visual 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 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.

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.

Freya Holmer explains how Bezier curves work, from the helper-line construction to their uses in animation, text rendering and shapes. It uses visuals from her Unity Shapes plugin and was a SoME1 contest winner.

ScienceClic explains why the rubber sheet analogy for general relativity is misleading and offers a new visualization that includes the curvature of time and shows gravity as motion through curved spacetime.

ScienceClic gives a 15-minute animated introduction to quantum field theory, covering fields, spin, conserved quantities, the standard model and interactions.

Tom Scott makes the difference between a million and a billion dollars tangible by using distance on a road trip instead of volume. The drive makes the scale of a billion intuitively felt.

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.

3Blue1Brown's visual explanation of how transformers and GPT-style language models work, tracing data through tokens, embeddings and attention.

3Blue1Brown visualizes Feynman's lecture on the refractive index, explaining why light appears to slow down in glass and why the effect depends on color. It builds the idea from waves produced by oscillating charges in the material.

3Blue1Brown's visual walkthrough of the attention mechanism inside transformers, covering self-attention, multiple heads and cross-attention. It is chapter 6 of his deep learning series.

Jared Owen's 3D animated breakdown of how a Brunswick GS-X bowling pinsetter works, showing its mechanisms for sweeping, lifting and resetting pins and balls.

Huygens Optics shows how DIY photon sieves shape a laser's wave front, explaining how they differ from zone plates and how aperture count affects the focal point, with time-resolved visualizations of the diffraction.

2swap explains how he solved the Klotski sliding-block puzzle by mapping its full state space as a graph and visualizing it. The video includes footage of the Guinness world-record solve and links to an interactive graph.

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.

This Place argues that the uncanny valley is a flawed concept, since 'human likeness' is too broad and the supporting evidence is cherry-picked. It proposes that the creepiness really comes from how animated characters and robots move.

ScienceClic visualizes what you would see falling into a black hole, from the approach and the accretion disc to crossing the horizon, in 15 minutes.

Insider explains how The Mandalorian replaced green screens with LED walls that project real-time 3D environments behind actors, with over half the show filmed on such virtual sets.

A 3D-animated walkthrough of a heavy-haul diesel-electric freight locomotive, covering the frame, coupling, draft gear, engine and drive systems. Made in Blender by Animagraffs.

Owen Maitzen's animated hour-long introduction to Hackenbush, a simple combinatorial game, and how its strategy leads to surreal numbers and the roots of the number system.

CodeParade's short devlog on how spherical geometry looks in 2D and 3D and why it feels so unusual, part of the Hyperbolica series on a non-Euclidean game.

PBS Space Time examines Roger Penrose's idea that consciousness arises from quantum processes in the brain, and reviews new evidence about microtubules. It ends with an estimate of what replicating consciousness would demand.

2swap explores lambda calculus using John Tromp's lambda diagrams, with animated beta-reductions, asking what PLUS times PLUS gives. It touches on Church encodings and the equivalence of Turing machines and lambda calculus.

Freya Holmer's 74-minute video essay on splines, covering Bezier curves, B-splines, derivatives and the different levels of continuity (C0, C1, C2), built with custom animation tools. She notes she did not cover non-uniform splines.

An animated introduction to geometric algebra, presented as a language that can describe most of physics. It was made with manim and covers multivectors and how they generalize familiar tools like cross products and quaternions.

Veritasium debunks the idea of learning styles, such as being a visual learner, with an interview with Daniel Willingham and a memory experiment. It argues that a multimodal approach helps everyone.

A short Tracklib video visualizing the disco sample that Daft Punk's One More Time is built from. It shows how the track is composed from the original material.

PBS Space Time explains the Standard Model Lagrangian, the single equation encapsulating the particle physics theory, and visualizes what its terms mean.

Reducible's visual walkthrough of the Fast Fourier Transform, motivated by polynomial multiplication. It shows how the FFT's key ideas can be discovered by asking the right questions.

AlphaPhoenix uses a custom high-speed measurement setup to watch voltage waves travel down wires and split at a fork. It answers how electricity knows where to go and how quickly that process happens.

Not Just Bikes explains how SUVs and light trucks have grown in size and share of US sales, and why that is dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists and city life. He covers the regulatory loopholes, such as fuel economy rules and the chicken tax, that favored them.

A 36-minute animated deep dive from Branch Education into how DRAM works. It shows how memory connects to the CPU and how billions of bits are stored in nanoscale capacitor cells. It also covers why DRAM sits between SSDs and the processor.

Veritasium explains why bicycles are stable, arguing that gyroscopic effects are not the answer. The video shows countersteering and an experiment where riders blocked from steering the opposite way cannot turn.

Benn Jordan investigates infrasound and low-frequency noise from data centers, including xAI's Colossus and a crypto mine, and reports his own experiments on the effects. The video covers the health and community impacts on nearby residents.

Veritasium tells the history of how imaginary numbers arose from the quest for a general solution to the cubic equation, including the duels and secrecy among Renaissance mathematicians. It argues math had to give up the requirement that it mirror reality.

3Blue1Brown explains why positive results on accurate medical tests are often false positives, and reframes Bayes' rule using likelihood ratios (Bayes factors) to update odds. It uses visual examples to make the reasoning intuitive.

Tom Scott explains why Ipley Cross in England's New Forest was one of Britain's most dangerous junctions. The angled crossroads lets a car's A-pillar hide approaching traffic and cyclists because there is no relative motion in the driver's view.

Veritasium investigates whether a wind-powered vehicle can travel directly downwind faster than the wind, driving the Blackbird craft himself. The video explains the physics behind a claim some physics professors dispute.

Phil Vischer of VeggieTales and Holy Post gives an 18-minute history of racial injustice in America, covering why anger persists despite civil rights laws. It is told from an evangelical Christian perspective and adapted from a class he co-taught.

Astronomer David Kipping of Cool Worlds talks with Mick West to break down the three declassified Pentagon UFO videos. They explain the footage through camera artifacts, glare, and perspective effects.