FILM IDEAS

ZACH KING is a YouTuber who has done humorous special effects videos for quite some time – there are hundreds of his gags on YouTube.  Almost all of them are simple to do, but so cleverly executed that it is sometimes hard to figure out exactly what he’s done.

Get some sand, put it on a light table, and take video one frame at a time using a camera on a tripod, over the table.  Move the sand a bit each time.  When you play it back, it will move.  The video below shows how it is done.  Below that, see the spectacular results that the National Film Board of Canada’s Caroline Leaf achieved – a film which took hundreds of hours to create!

Caroline Leaf is an artist who spent many years working as an animator at the National Film Board of Canada, in Montreal.  She experimented with many different techniques, in a series of stunning films.  For The Owl Who Married a Goose, released in 1974, she worked with Inuit storytellers and used her highly developed technique of drawing with sand on a light table.

Below is the follow-up video to “Hyperactive,” by Norwegian Youtube star Lasse Gjertsen.  He shot video of himself doing various things on the piano and the drums, then used iMovie editing software to cut-and-paste the different bits, creating music – even though he claims not to be able to play piano or drums!