Topic: shapes
Gravity Glue: Balanced rock sculptures by Michael Grab
Michael Grab has been balancing rocks since 2008, and has since gone viral from what seems to be the gravity-defying nature of his balanced stone sculptures. In fact, Grab's meditative art works with gravity by slowly...
Design Ah! (デザインあ) introduces kids to design concepts
In 2011, Japan's NHK television network began broadcasting Design Ah!, a Peabody award-winning children's educational program that explores different types of creative thinking for viewers of all ages. With an "Ah" th...
The Dot & the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (1965)
Winner of the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 1965, and adapted from the celebrated book by Norton Juster, best-known for Phantom Tollbooth, this is The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics. Th...
The Red Thread (Akai Ito): A single line tells a story
Activities and adventures, pulling apart, coming together, the joys of childhood: In Kazuhiko Okushita's Red Thread (2010), an animated line stretches and curls from scene to scene, visualizing moments of youth, growi...
The Curiosity Show: Matchstick Triangle Puzzle
Get out some matchsticks or toothpicks and some Play-Doh! Deane Hutton, science educator and co-host of Australia’s The Curiosity Show, sets up two challenges that requires some hands-on creative thinking: 1. How ...
The Magic Moment: Work by paper engineer Peter Dahmen
From sketches, to prototypes, to finished three dimensional pieces, Germany-based paper engineer Peter Dahmen infuses his passion for movement into his paper structures and pop-up cards. In this film by Christopher He...
Luxo Jr. Pencil Test: Emotional storytelling in wire frames
How do animators make a character lovable when the character doesn't have a face and doesn't speak? How can you build a relatable story with something as minimal as a computer generated pencil test? How do you communi...
Breaking Wave: An anamorphic kinetic sculpture
Small planet-like spheres hang on several miles of wire rope in this kinetic sculpture created by Plebian Design and Hypersonic. The 804 wooden spheres' heights and relationships are changed by the rows of rotating sh...
Sesame Street: The 30 Dots Collection
Classic patterns and surprises! Sesame Street's 1970s era series about 30 dots has been collected into 13 segments by YouTube user Monsterpiece Theatre. Debuting as an animation set by You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown...
Tokyo roads transform into dazzling tunnels of light
Filmmaker Hiroshi Kondo transforms Tokyo's street lights into pulsing, dazzling, kaleidoscopic tunnels of light in this experimental motion graphics video: Eye Know. Music by Ayako Taniguchi.
Minute Physics: Why are Stars Star-Shaped?
If we know that stars are massive spheres of hot gases, then why do we draw them with lots of twinkly points? Why doesn't "star-shaped" mean a round shape? The answer: We see stars as pointy (and so does the Hubble Sp...
Storm Chasing on Saturn: The hexagon-shaped hurricane
Hexagon-shaped storms exist. There is a massive, persistent, hexagon-shaped jet stream on Saturn’s north pole -- "the perfect six-sided hurricane, 60 miles deep, that could swallow four Earths..." The New York Tim...
Drums West by Jim Henson (1961)
Made with cut paper by Jim Henson, Drums West is an experimental animation from around 1961 that features music by jazz great Chico Hamilton. Bonus: At the end, we get to see Henson and his workspace, likely filmed by
The Iron Genie Harmonograph
Watch artist Anita Chowdry's Iron Genie Harmonograph create intricate, spirograph-like drawings. Made of steel, it was inspired by mid-19th century harmonographs and St. Pancras Station's Victorian engineering. The vi...
The Crazy Circle Illusion: How are these dots moving?
In this Brusspup mind-bender, you may think you see a circle of eight white dots rotating around the inside of a larger red circle, but you're actually witnessing something else, and you may not believe it unless you ...
Magnet-connected pyramids that transform into different shapes
Hypercubes are geometric art toys made by Andreas Markus Hoenigschmid. Their shapes can be reconfigured from a single cube or brought together with other cubes to build larger structures. From Hoenigschmid's site: ...
Numberphile: The Scientific Way to Cut a Cake
This "scientifically correct way" to cut a cake will not work for birthday parties, where the cakes are often consumed too quickly by kids and adults alike, but it may be absolutely perfect for the "mathematical loner...
Why do honeybees love hexagons?
What is it about the six-sided hexagon that makes it such a perfect shape for storing honey? It's an efficient design! Just ask a bee, one of nature’s finest mathematicians, or watch this TED Ed by Zack Patterson and ...
