Amazing

Tilt-Shift Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro

Though tilt-shift photography is widely overused these days, this clip by Keith Loutit and Jarbas Agnelli could be one of the best examples of the method I’ve ever seen. Shot during the 2011 Carnival parade in Rio de Janeiro and set to music by Agnelli that evokes Phillip Glass, The City of Samba turns this annual spectacle of staggering scale and proportion into a delightfully miniaturized version that feels as though thousands of toys are tromping through a kitchen cabinet. The parade starts around 2:00 but do yourself a favor: switch it to HD/full-screen, and watch it all the way through. (via vimeo)

Animation Music

Love Is Making Its Way Back Home: A Stop Motion Animation Using 12,000 Sheets of Construction Paper

This great new video for Josh Ritter’s Love Is Making Its Way Back Home was directed by Erez Horovitz and involves the meticulous animation of over 12,000 laser-cut pieces of construction paper. Via Etsy:

A team of nearly twenty artists, editors, directors and product assistants ushered the video into being. The group started with storyboarding and computer animation before converting the digital graphics to paper cutouts (frame by frame), photographing those 12,000 cutouts and then stitching them together into four minutes of paper animation.

You can learn more about how it was done and see some great behind the scenes shots on Josh Ritter’s blog. (via etsy)

Photography

Skull Portraits by Carsten Witte

All images © Carsten Witte

A number of decidedly unsettling portraits from Hamburg-based photographer Carsten Witte from his series Intuition (nsfw). Of the series he says: “One main idea behind my work is the belief that everything is constantly changing but photography can preserve the moment. Beauty is almost nothing without the knowledge of how fast it will fade…” (via behance)

Art

A Condemned House Explodes Onto the Streets of Austin

All images © Chris Whiteburch

A few days ago I happened upon a rather unique art project called Last New Year in the Austin American Statesman, showing photos of a dilapidated home recently transformed with a number of installations by a small arts collective called Ink Tank. The premise for the project was fascinating: the ensemble imagined a fictional group of people living in the home who would react to the prophesied end-of-times 2012 date. One of my favorite pieces from the show is a giant installation called The Purge by artist Chris Whiteburch who decided to imagine how the house itself would confront the impending doom. The result is a structure purging its contents, all manner of debris and structural material shooting violently through a window into a giant wooden splash.

One of the most fascinating things about this project to me was its similarity to Inversion House, another modified house installation created by sculptors Dan Havel and Dean Ruck in 2005, roughly 150 miles east in Houston. The resemblance is uncanny in that they are essentially exact opposites. Via phone Whiteburch says the similarity is purely coincidental and that he wasn’t even aware of Inversion House until somebody mentioned it after seeing his work. Photos courtesy Julie and Adam Schreiber.

Art

Snow Drawings at Rabbit Ears Pass by Sonja Hinrichsen

All images © Sonja Hinrichsen

Step by step this massive snow drawing was trampled into freshly fallen snow by artist Sonja Hinrichsen with the help of 5 volunteers last month at Rabbit Ears Pass in Colorado. I love that a piece so expansive and yet so temporary can be created with a few pairs of well choreographed snow boots. If you like this, also check out the beach drawings of Jim Denevan. The photos above are by Cedar Beauregard and you can see many more here. (via reddit)

Update: Want even more snow drawing madness? Don’t miss the work of Simon Beck.

Art

Street Art by Sam3

All images © Sam3

Street Art Utopia just posted an enormous collection of work by street artist Sam3 spanning the last few years but includes a number of pieces I’d never seen before. If you like what you see, also check out his blog and maybe pickup some stuff in his shop. (via street art utopia)

Update: He also made this fun stop motion video.