Video Recommendations

There’s no place on Earth as mysterious as the ocean floor. Pitch black and still largely unexplored (we humans can only withstand so much pressure crushing our soft, fleshy bodies), the ocean floor is a lot like space–it’s vast, it’s mysterious and oddly beautiful. Endless Gravity, a short film shot by Alex Soloviev, is a look at the alluring beauty of ocean creatures. As they float about the screen, their movements against the black backdrop make it look like they’re floating in an endless space–hence the name. Add the ominous spoken poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the ambient soundtrack and you have an experience that’s as close to exploring the ocean floor as you’re going to get.

Ahh, 1996, a milestone year. The first flips phones were invented, Bill Clinton was reelected, Tupac was shot (or was he?), and America was introduced to a strange, new technology called the internet. This old school instructional video, converted from an old VHS tape, was what the average Joe needed to learn about connecting to the world wide web.

Sure it’s funny to sit back and laugh at the archaic nature of its tech jargon, but this video is also an interesting look at how far we have come. To think, I could be typing this article in raw HTML into a Netscape browser to publish onto a Geocities page. Yikes!

There’s a specific image people think of when they hear the words “fan made” — usually something low budget, slop-dodged and inferior to the original. Basically, amateurish. But the medium of fan art has been growing in momentum lately and going into new, intriguing directions, like with Elliot Lim’shomage to The Wire and Yoann Hervo‘s fan made Simpsons tribute. This fan made homage to Mad Max: Fury Road, made by Julien JDM, exchanges the hypercut editing of the original with a retro, pixelated version with a sleek vaporwave undercurrent. Weirdly enough, he manages to capture the energy of the film while injecting some new energy of his own. If you’re wondering who did the song, it’s “Defiant Order” by Birdy Nam Nam.

Ahh, conventions. You go to one and you go to them all, right? It certainly seems like it. Just look at this old video from a 1976 Star Trek convention. Recorded by ultimessence, he took his old Super 8 camera down to Denver, Colorado’s Northgenn Mall to capture the rising swarm of Trekkies taking over America. Not only were Leonard Nimoy and James Doohan at the event, but also the first possible sighting of a furry at 1:20 of the video (although YouTube commenters say he’s actually dressed as a cataan from the Star Trek cartoon series, but hey, “furry” is funnier). The video is more than just a crazy, retro blast from the past, it’s also a video proof that conventions were always a little strange and a little awkward.

The way we consume media is changing more rapidly than ever. It’s hard to believe that less than five years ago streaming services (like Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc.) didn’t exist. We actually had to (gasp) shove little silver discs into our (gasp) DVD players. This short documentary by FilmmakerIQ explores the history of home theater and how we came from nickelodeons to streaming HD videos over the Internet. The video is part of an ongoing series that explores the history of film and technology. If you liked this video, also check out The Changing Shape of Cinema – The History of Aspect Ratio, The History and Science of Color in Film, and The Evolution of Modern Non-Linear Editors: From Tape to Digital.

In honor of Black History Month, here’s a short film that shows a rare glimpse of the black NYC art scene of the 1930s. During a time when most blacks worked tirelessly janitors, construction workers, elevator operators and other blue collar-type work, they took their off time to express themselves creatively through art. This 15 minute silent video shows three black artists, sculptor artist Richmond Barthe, photographer James Latimer Allen, and sculptor Augusta Savage. Although the video is less like a documentary and more like an archival collection of footage, it’s still an intriguing look into an art scene that most people have never seen on film.