Xmas countdown - I

Xmas countdown - II

Xmas countdown - III

Xmas countdown - IV

Amazing Grace Techno - Computer Controlled Christmas Lights from Richard Holdman on Vimeo.

Xmas countdown - V

Christmas tree built from 1050 stubbies (250ml bottles), equivalent to 462 pints. Tied together with 300 meters of wire and decorated with 200 lights, with a bubble lamp in the centre. Tree stands 2 meters high and 1 meter wide at the base - created by British students:

Xmas countdown - VI

Xmas countdown - VII

The Art of Emma Hack

From the Britannica Blog:
"Emma Hack is an internationally acclaimed body artist from Australia. Her art has been featured in Dubai, Holland, Belgium, Hong Kong, Canada, and throughout Australia, and her clients include Toyota, Tiffany, Sony, and Cirque du Soleil, among many others. Her unique style – in which her meticulously painted models virtually disappear into her lavish wallpapers and ornate backgrounds - is now instantly recognizable.
Ms. Hack will highlight her compositions, and discuss her methods, weekly at the Britannica Blog."

Emma Hack website: www.emmahackartist.com

Icebergs

Koala & Australian heat wave

Article from Mirror.co.uk:

"This little koala was suffering so much in the 40+ degree southern Australian heat wave that he sidled up to the back porch of a family home on the lookout for some relief.
Lucky for him the kids were in and poured him a tub of cold water to help him cool down.
After tentatively lapping up the water and dipping his paw in to test the temperature the little koala decided to throw caution to the wind and hop in.
Looks like it worked a treat..." -- (Pictures taken in January 2009)

Visit their website: www.mirror.co.uk/

A beautiful friendship

"When Surya the orangutan meets a hound dog by the river, the two carry on like long lost friends." - A great video from National Geographic Channel:

Mystery in the Norway skies

From Mail online: "Strange spiral: Residents in northern Norway were left stunned after the lightshow, which almost looked computer-generated, appeared in the skies above them"






Read the whole article here: www.dailymail.co.uk

Giant puppets at the Branderburg Gate

From the source:

"Two giant puppets searched for eachother throughout Berlin in Saturday, October 3, the same day that the city of Berlin was unified, 19 years ago.

In the street theater piece "Rendez-Vous in Berlin," the little giant searches the city for her long-lost uncle the "Big Giant."
The 15-metre tall "Big Giant" searching for his niece with the help of an underwater geyser that allowed him to burst through the wall that divides them. He then got out of the water at the harbour next to the central train station and made his way to find his long-lost relative.

The two giants finally met up with each other in front of Berlin's landmark Brandenburg Gate, where the city was once divided by the Berlin Wall.
Like all good fairy tales, the story had a happy ending.
Staged by the French theatre group Royal de Luxe, the open-air theatre production took three years and cost 1.6 million euros to put on.

This isn't the first time Royal de Luxe have staged such a large show. Their giant puppets previously roamed the streets of the French town of Nantes and have brought their street theatre productions to London."

Beautiful - Autumn in Japan

Winged migration

Beautiful clip from 'Winged Migration' - a must see movie. Soundtrack created by Bruno Colais:

More: see the trailer:

Visit the website: www.sonyclassics.com/wingedmigration

The Laringospasms - very funny

They are doctors - anesthesiologists - and they sound pretty good!

Visit their site: www.Laryngospasms.com

Tic-Tac candies street show

Twin polar bear cubs at the Moscow's zoo

Twin polar bear cubs have taken their steps in the limelight at Moscow Zoo, after being born while their mum was hibernating.

'I was a cloud' movie

You don't need to watch the movie - but these guys are excellent in what they do!

Very smart

This is a short video for the event Challenge your world - www.challengeyourworld.com - in Montreal the 19th of November 2009.
Directors/animation/rendering: Celine Desrumaux & Yann Benedi

Having breakfast with deers - Amazing!

A Mom's great heart

Unusual breast feeding, dog and baby tigers - really tender.

Jaguar swimming

The Muppets: Ode to Joy

Baby boom

From the source: "Take two people, add a little hot air, and boom! It's that simple. Photographed over a period of nine months in our home in San Francisco."

:

And she is 88!

Watch this incredible interview with Hazel McCallion, Mayor City of Mississauga, Canada:

The fastest way to travel to Singapore

You will see a lot about Singapore!

Polynomiography

From the source: "Formally, polynomiography is the art and science of visualization in approximation of zeros of polynomials. This visualization is via fractal and non-fractal images created based on the mathematical convergence properties of iteration functions."

This video shows a Polynomiograph of Z Cubed minus 1 - or [Z^3 - 1] and a projected 3D extrapolation of regions according to their mathematical correlations to the roots.

To learn more about visit www.polynomiography.com

Graffiti

Very interesting project analyzing graffiti handwriting:

Halloween

Wait a little bit and see what he does...

You have to be patient...

He does better than us:-)

A homage to our friends, the trees

Yamaha commercial

Dog talking

A baby is coming!

Air traffic video

Air traffic worldwide in a 24 hours period. Each yellow dot is a plane in movement. Amazing!

Just bubbles

World's youngest country dancer

The young boy is Gabriel Consoli, considered 'The world's youngest country dancer'. Show featured in Nashville, USA, 2007, during the World Championship of Country Dance. Gabriel dances with his mother and his uncle.

Remembering 'Hair'

Tango Cartoon

Beautiful, tender and nostalgic...

Bushbabies at the zoo

Galago babies (also known as bushbabies). 20 days old during medical check up exam at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle.

The Fun theory

From the creators: "We believe that the easiest way to change people's behaviour for the better is by making it fun to do. We call it The Fun theory."

Visit their website: www.rolighetsteorin.se

Jellyfish!

They look almost like a computer generated effect... but they are real:

Nascargot: speeding the week!

Deadly beauty

The mushroom Amanita Muscaria in a time lapse movie: poisonous and beautiful it is also a God's creation.

Round Table at Enterprise

Time lapse: Moscow

Time

From the source: "This is my Great-Grandfather's 1944 railroad watch. I've had it for years but only recently realized what was "under the hood." Watching the gears turn, even in real time, is very soothing to me."

Amazing how beautiful a watch can be

Nap time!

Beautiful love story

Very nice animation created by Carlos Lascano:

Visit his website: www.carloslascano.com

She l-o-v-e-s water!

Do you really need anything else?

A 300-foot-tall giant

Photographer Nick Nichols spent a year planning the nearly impossible: a top-to-bottom photograph of a 300-foot-tall redwood tree, now the centerpiece of the October 2009 issue of National Geographic Magazine.

Sand animation from Ukraine's got talent

A newspaper picture becomes music

Artist's comment: "Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn't the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating."

What a cute little thing!

Animation for 'Clair de lune', Debussy

Website: www.musanim.com

Hadiah, three weeks old

"Hadiah", the Baby Sumatran Tiger at Woodland Park Zoo nursery in Seattle.

For starting the week... Monday, Monday

Meet Kent & Cropper

Uplifting story that tells us about an unusual friendship

Cute little thing

Would you like one letter opener like this one? It's green, organic and cute!

Wonderful song

Morph video

Nora, the piano cat

The source says: "This is not a trick that was taught to Nora. She began sitting at the piano at about one-year-old. She's four now. She plays only when the mood strikes her, which is usually several time a times a day for short periods."

911 Tribute

Very cute: kittens dancing

How about this pet?

Let yourself feel

Very artistic short movie with beautiful images - and as a bonus, two insightful quotes:

"There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly"

(Buckminster Fuller, US engineer and architect, 1895-1983)

"You need chaos in your soul to give a birth to a dance star"

(Friedrich Nietzsche)

Let yourself feel. from Esteban Diácono

Great animation

A Record Of Life from Owen Gatley and Luke Jinks on Vimeo.

A Thousand Words

Every day so many opportunities to connect...What if you took just one?-- A short movie from Ted Chung

A Thousand Words from Ted Chung on Vimeo.

This is why...

Snow time!

The ferrets Ronnie and Gizmo making tunnels in the snow.

Awesome art

His name is Eric Grohe, a fine artist mural painter.

You can check his work here and see the before and after states, they are great. (You have to scroll down the page to see all the images)
His official website: www.ericgrohemurals.com

The Piano: very good animation

An old man shares his life story with his young grandchild through evocative music: very delicate way to tell a story - without using words.

Song: "Comptine d'un autre été: l'après midi", composed by Yann Tiersen
Animation: Aidan Gibbons

The Beauty of Imperfection

Cheers to the way that we look and we are - let's celebrate the beauty of our 'Imperfection'. We are being overloaded by fake illusions. See the video:

The birth of a butterfly

Amazing pictures

*Click here* to see some amazing pictures like the one below:

Good Australian commercial

Very inspiring

It is up to us to follow their example and change the world.

The Roller Babies: commercial and 'making of'

Evian Water commercial: just in the month of July, more than 7 million views on YouTube


If you you want to know how they did it, you can watch also the 'making of':

Real Love

This woman in Colombia, found a lion wounded and hungry. She took care of him until he became too big for her house, so she put him in the zoo. See how he welcomes her...

Animal party

The Marula trees (Sclerocarya birrea) are from the Southern part of Africa and are also called Elephant tree or the Marriage Tree.
They produce very juicy fruits that contain large amounts of alcohol, being the most important ingredient for the Amarula cream liqueur. But not just for humans: due to the water shortage in the summertime the animals go to the trees as soon as the fruits are ripe and... they have a real party!

See the video - a French documentary about Africa:

Cog - Honda Accord commercial

The 2 minute commercial, entitled "cog", uses over 85 individual parts of the Honda Accord which precisely and intricately "knock on to" and interact with one another to form a complex chain reaction which lasts until the car is finally revealed.
It was produced without the use of computer or digital tricks, done in real time exactly as shown. The recording required 606 attempts.
In the first 605 attempts was always something minor that didn't work out. The team spent weeks recording, day and night, and they were almost giving up but the mutual support kept them together.
The recording cost 6 million dollars and took 3 months to finish, including engineering planning to complete a single sequence. This commercial won CLIO Awards, 2004 (Gold) for Automotive

Animals can laugh

Scientists listened to animals playing and they noticed something that appeared to them to be laughter. They studied this behavior for couple of years before acturally realizing that it is laughter.

Soon they got a device which transformed higher frequency sounds to frequencies our auditory system can hear.
So they developed a way to ask these rats if they liked being tickled and the answer was definite yes!

From Dr. Jaak Panksepp - scientist from Bowling Green State University:

Canned food, please!

His owner says that since he was a kitten he asks for canned food in this way. Sure, he knows what he wants!

A stop motion movie: great!

From the source: "We shot 60.000 pictures, developed 9.600 prints and shot over 1.800 pictures again. No post production!"

Morph video in real life

Coca-Cola commercial

Good Coca-Cola commercial made for the 2006 FIFA World Cup, aired in Argentina:

The magic of Riverdance

Baby tiger: precious!

Lovely Conchita

Meet Conchita, the cutest baby monkey, from ZSL***

*** Zoological Society of London: click here to go to the site

Painting with the sand

Crop Circles June 2009

Almost 20 new designs of crop circles reported in the month of July - just in England.*

*Images from Crop Circle Connector

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Dolphins

Beautiful video clip - good for starting the week!

Britain Got Talent 2008 - Great!

Amazing indeed!

Animal behaviourist, Kevin Richardson, has struck up a remarkable friendship with an entire pride of lions in South Africa.

The adventures of Maru - III

You know Maru***, right? Now he plays of hide & seek... very cute.
People love him: 660 000 views on YouTube!

***Earlier posts about Maru: May 14 -- May 21 -- May 28

Stomp it!

Stomp official site: www.stomponline.com

What a feeling!

Carlton Beer Commercial - Gold Lion, Cannes Advertising Festival - 2007

Sony Bravia Commercial - Domino City

Filmed in India, 2008 - 100 foam dominos were used:

All about cuteness...

Cannes Awards 2007

For cat lovers

Acrobatic Swan Lake dance

The penguins: BBC commercial

A good sense of humor:-)

The title of this video is misleading... watch it until the end, it is funny!

Awesome but...

It makes me wonder about the stress levels which both animals were under just to perform the task in such perfection...

Asperatus & Mammatus cloud formations

With all the climate changes that our planet is going through, awesome cloud formations are spotted in the sky.

Here, two types: Asperatus and Mammatus:

Undulus Asperatus
Beautiful like a painting, a new type of cloud formation - Asperatus - has been recognized by the meteorologists in 2009. The last one was added in 1951.
These clouds have been spotted during the morning or midday hours following convective thunderstorm activity. They are not considered a precursor to severe weather, rather appear to form following rain or thunderstorm activity.The name "asperatus" is derived from the Latin asperus (rough).

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Read the complete article from Mail Online

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Mammatocumulus
Mammatocumulus - or simply Mammatus - are cloud formations often indicative of strong storms or maybe even a tornadic storm. They tend to form during warm months in several areas of the United States.
The name "mammatus" is derived from the Latin mamma (udder), due to the resemblance between the shape of these clouds and the udder of a cow. (Source: Wikipedia)

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A historic moment: the Dalai Lama meets Nehru

Year of 1959: The Dalai Lama (a young 23 years old monk) and Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India during his visit to Tibet (prior to the Dalai Lama's forced immigration to India)

Historic background:
The Dalai Lama met with the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, to urge India to pressure China into giving Tibet an autonomous government, as relations with China were not proving successful. Nehru did not want to increase tensions between China and India, so he encouraged the Dalai Lama to work on the Seventeen Point Agreement Tibet had with China. Eventually, after the failed uprising in 1959, the Dalai Lama fled Tibet and set up the Government of Tibet in Exile in Dharamshala, India, which is often referred to as "Little Lhasa". (Source: Wikipedia)

Saving the ducklings: a great story

Very cute: slow lori

The slow lorises are three species of loris and are classified as the Genus Nycticebus. These slow moving primates range from Borneo and the southern Philippines in Southeast Asia, through Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, India (North Eastern India, Bengal), southern China (Yunnan area) and Thailand. They are classified as vulnerable or endangered species, and are hunted for their large eyes which are prized for local traditional medicine. The Indonesian name, malu malu, can be translated as "shy one".  (Source: Wikipedia)

Honda Commercial -2007

Famous people painting

You probably know this painting already: Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante - created by by Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An, 2006, oil on canvas.

But do you know all the famous people depicted in the art?

Answers here:

 Famous people painting with wiki links & mouse over tagging 

and here (below the promo banner): 

The complete list of people with quick facts & comparison photos

A classy work out

FAO Schwartz* employees perform Mozart on the large floor piano - like Tom Hanks did in the movie Big.

***FAO Schwarz is the name of an upscale specialty toy retailer headquartered in New York City

Congratulations, Donald!

Donald's birthday is officially recognized as June 9, 1934, the day his debut film, The Wise Little Hen, was released.
He is now 75. Happy Birthday, Donald!

Lupin, the weather cat

According to some sources, this weather station is in Switzerland although they broadcast for Germany.
Look on the bottom of the screen, you are going to see something going on. And congratulations to the weather man, very professional indeed!