concept animation

An award-winning 3D animation by XVIVO for Harvard's BioVisions showing the molecular machinery inside a cell as a white blood cell responds to a stimulus.

A concept video from Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center showing Morph, a flexible, self-cleaning, shape-changing phone imagined through nanotechnology.

David Rosen of Wolfire Games explains how simple procedural techniques can produce fluid, interactive character animation from very few keyframes. Examples come from Overgrowth, Receiver and Black Shades, from his 2014 GDC session.

Animator Noodle explains why frame interpolation does not make animation better, covering timing, easing, smear frames and using the wrong tool for the job. A pinned correction says the video is partly outdated given later AI developments.

Alan Becker's short series on the 12 principles of animation, covering squash and stretch, anticipation, staging, timing, arcs, appeal and the rest. Each principle gets a brief animated illustration.

A concept video from 2003 showing an early vision of Windows Longhorn's interface, before it shipped as Vista.

The US Chemical Safety Board's updated animation of the 2005 BP Texas City refinery explosion, which killed 15 workers. It was released ahead of a process safety training application.

Magic Leap's original 2015 concept video, made with Weta Workshop, showing what mixed reality could look like. It was posted to explain the company's goals to outsiders.

A short animation illustrating the proposed nanofactory concept, where nanomachines assemble atomically precise parts into larger products. It depicts how such a system might build macroscopic goods from raw materials and energy.

A compilation of molecular animations of DNA replication and gene transcription by Drew Berry and Etsuko Uno at WEHI, made with no narration. It shows molecular machinery at work inside cells.

Drew Berry shows scientifically accurate animations of molecular processes inside cells, such as DNA replication, at TEDxSydney.

Jake Archibald's JSConf.Asia 2018 talk "In the Loop" explains the browser event loop, covering tasks, microtasks, requestAnimationFrame, and how rendering interleaves with JavaScript. It uses visual walkthroughs to show why code runs in surprising orders and why setTimeout fixes are unreliable.

A demo of the Symbolics Graphics Division's S-Packages, a Lisp-based 3D color graphics and animation system from the 1980s. It was later used in developing for the Nintendo 64.

Retired Boeing Technical Fellow Doug McLean walks through common misconceptions in aerodynamics, drawing on his book Understanding Aerodynamics. He critiques popular explanations of wing lift and rocket thrust and argues for arguing from the real physics.

A short concept video of Microsoft's unreleased Courier, a dual-screen tablet designed as a digital notebook with clippings and annotation. It was first leaked by Gizmodo in 2009.

HERO is a short animated film made entirely in Blender to showcase the Grease Pencil 2D animation tools in Blender 2.8. It mixes hand-drawn 2D with a full 3D pipeline.

A 1957 Walt Disney film in which he explains and demonstrates the multiplane camera, the animation tool that gave 2D films depth. It is a short behind-the-scenes piece from Disney's archives.

A kinetic typography animation for Jonathan Coulton's song 'Shop Vac', made by Jarrett Heather with Illustrator, After Effects and other tools over 500-1000 hours.

A Mandelbrot set zoom animation reaching a magnification of about 2.1x10^275, claimed as the deepest at the time (January 2010). Each frame was rendered separately over six months on 12 CPU cores.

A one-minute Sesame Street animation of a counting pinball game focused on the number 12, set to Pointer Sisters music.

A SpaceX concept animation showing the planned fully reusable Falcon 9, with both first and second stages performing vertical landings.

Microsoft's 2015 concept video imagining how ubiquitous computing, collaboration services and data analytics might change work 5-10 years later.

Veritasium answers criticism that his videos make people look stupid, explaining that teaching must address learners' misconceptions and that holding common beliefs inconsistent with science is not stupidity.

A 30-minute animated film explaining how money, banking and the Federal Reserve work and arguing that the American economy is heading for collapse. It is opinionated and has a strong point of view.

Veritasium debunks common climate change myths in under seven minutes, with references to NASA and published research. Topics include CO2 sources, sea ice and 1970s predictions of cooling.

Corning's 2011 concept video showing a future where specialty glass surfaces and touchscreens are woven into everyday life.

Apple's late-1980s Knowledge Navigator concept video, produced under John Sculley, showing a professor using a tablet-like device with a conversational software agent. It envisions hypertext, touchscreens and voice assistants.

Corridor Crew explain how they made an anime short by filming themselves and running the footage through custom-trained Stable Diffusion models. The video walks through the technique and its open-source foundations.

A one-minute clip from Who Framed Roger Rabbit in which a swinging pendant lamp is bumped and keeps flailing, showing animators' attention to detail.

A SpaceX concept animation of a Falcon 9 and Dragon launch with powered vertical return of both stages and the capsule. It was uploaded to YouTube in 2011.

Walt Disney Animation Studios' short introduction to path tracing, showing how rays are traced and bounced through a virtual scene to simulate light. It explains how this approach is used in animated films.

Douglas Hofstadter's Stanford Presidential Lecture argues that analogy is the core of cognition, illustrating how concepts, categorization and thought arise from analogy-making.

Veritasium's explainer on entropy, presented as one of physics' most important and least understood concepts. It uses examples such as heat engines and the sun's energy flowing through the Earth.

Ron Pressler's Curry On 2015 talk arguing that imperative languages should not be polluted with pure functional concepts like monads. He favors simple blocking code over non-blocking styles.

A CAD-based animation from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics showing how the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator is configured and what its fusion research aims to achieve. It runs about 11 minutes.

Corridor Digital makes a roughly seven-minute anime short using Stable Diffusion and related AI tools, based on a technique they teach in a longer tutorial. It was an early showcase of AI-assisted animation.

Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown shows his workflow for animating math videos with Manim, with Ben Sparks. He codes scenes live, including a Lorenz attractor, and walks through example scenes.

Veritasium examines research suggesting science explainer videos like Khan Academy's make students feel they understand while tests show they have not learned, because misconceptions go unaddressed. It suggests how to partly fix this.

IBM's Dr. Talia Gershon explains quantum computing to five people of increasing expertise: a child, teen, college student, grad student and professional. The WIRED series format moves from simple analogies to technical detail.

A short Harvard animation narrated by Professor Rob Lue introducing mitochondria as the cell's powerhouses and how cells turn food and oxygen into energy.