practical effects

VFX supervisor Jonas Ussing examines what studios mean by "no CGI", showing how much invisible CGI hides behind practical-effects marketing. It is the first part of a multi-part series that includes analysis of doctored behind-the-scenes footage.

Corridor Crew VFX artists react to the visual effects of the 2021 Dune and compare them with David Lynch's 1984 version. They discuss which effects were practical and which were CGI.

Captain Disillusion explains the visual effects behind the Back to the Future trilogy. He covers ILM's motion-control, computer-controlled camera work and clever pre-CGI tricks.

A 1983 behind-the-scenes film about making the HBO 'Feature Presentation' starship logo sequence. It shows the handcrafted miniature city, motion-control cameras and practical effects.

Corridor Crew dive into the visual effects of Terminator 2 and try recreating the T-1000 bars scene with modern tools. They explain how the original effects were achieved.

A scene from John Carpenter's 1981 film Escape from New York in which Snake Plissken glides in over Manhattan between the Twin Towers. It features the film's wireframe green laser-grid visuals built from miniatures.

Honda's 2003 'Cog' commercial for the Accord, a two-minute Rube Goldberg chain reaction of car parts. It was filmed practically rather than with CGI.

Captain Disillusion's VFXcool episode, led by Alan Melikdjanian, takes a 41-minute nostalgic look at how the visual effects of Flight of the Navigator were made. It covers early computers, motion control, in-camera effects and practical crafts.

OK Go's music video for This Too Shall Pass, featuring a huge Rube Goldberg machine built in a warehouse in Los Angeles with Syyn Labs. The band interacts with the contraption in one continuous take.

An episode of the comedic You Suck at Photoshop series in which Donnie Hoyle teaches distort, warp and layer effects while vandalizing a Vanagon in the image. It won Webby awards as a how-to and comedy series.

Lesson 1 of fast.ai's Practical Deep Learning for Coders, taught by Jeremy Howard. It takes coders from running code in a Jupyter notebook straight into training a real image model.

Robert Miles introduces the first of several videos on the paper 'Concrete Problems in AI Safety', focusing on how AI systems can cause accidental negative side effects. It explains the problem in accessible terms.

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.

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.

Raph Koster's 2014 GDC Next talk on what science says about creativity, with practical steps game designers and developers can use to be more creative. It frames creativity as applying existing patterns in new contexts.

Alexis King's ZuriHac 2020 talk on how effect systems in Haskell can be implemented efficiently. It looks at the performance cost of effect libraries and how to reduce it.

OK Go's music video for Needing/Getting, shot in the desert with a Chevy Sonic fitted with pneumatic arms that play over a thousand instruments across two miles.

Captain Disillusion debunks a viral Chinese invisibility cloak video while parodying popular educational channels. Along the way he explains chroma keying and green screen techniques.

Captain Disillusion's comedic, fast-paced explainer on how color works in cameras, displays and video. It covers the biology of color perception and what it means for screens.

Stargate Studios' 2009 virtual backlot reel shows before-and-after shots in which green screen and compositing replace locations in ordinary TV dramas and comedies. It shows how much of a seemingly real show is computer generated.

RocketJump Film School argues that we only notice bad CG while great CG is invisible, so CG seems to be everywhere ruining movies when it often is not.

The official music video for Kylie Minogue's Come Into My World, directed by Michel Gondry, built around a looping scene with multiplying copies of Kylie.

Deepfake artist Shamook's improved version of the Luke Skywalker scene from The Mandalorian season 2 finale, replacing the official CGI face with a deepfake.

Practical Engineering gives a short introduction to concrete, covering the difference between concrete and cement, the ingredients, and reinforcement. It includes a hydraulic press demonstration of compressive strength.

Practical Engineering explains what a 100-year flood actually means, combining statistics, hydrology and how society treats risk. Grady walks through local drainage infrastructure and the caveats in estimating flood probability.

Jeremy Howard's 90-minute practical tour of language models. It covers how they work, GPT-4's capabilities and limits, using the OpenAI API, code writing, data analysis and fine-tuning.

Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, presents practical data-oriented design techniques for shrinking memory footprint and making programs cache friendly. He ends with a case study of how these ideas sped up the Zig compiler.

Peter Seibel's 2006 Google TechTalk on Practical Common Lisp, framed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Paul Graham's Blub paradox. It shows Lisp features such as condition restarts and its generic-function object system.

Rhonda Patrick of FoundMyFitness makes a case for isothiocyanates such as sulforaphane from cruciferous vegetables and broccoli sprouts. It covers cancer, aging, heart disease, brain and behavior, and neurodegeneration, with chapter timestamps.

Simon Peyton Jones presents linear types for Haskell, showing how practical linearity can fit into a higher-order polymorphic language. The talk covers motivations such as resource handling and relates the ideas to Rust.

A short clip of Simon Peyton Jones talking about the future of programming languages, saying Haskell is useless in the sense that pure programs cannot have effects, while mainstream languages are useful but unsafe. He describes languages converging, with ideas such as STM and LINQ moving between them.

Chris Paget's DEF CON 18 talk on practical cellphone spying, showing how GSM traffic can be intercepted with a fake base station. It covers 2G interception and the weaknesses of cellular networks.

The 2010 Old Spice commercial featuring Isaiah Mustafa, shot as a continuous sequence with scene changes and practical effects. It became a famous viral ad.

A short screen recording of an Ubuntu Karmic Koala desktop running KDE4 with Compiz Fusion 3D cube effects and CairoDock.

Robert Watson presents the Capsicum paper at USENIX Security 2010, describing practical capability-based sandboxing for UNIX. The paper won Best Student Paper.

A 2007 side-by-side demo comparing Windows Vista's Aero interface with Ubuntu running Beryl/Compiz, showing effects such as the desktop cube and burning windows.

Ian Hubert shows quick, unconventional tricks for greenscreen compositing in Blender, as a follow-up to his motion tracking video.

Ian Hubert shows how to use Blender's motion tracking to turn ordinary footage of a room into a stylized digital environment for an indie film. It is a quick, practical walkthrough in his loose, lazy-tutorial style.

Corridor Crew tracks down Disney's lost sodium vapor prism process, used for Mary Poppins-era transparency mattes. They explain how a narrow sodium wavelength and a beam splitter enabled better compositing than green screen.

Practical Engineering explains Mechanically Stabilized Earth, where layers of reinforcement make soil strong enough to hold heavy loads, shown with a sand structure supporting a car. It notes that MSE walls are everywhere in infrastructure.