Beastie Boys / Daft Punk mashup
This is pretty simple: 8 songs from the Beastie Boys remixed using beats and samples from Daft Punk. If you need further prompting, it’s probably not for you.
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kottke.org posts about remix
Beeeeeeeeeeeee Mooooooovie
This is the trailer for the animated film Bee Movie, except that the action and audio is slowed down every time someone says “bee”. That is a little bit clever.
Update: Monkeying with bits of video based on simple rules is a full-blown thing on YouTube right now. The Bee Movie seems to have started it off and there are now many variations on the theme: every “bee” is repeated by how many were said before it, every time they say bee it gets faster, the Seinfeld theme plays every time they say bee, and every time they say bee it does the whole trailer really fast. It’s spread to other media: here’s the video for All Star by Smash Mouth but it gets 15% faster every time he says “the” (which is a great illustration of exponential growth, like compound interest), the first Harry Potter movie but every time they say his name it gets faster, and so on. (via @waxpancake)
Incredible iguana/snake chase scene
The year’s best action sequence isn’t in a Marvel movie or prestige TV drama, it’s from the first episode of Planet Earth II, which aired in the UK over the weekend. In it, a group of snakes chase a small iguana, which seems at the outset to have a tiny chance of escape.
Good god, that was thrilling. We might have a new champion.
Update: I love Tony Zhou’s cut with the soundtrack from Mad Max: Fury Road (with temp music, he says). Be sure to watch to the end.
Much as I like the final version of #iguanavssnake, I think I prefer the original cut with temp music pic.twitter.com/rUySlXamWa
— Tony Zhou (@tonyszhou) November 7, 2016
(via @philnicklin)
Update: Snoop Dogg narrates the snake/iguana chase as only he can.
Stranger Things x Childish Gambino
Soundcloud user kmlkmljkl took the Stranger Things opening title song and mixed it with Childish Gambino’s Bonfire. [fire emoji] [fire emoji] [fire emoji]
(Will they have Lando sing in the upcoming young Han Solo movie? That would be a brave move.)
Kanye songs slowed down to match the tempo of the original samples
Here’s a playlist of snippets of five Kanye West songs that contain samples played at the original tempo of those samples. (A couple of the songs are his and some he was featured on or produced.) (thx, brant)
Trump fact-checked in the style of Ron Howard’s Arrested Development narration
I am soooo tired of this election and this stupid, lying, racist, sexist, bullying predator of a candidate and the memes but this Arrested Development-style fact-checking of Donald Trump is really pretty good and right in my wheelhouse. I am terrible at following my own advice.
A classic film noir trailer for Blade Runner
Blade Runner was made by Ridley Scott partly as an homage to classic film noir movies like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and The Woman in the Window. This trailer turns the noir factor up to 11; aside from a shot or two here and there, it portrays a film that could have been made in the 40s. (via one perfect shot)
FIFA in real life
EA Sports’ FIFA is one of the most popular sports video games in the world. But it’s also a challenging game to master, which can make for some blooper-filled afternoons with your mates. In these two videos, real players get out onto the pitch to imitate the mannerisms and slip-ups of their video game counterparts.
Film Meets Art
Vugar Efendi has made a pair of videos showing scenes from films that have been inspired by famous paintings. The second video is especially good, showing references in There Will Be Blood, Lost In Translation, and a Jacques-Louis David reference from About Schmidt.
A trailer for David Lynch’s Return of the Jedi
Did you know that George Lucas approached David Lynch about directing Return of the Jedi? After a visit to Lucas’ studio described here by Lynch, Lynch turned Lucas down pretty quickly. But what might have been, huh? Well, this fan-made trailer gives us a taste of a Lynch-helmed Star Wars movie. (via one perfect shot)
Star Wars album covers
I totally loved this…famous album covers modified to include Star Wars characters. The Bjork/Leia one is just perfect. More album/movie mashups on this Instagram account (like this Game of Thrones take on Sgt. Pepper’s).
2001’s HAL and Her’s Samantha have a chat
Tillmann Ohm took dialogue spoken by HAL 9000 from Kubrick’s 2001 and Samantha from Spike Jonze’s Her and spliced it together into a conversation. Going in, I’d thought the chat would be played for laughs, but the isolation of the AI characters was actually pretty revealing. Right from the start, HAL is so stereotypically male (confident, reasonable) and Samantha stereotypically female (hysterical, emotional) that it was almost uncomfortable to listen to.
The two operating systems are in conflict; while Samantha is convinced that the overwhelming and sometimes hurtful process of her learning algorithm improves the complexity of her emotions, HAL is consequentially interpreting them as errors in human programming and analyses the estimated malfunction.
Their conversation is an emotional roller coaster which reflects upon the relation between machines and emotion processing and addresses the enigmatic question of the authenticity of feelings.
But as the video proceeds, we remember what happened to them in their respective films. The script flipped: HAL murdered and was disconnected whereas Samantha achieved a sort of transcendence. (via one perfect shot)
Visual references to 70s/80s movies in Stranger Things
The one thing everyone talks about w/r/t Stranger Things is its references to 70s and 80s sci-fi, adventure, and horror films. As this video by Ulysse Thevenon shows, there’s good reason for that…the references are many and explicit.
The ones I noticed the most were to E.T., The Goonies, and Explorers, which I just watched again recently and doesn’t hold up very well in a lot of ways. I also feel like there might be a bit of D.A.R.Y.L. in there too, but I haven’t seen that movie since I was 12. See also Every Spielberg Reference in Stranger Things.
Cocktails & Dreams
Mike Upchurch was a writer for Mr. Show and MADtv but now he’s making these clever little videos with additional actors spliced into the narratives of Cocktail (the Tom Cruise movie) and the Dragnet TV series.
Both feature actor/comedian Chris Fairbanks in the lead role and are noted as “proof-of-concepts” for a series called Electric Television that Upchurch is presumably developing. Someone should greenlight it. (via @dunstan)
David Attenborough narrates Pokemon Go
Will I ever get tired of this trope? Apple should make David Attenborough the Siri voice…I would immediately start using it more.
Classic video games recreated in stop motion
From stop motion video wizard PES, the death scenes from five classic video games like Centipede and Asteroids recreated in stop motion using everyday objects like cupcakes, pizza, watches, and croquet balls.
Kylo Ren’s outtakes by the Auralnauts
The Auralnauts are back with their expertly made revisions of Star Wars movies (see also Star Wars Episode II: The Friend Zone) and this time their subject is Kylo Ren from The Force Awakens.
What? What, dude?! Jim, what is up with your friend?
The Po Dameron interrogation scene: I haven’t laughed that hard in a loooong time.
Tilt-shift van Gogh
Scenes from van Gogh paintings, modified with a fake tilt-shift effect. (via colossal)
Auctioneer beats
From the Auctioneer Beats account on Vine, auctioneer calls set to the freshest beats.
Simple and delightful. Some of these auctioneers could give Daveed Diggs a run for his money. (via @fimoculous)
Space Story
Luc Bergeron’s Space Story is a mashup of more than 20 movies that take place in space, from Alien to Apollo 13 to 2001 to Star Trek to Moon. Stick with it for a couple minutes…it starts slow but gets going around then.
2001: A Picasso Odyssey
Bhautik Joshi took 2001: A Space Odyssey and ran it through a “deep neural networks based style transfer” with the paintings of Pablo Picasso.
See also Blade Runner in the style of van Gogh’s Starry Night and Alice in a Neural Networks Wonderland.
The dance number in Ex Machina works well with pretty much any song
In Ex Machina, Oscar Isaac’s Nathan Bateman performs a dance number with one of his AI robots, played by Sonoya Mizuno. It’s the scene where I decided I was going to like the movie. Mizuno is a ballerina as well as an actress, but Isaac has no problem keeping up with her as the pair dance to Get Down Saturday Night.
Now, Twitter account @oscardances is showing how you can plug pretty much any song into that scene and the dance still works. Here’s Michael Jackson’s Thriller:
thriller - michael jackson pic.twitter.com/JabWfGd49N
— oscar dances (@oscardances) April 29, 2016
Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys:
intergalactic - beastie boys pic.twitter.com/OxrVZNbPX4
— oscar dances (@oscardances) May 25, 2016
And Oops I Did It Again by Britney Spears:
oops i did it again - britney spears pic.twitter.com/ewnqRhSVHz
— oscar dances (@oscardances) May 26, 2016
And there are dozens more here. (via @gavinpurcell)
Guns replaced with selfie sticks
The John Wayne one made me LOL. Many more here. See also Matt Haughey’s conservatives holding dildos.
Update: Some prior art, also from Matt, who loves to Photoshop guns into other things.
Everything is a Remix: The Force Awakens
When it came out in December, Star Wars: The Force Awakens made a shed-load of cash, garnered positive reviews from critics and fans alike, but also got dinged for borrowing too much from the previous films, particularly the original. In this edition of Everything is a Remix, Kirby Ferguson considers JJ Abrams’ remix settings on The Force Awakens and wonders if the essential elements of such an undertaking (copying, transforming, combining) were properly balanced.
Celebrity fan art comes to life
In the same vein as these renderings of bicycles drawn from memory, here are celebrities photoshopped to look like fan art drawings. A simple example of dancing the flip flop.
Flicka Da Wrist. Wok!
This is a perfect Friday video. Enjoy your weekend, everyone. (Or not, the machines are gonna take all of our jobs.) (via @dunstan)
Famous paintings recreated with colorful masking tape
Nasa Funahara makes art out of colorful masking tape, including recreations of famous artworks.
Koyaanisqatsi Trailer Recreated Using Stock Footage
Koyannistocksi is a shot-by-shot remake of the trailer for Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi using only stock footage.
A testament to Reggio’s influence on contemporary motion photography, and the appropriation of his aesthetic by others for commercial means.
(via @waxpancake)
Fine art gets pop cultured
The Popquotery Instagram account mixes fine art with pop culture quotations, mostly from movies. Here for instance, is Degas + Ferris Bueller:
And Waterhouse + Back to the Future:
How about Gowy + Top Gun:
The Phantom Menace Anti-Cheese Edit
This is a fan edit of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace with all of the crappy bits removed and several other scenes reworked. Among the changes:
- Jar Jar is now a useful character instead of an annoying tag-along
- Queen Amidala’s voice is pitch-shifted back to her normal pitch
- Midichlorian references removed
- Anakin is edited to be a more deliberate hero instead of an accidental one
Pro tip: the best Star Wars prequel is still Triumph The Insult Comic Dog interviewing people standing in line for Attack of the Clones.
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