February 2012
76 posts
Watch Terrifying Flying Robot Quadrotors Perform the ‘James Bond’ Theme
Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab, Daniel Mellinger, Alex Kushleyev and Vijay Kumar, demonstrate the agility of their autonomous quadrotors by programming them to plunk out the James Bond theme music on a room full of instruments. Humans...
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How to Transmit News Photos by Wire—in 1937
Telephotography was a thrilling new technology in the 1930s, allowing newspapers to send images across the country at lightning speed. Photographs were scanned from a rotating cylinder and transmitted electronically via telephone lines. Courtesy of the Prelinger Archive, this informative film was produced by Chevrolet, and shamelessly ...
WatchGeorges Méliès’s 1902 Classic, ‘A Trip to the Moon’
The iconic sci-fi short went on to inspire countless films, including Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.
WatchThe Quintessential American Barber Shop
Matt Morris’s Pickin’ & Trimmin’ features a classic barber shop in Drexel, North Carolina, and the men who have been meeting there to play bluegrass music, tell stories, and get an occasional haircut, for decades.
WatchZen and the Art of Highlining
An excerpt from Highliners, a documentary in progress by Grant Thompson, features Jerry Miszewski as he describes why he fell in love with the sport.
Watch A Breathtaking Time-Lapse Journey Through the American Southwest
The Wild Heart captures the color-saturated beauty of some of North America’s most stunning natural phenomena, from the Grand Canyon to the lunar eclipse of last December. The video is by Henry Jun Wah Lee, a physician of Chinese medicine who took up photography as a way to reconnect with the natural world.
WatchWhy Space? A Surreal 1957 Cartoon About Space Exploration
Courtesy of the Internet Archive, this animated film from the Department of Defense makes the case for space.
Watch NASA’s Documentary About the First American to Orbit Earth
John Glenn and the other astronauts who manned the Friendship 7 mission 50 years ago give a play by play description of the effort in this documentary from NASA, including stunning archival footage. For more images from the project, don’t miss Alexis Madrigal’s reconstruction of Glenn’s experience in orbit, in...
Watch 1930s Hong Kong Revealed in a Vintage Travel Film
Hong Kong: Gateway to China is rich with amazing footage of the “mountainous and verdant island,” and worth watching in spite of the condescending narration. Courtesy of the Travel Film Archive, the film captures stunning landscapes of the bay, especially the panorama from the top of the island (skip to about 7:45 to take in the ...
Watch The Oldest Cat Video of All Time?
This 1894 film, one of the earliest produced by Thomas Edison’s Black Maria movie studio, features two cats boxing. Obviously it’s not actually a video, but it’s certainly evidence that even at the dawn of cinema, over a century before YouTube, cats ruled the moving image.
But is this the first recording of a cat in motion? That credit, it...
WatchA Short Animated Biography of Nikola Tesla
Jeremiah Warren’s his quirky animation style makes for an entertaining three-minute whirlwind tour of Nikola Tesla’s career, full of fun facts and more than a little disdain for Thomas Edison. Don’t miss The History of Thomas Edison, a similar treatment of the rival inventor’s life.
WatchA Hauntingly Beautiful Zombie Love Story
This Valentine’s Day, the Atlantic Video channel is proud to premiere a heart-melting tale of undead romance. In Rest, an American soldier killed in World War I rises from the grave to go in search of his beloved. He travels miles across stunning locations, filmed in Mendocino County, Morongo Valley and New York City. The short film was produced...
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A Short Animated Biography of Thomas Edison
This playful animated short gives an overview of the inventor’s life, while pointing out that he might have been more of an exceptional businessman than a creative genius. Jeremiah Warren created the video to celebrate the 165th anniversary of Edison’s birth.
WatchA Photographer’s Return to 19th-Century Tools and Life in a Cabin
John Coffer, a tintype photographer, has spent the past 25 years living a Thoreauvian existence in a cabin in New York. This beautifully shot documentary is one in a series of short films, This Must Be the Place, which explores the idea of home and the connection between people and their most personal spaces, by David Usui...
Watch Extreme Weather: Episode 7
Extreme Weather looks at the weather-related disasters that seem to be plaguing the planet with increasing frequency due to global warming. This episode covers the freeze in Europe, flood and fires in Australia, and methods for predicting dangerous weather.
WatchOn Living in Harmony With Magical Things
Chong Gon Byun, a multimedia artist in Brooklyn, shares an intimate look at his home, which is packed with art and whimsical objects he has collected during his travels. This short documentary is one in a series called This Must Be the Place, which explores the connections between people and their homes.
WatchBob Chisholm’s Lost and Found Photographs
Bob Chisholm has been taking photographs for decades, but didn’t display them until a 2011 show at The Popular Workshop gallery in San Francisco, Forgotten and Undisturbed. In fact, the gallery writes, most of “the work in the show was discovered in a crawl space in a home in Northern California, left untouched for more than a...
WatchThe Quintessential American Burger Joint
The folks who’ve been working at New York City’s Prime Burger for decades say it’s a little like the mafia — once you’re in, you don’t leave. The restaurant has been in business since 1938, and the staff are in it for the long haul. This documentary is one in a series of short films, This Must Be the Place by Lost...
WatchWhat Obama Can Learn From George W. Bush
In his March 2012 Atlantic cover story, James Fallows explores the U.S. president’s “central mystery”:
Has Obama in office been anything like the chess master he seemed in the campaign, whose placid veneer masked an ability to think 10 moves ahead, at which point his adversaries would belatedly recognize that they had lost long...