Video: Skateboarding In Shanghai

Shanghai 5” from Charles Lanceplaine on Vimeo.

Skateboarding in Shanghai must be a great way to see the city. With wind in your face and chance looming all around you, there’s got to be something distinctly exhilarating about skateboarding through a foreign city; experiencing a new culture in a twisting and turning flash. I’m not a skateboarder myself, so I don’t know for sure, but this is how it seems to me. I suffered from severe skateboarder envy in middle and high school. That was partnered with my crush on the collective “alternative” hairstyles of skateboarders everywhere. My first attempt at skateboarding threw me, terrified, down a steep hill in rural Ohio. I’m not sure what I was so afraid of hitting amid all of the wide-open space there, but I dove off of the board and onto the steaming summer asphalt, wondering just how skateboarders did it as I limped back home. I tried a few more times over the years and eventually lost interest (read: gave up). Skateboarding videos stuck with me, though. I quickly learned then and still believe now that these videos offer viewers a unique and interesting opportunity to experience a destination through film. This video, created by Charles Lanceplaine and featuring skateboarding throughout Shanghai, is a good example of what I mean. Enjoy.

A timelapse journey through the American Southwest


While I don’t think anybody would dispute that the American Southwest is beautiful, this timelapse video by Henry Jun Wah Lee of Evosia Studios takes the region to a whole new level of breathtaking. Without using words or special effects, the Los Angeles-based filmmaker brings the landscape to life with dancing fog, vibrant sunrises, detailed rock formations, and curvacious craters that appear to flow like a woman’s skirt. The photographer’s mission in his work is to inspire people who spend their time in cities to get out and re-connect with nature. Through this video, you’ll get to explore the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, North Coyote Buttes, the Upper and Lower Antelope Canyons, Rattlesnake Canyon, the Eastern Sierras, Vermillion Cliffs, Yosemite National Park, Grand Staircase Escalante, and the December 2011 Lunar Eclipse.

So how did he create such a stunning masterpiece? Jun Wah Lee explains it took, “a little bit of luck, a lot of traveling and sleepless nights, and a lot of practice!”

Infamous French prankster arrested for impersonating a traffic camera




While it’s probably safe to say that most people think traffic cameras are pretty annoying, infamous French prankster Rémi Gaillard has brought harassing drivers to a whole new level. In this video, he impersonates a traffic camera, literally flashing lights at commuters and then chasing them while dressed in a cardboard costume. While many people have found the joke to be out-of-line, calling Gaillard obscene words and saying he is “destroying the very fabric of society”, I have to say that from this side of the action the video does have a lot of humor to it, especially with the aggressive background music. The fun didn’t last too long, however, as the cops arrested him before the situation could get too out of hand.

Underwater bollywood dancing on the Great Barrier Reef



While it isn’t hard to find countless videos on the web showing you the beauty and marine life of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, it isn’t that often that you find the location being the set of a choreographed, underwater dance number. The video is actually a contest entry for the Tourism Tropical North Queensland’s bollywood dance competition submitted by Seawalker, an underwater diving company that allows you to walk on the ocean floor. Despite having gravity working against them, the Seawalker team actually does an impressive job at mastering the dance moves, and are clearly having a great time doing it.

Karl of Seawalker commented post-production, “It’s a very unusual experience trying to dance underwater in a helmet, as all you hear is bubbles, no music, and yourself counting out the moves in a 4/4 count just hoping that everyone around you are in time. Thus, [it took] about 15 takes to get it right.”

Check out their finished product above.

Strolling through the airport just got more exciting with the new musical floor




Recent Design Academy in Eindhoven graduate, Jeriël Bobbe, has recently come up with a new way to make spending time at the airport more fun. His new design is a combination between public art and community musical instrument as it is a piece of flooring with wooden slats designed to play music when you roll your suitcase over it. How deep the grooves in the wood are control the volume, while the width between the ribs affect the pitch.

“The tiles are being deployed in airports to compete with the horizontal escalators,” explains Bobbe. “In a playful way, the traveler is triggered to walk by himself. Which way do you choose?”

Check out the video above to see a preview of what you can expect from Bobbe’s creation.