Video

Botellas Rotantes (Rotating Bottles) is a short (about one minute) experimental stop-motion animation, shot in anaglyphic 3-D by Iván López Espejo, a student in Granada, Spain. With all of the fancy modeling and rendering software out there, it's good to see some old-school stop-motion being done. The music, Liszt's Un Sospiro, is a perfect soundtrack.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D was released in 2005, and is now available on DVD. Max is a schoolboy whose imaginary superheroes Sharkboy and Lavagirl unexpectedly become real, and he must go with them to help save the world.

 

Sharkboy lost his father in a storm at sea, and was raised by sharks. The story was conceived by a seven-year-old boy, and polished into a movie script by grown-ups. It is full of the charming sort of nonsense that only young children can dream up.

Dan Ridley-Ellis made this sweet video of happy children chasing bubbles at an outdoor fair in Edinburgh, Scotland. The slow motion works particularly well, as the ecstatic children seem to float just as weightlessly as the bubbles. The melancholy music is the old barbershop quartet standard, "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles."

I'm forever blowing bubbles, Pretty bubbles in the air, They fly so high, nearly reach the sky, Then like my dreams they fade and die.

What is it about slow-motion film that makes happy moments seem bittersweet? Is it because it reminds us that these moments are fleeting? Or is it just because Hollywood has trained us to think of slow motion as foreboding and ominous? I'll leave you to ponder that as you watch Dan's delightful video.

It's kind of fun to see blood cells flying around. This CGI animated video was made by Merck to illustrate how their drug Cozaar attaches itself to angiotensin II receptor sites in blood vessels. I would guess that this was intended for the British market, since it is optimized for red/green glasses, and the narrator has that accent. If you watch it with red/blue glasses, it will look kind of pink, but still good. For best results, watch this one in full screen.