure imagination, it’s a feel-good short that reminds us of the magic of making.
via boingboing
For as long as I can remember (Winamp, anyone?), visualizers have always had a bit of a psychedelic aesthetic; Benga opts for acetate instead of acid trip. The teaser clip for the dubstep producer’s new single, “I Will Never Change,” is a clever riff on the prevalence of the digital waveform, recreated in a stop-motion accumulation of custom-cut vinyl—a logical extension of, say, art hacker Gene Kogan’s palm-sized extrusion of a Billy Joel track à la Makerbot, yet not as hacker-y as Ishac Bertran’s cut-and-paste records.
While waveforms have long been familiar to sound engineers and (with the advent of software tools such as ProTools, Garageband, etc.) amateur musicians alike, music streaming site Soundcloud might be credited with the ‘mainstream’ popularization of these graphic representations of audio recordings.
via Hypebeast
Graeme Obree in 1993, via Wolfgang Menn
It’s the stuff of legend in the cycling community, and frankly it’s a shame that he lacks recognition in the greater world of sport or design: Graeme Obree, a.k.a. the “Flying Scotsman,” the outsider who broke the World Hour Record (distance cycled in one hour) on a homemade bicycle in 1994, has set his sights on a new record. His infamous “Old Faithful” was inspired by the downhill skiing, where the athlete folded in an aerodynamic albeit awkward-looking tucked position; his equipment consisted of a radical design that reduced the traditional diamond into a single oversized tube, with a one-bladed fork and custom bottom bracket that infamously incorporated parts from a washing machine (more on that below).
A quick dip in the ol’ YouTubes yields several fascinating documentary clips, but before we get into the archive, it’s worth checking out the occasion for Obree’s recent headlines: earlier this month, Humans Invent posted an interview with Obree, now 46, who currently has his eyes on the human-powered landspeed record.
The short unravels a bit during the second half of the five-minute clip, but this is precisely why Obree is such a compelling individual: he has a one-track mind, as they say, and one gets the sense that his fixation on speed is his literally his raison d’etre. The lengthy interview (produced alongside the video) quickly exposes the depth of his obsession:
…I thought to myself, what was my passion before? What were my strengths? I thought bike design, bike building, and pumping out a lot of energy from my legs. I thought the human powered land speed record is the perfect solution to all those three things. It is actually the complete embodiment of what I am as a human being.
“Fresh Guacamole,” a stop-motion short produced by PES for Showtime’s SHORT Stories, hit the web a few weeks back (it’s not so fresh, in a manner of speaking), but it definitely put a smile on my face when I saw it for the first time the other day:
The real genius lies in the details: ‘peeling’ the old, worn baseball/onion to reveal a pristine one underneath the outer skin; the little ‘squish’ of the golf ball/lime…
It’s the sequel to the similar-but-worth-watching-nonetheless short “Western Spaghetti,” after the jump:
See the manufacturing process at Cone Mills
Generally considered the arbiter of denim, Self Edge recently took a trip to Greensboro, North Carolina to visit the world’s oldest denim mill and document the making of Roy‘s new denim. Designed from warp to weft by Roy Slaper himself, the custom denim also marks the first unsanforized fabric produced by Cone Mills for anyone in more than 60 years.
The insightful short shows the fabric come to life as huge scans of simultaneously selected thread move through the denim production process and into massive vats of 100% pure indigo dye. Whipped around like salt water taffy the denim strands are eventually woven together to form brilliantly dark raw denim weighing in at 14.5oz per square yard—which actually swells to 16.25oz after a hot water soak. Described by Self Edge as simply a “tough fabric,” the new Roy denim is dyed with the darkest indigo Cone to produce a unique wash that’ll only evolve with age.
The new run of Roy jeans have been tweaked to improve fit and will be available in an adjusted version of Roy’s straight and slim fits. Look to Self Edge in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City this Saturday, 24 March 2012 when the latest Roy jeans will go on sale at 12pm in each respective time zone and online at 9am (PDT).
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
