In this video by the Washington Post, dancers from The Washington Ballet are filmed as they execute their most difficult dance moves, which the dancers explain in voiceover. The viewer is shown the moves in slow motion, which is a great way to better illustrate the impressive athletic feats that ballet dancers perform regularly.
Via Laughing Squid.
Courtroom sketch artist is one of the most niche jobs you can find in the field of creative art, but their illustrative skills are unmatched, and the way they capture the mood of the courtroom and the personalities of those involved in a court case makes you feel like you’re in the room watching the case unfold.
Gary Myrick is one of these extremely talented courtroom artists, and after working in Texas for over 38 years he, like many other court sketch artists, can’t seem to find much work these days, as the illustrators of the past are being replaced by video cameras.
Gary is the focus of a documentary produced by Ramtid Nikzad for The New York Times, and he hopes that the op-doc will reveal how important the human element is to courtroom reporting, because as he puts it:
I’m trying to draw to communicate to those that aren’t there, what it was like to be there. And maybe some of that has been getting lost.
-Via Beautiful/Decay
It’s not just sugar on a stick. This street vendor in Xian, China is more like a glass blower. Watch him inflate and shape balls of sugar into animals. You can eat them, of course. But his hands and lips have been all over them. So maybe you should just keep yours as a sculptural piece.
Good street vendors sell food. Great street vendors sell performances. Be sure to check out our videos of another Chinese vendor making sugar dragons, one who makes cotton candy flowers, and a Turkish ice cream vendor who acts like an acrobat.
-via Geekologie
A busker outside a Kroger store in Dallas is joined by a passerby -and then another, leading to a nice jam session on the sidewalk. These guys may not know each other, but they know what they’re doing! Don’t you wish you could randomly come across a scene like this in real life every once in a while? The video was originally recorded and posted on Facebook by Jaime Tatos Maldonado. -via reddit
An elderly woman joined a street soccer game in the suburbs of Rome. Don’t tell her that she’s too old to play. She’ll show you up hard. Watch her dribble, pass, and keep the ball in the air.
-via Huffington Post
(Image Via KNARF New York)
Breakdancing is really hard for people to learn who are used to counting their steps and holding their partners hands, but when you’re a Buddhist monk who has spent his life studying martial arts, and keeping your body in peak physical condition, breakdancing sorta comes naturally.
The monks in this video aren’t actually Buddhist monks, but they bust out with some impressive b-boy skills nevertheless, showing mad love for the fallen Beastie Boy MCA (Adam Yauch) who died on May 4, 2012.
May 4th has become an unofficial holiday in New York called MCA-DAY, and last year a park in Brooklyn Heights was dedicated to Yauch, but this year's breakdancing monk-stravaganza seems a more fitting tribute to MCA, who was a practicing Buddhist.
-Via Gothamist
Here’s the perfect thing to get you going on Star Wars Day! A rocking’ medley of the various musical themes in Star Wars, courtesy of TheHumanTim (previously at Neatorama). Yes, he plays all those instruments; his next project is the Indiana Jones movies. You can use this for background music while you’re surfing the web, and be sure to show the kids. May the Fourth be with you! -Thanks, Tim!
Now that music has gone from cassettes to discs to digital files what the heck are we supposed to do with all those leftover tapes?
Brian Dettmer has a pretty good idea of what to do with dead media, and his amazing skeletal sculptures are made out of cassette tapes which are melted ever so gently into bone shapes.
Brian’s works are so meticulously crafted that the tapes preserve much of their original integrity, like the album titles, the reels and the windows, and Brian's grasp of anatomy is so strong that his melted musical masterpieces have all the right parts in all the right places.
-Via Juxtapoz
(Previously on Neatorama-Cassette Tape Skeletons)
Some radio controlled vehicle fanatics feel the old adage "the bigger, the better" rings true in terms of their favorite hobby, but those fans of supersizing probably didn’t have a vehicle as large as a 5.2 ton Blackhawk helicopter in mind!
The guys in this photo aren’t your average R/C enthusiasts, they’re engineers from Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. and they get to do totally boring stuff for a living, like playing with Blackhawk helicopters via remote control.
Unfortunately, these guys aren’t making the newest consumer R/C product, they’re working on a serious project with real military applications:
In cooperation with the U.S. Army, Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. has successfully demonstrated optionally piloted flight of a Black Hawk helicopter, a significant step toward providing autonomous cargo delivery functionality to the U.S. Army.
According to Mark Miller, Sikorsky Vice President of Research & Engineering "the autonomous Black Hawk helicopter provides the commander with the flexibility to determine crewed or un-crewed operations, increasing sorties while maintaining crew rest requirements. This allows the crew to focus on the more 'sensitive' operations, and leaves the critical resupply missions for autonomous operations without increasing fleet size or mix."
-Via Sploid
The name Dan Witz may be unknown to those who think street art begins and ends with Banksy and Shepard Fairey, but his outlaw artworks paved the way for the fame enjoyed by many today, fame which has eluded Dan because he's in it for the art, not the notariety.
Dan started his street art career in the late 70s with little painted birds and cleverly rendered slogans. He then moved on to creating unique installations that look like people stuck behind grating, and nowadays he's part of the gallery scene, creating amazingly detailed paintings of mosh pits.
Animal New York created this brief yet highly informative mini-doc about Dan Witz, which is a must see for street art fans and those who wonder how it all began.
Andy Warhol's exploration of new styles and techniques inspired many artists throughout his career, and he kept on breaking new artistic ground until his untimely death in 1987.
In 1985 Warhol was approached by Commodore International to create digital artworks on the Commodore Amiga 1000 using software called Graphicraft, but the images he created were thought to be lost until Cory Arcangel and the Carnegie Mellon Computer Club discovered these bold images on decaying floppy disks.
A documentary about the recovery of these digital artworks called "Trapped" will premiere at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall in Pittsburgh on May 10th.
Digital artworks generally don’t command a very high price at auction, but something tells me Warhol’s digital works will be worth millions.
-Via Boing Boing
I can snap my fingers as well as the next person, but I never knew until today that you (or at least some talented people) can make snapping fingers play different notes. Emil Axelsson is pretty good at it. Watch closely and you’ll see that he’s not snapping the same fingers over and over, but different fingers to make different tones. Enjoy his version of the Super Mario Bros. theme. -via Viral Viral Videos
Artist and music lover Natalie Sharp discovered the Unknown Pleasures of painting her face to look like various album covers, and now she must Remain In The Light lest she be mistaken for a Veckatimest and elicit some Screamadeica from those who catch sight of her in public.
Natalie came up with this fun face painting concept as a way to pay homage to Record Store Day, which took place on April 19th, and she cites the albums painted on her face as inspirational to her art.
Here’s what Natalie had to say about this unique project:
I stupidly thought I could knock these out in a day. Three days later with a bleeding face and being accused of racism after posting my progress on Facebook, I had to stop. These are not my top eight albums, I don’t believe in that crap, but they are eight very inspiring and spectacular albums that I keep returning to. Each face took between 3 – 6 hours to paint. I cried after finishing grizzly bear, I thought it had broken me. I don’t use any stencils its all freehand.
Record Store Day, here is my gift to you.
-Via AnimalNY
What was once something kids did while sitting around bored in class has now become a thing kids do while bored in class, while hanging out with friends, and also to impress people online.
Whether you call it twiddling, spinning or twirling a pen the two smug young men in this video are really good at making writing instruments fly around their fingers, flip across their legs and generally flit around like they have a mind of their own.
Ian Jenson and PPM are bringing epic pen spinning to the masses, but no matter how hard they try it will never be as cool as being part of the color guard!
-Via Geekologie
Creating highly detailed sculptures, with realistic fluid shapes and organic contours, out of wood is a feat in itself, but when you create each individual work out of one single piece of wood you’ve got some serious wood carving skills!
Stefanie Rocknak is one of these extremely talented wood carvers, and the beauty of her single block sculpture is not just in the execution, but the elegant simplicity and retention of the basswood's natural grain pattern as well.
The figure looks like he’s really splashing through a wooden wave, with face turned in mid-breath and a hand so realistic it even has creases in the palms.
-Via Juxtapoz
