visual effects

Christopher Domas presents his Cantor Dust tool at Derbycon 2012, a 3D visual approach to reverse engineering binaries by visualizing their structure dynamically.

Christopher Domas's REcon 2013 talk on dynamic binary visualization for reverse engineering. He shows how rendering binary data as interactive visual maps and trigraphs reveals structure that hex dumps hide, leading to his Cantor.dust tool.

Bret Victor's talk on Drawing Dynamic Visualizations. It argues that visualization tools offer either the directness of hand drawing or the dynamics of programmed graphics, and shows a tool that combines both.

A Foresight Institute workshop video with two talks: Shawn Douglas on nanoscale instruments for visualizing small proteins, and Bret Victor on Dynamicland. Victor's part shows biomolecular design built in his Realtalk system with physical objects.

A Google Tech Talk by Laurens van der Maaten, co-creator of t-SNE, on visualizing high-dimensional data by mapping it to two dimensions. It explains how the technique works and how it compares with other visualization approaches.

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.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.

Captain Disillusion's comedic talk at the 2018 Blender Conference recounts how he uses Blender as a production tool for his VFX-debunking web series. It is part case study and part love letter to the Blender community.

Ian Hubert's Blender Conference talk on world building in Blender, covering photogrammetry, camera projection and assembling complex environments from simple shapes at great speed.

Michael Steil's 27c3 talk on reverse engineering the MOS 6502 from die shots into a transistor-level simulation, as in the Visual6502 project. It covers going from chip package to a digital model.

Eric Chahi's GDC 2011 postmortem of Another World (Out of This World), describing how he built the game. He shows his polygon art approach, rotoscoping and animation tools.

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.

Simon Brown's Agile on the Beach 2019 talk presents the C4 model, a lightweight approach to diagramming software architecture with a shared vocabulary and simple notation.

Andrew Price presents at the Blender conference on the problems, politics and possible fixes for Blender's user interface, followed by a full Q&A. He argues that an interface upgrade is overdue.

Jeff Bell's Blender Conference 2018 talk on how Netflix's animated film Next Gen was produced using Blender. It covers the studio's pipeline and tooling.

Philip Roberts explains the JavaScript event loop, call stack, callbacks and asynchronous behavior with live visualizations using a tool he built. It demystifies terms like non-blocking and single-threaded.

Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.

Richard Feldman argues that functional programming is not the norm largely because of historical accidents, such as C++ popularity, platform exclusivity, marketing spend and network effects, rather than merit. He traces the history of how languages become mainstream.

Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON 18 talk on changing threats to privacy argues that surveillance arrived through convenient services and network effects, so opting out is not a real solution. It also includes his framing of getting social democracy rather than the fascism people feared.

Paul Chiusano's Strange Loop 2019 talk introduces Unison, an open-source functional language for distributed, elastic systems. It covers content-addressed code identified by hashes of the syntax tree, a codebase manager, and algebraic effects called abilities.

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

Steven Wittens' JSConf US 2013 talk on drawing with WebGL, using animated visuals to walk through vectors, matrices and the rendering pipeline. Despite the title, it works as a visual primer on the linear algebra behind 3D graphics.

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.

Julia Galef uses pictures to explain Bayes' rule, then tells three personal stories showing how she applies it to improve her thinking.

Anna Rosling Rönnlund presents Dollar Street, a project photographing homes in dozens of countries, from stoves to beds to toilets, and sorting them by income. She shows how data visualization can change how we see the world.

SciPy 2015 talk by Nathaniel Smith and Stefan van der Walt on choosing a new default colormap for Matplotlib. It covers why Jet misleads, how perceptual color spaces work, and how viridis was designed.

Gary Bernhardt's RubyConf 2012 talk on testing in isolation without mocking everything. It goes through behavior versus data, mutation versus immutability, and how a functional core with an imperative shell yields natural isolation and parallelism.

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.

Hans Rosling uses the Gapminder animated-data tool to debunk myths about world development, with sportscaster-like energy. It shows trends in health, income and child survival across countries.

The full 80-minute Macworld 2007 keynote in which Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone. It includes the multitouch demos, visual voicemail and scrolling.

Emery Berger argues that performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern systems, showing how code layout and link order can swamp optimization effects. He presents tools that evaluate performance more reliably.

In this TED talk, Hans Rosling uses animated statistics to debunk myths about the developing world, showing how health and income have improved across countries.

Bret Victor's 2013 MIT Media Lab talk argues that the media we think with determine which thoughts are possible. He demos new representations for scientific papers, circuits, filters and signal processing.

Dan Abramov's talk on the wet codebase, using visualizations to show how removing all duplication too early produces wrong abstractions that are hard to unwind.

Hans Rosling's TED@Cannes talk uses boxes and animated data graphics to show how world population will grow to about 9 billion. He argues that raising living standards for the poorest is what reduces population growth.

Jonathan Blow's LambdaConf 2025 keynote demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains its design. It includes demos of metaprogramming and tools that visualize programs.

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto runs the audience through color and pattern illusions to show that perception is shaped by context and evolutionary history rather than being a direct readout of the world. The talk is playful and hands-on, and it argues that the brain interprets ambiguous signals.

Vlambeer's Jan Willem Nijman shows how to make an action game feel great by stacking small effects like screenshake, recoil and particles onto a basic shooter. It was presented at INDIGO Classes 2013.

Emery Berger explains why performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern hardware, showing how code layout and alignment can swamp optimization effects. He presents Stabilizer for statistically sound evaluation and Coz, a causal profiler.

In this TED talk, Lawrence Lessig argues that American politics is corrupted by Congress's dependence on funding from a tiny fraction of citizens. He uses rapid-fire visuals and calls for a bipartisan push to reclaim the Republic.