Modern animation is pretty incredible. It’s getting close to being indistinguishable from actual film thanks to advanced computer graphics and futuristic techniques. French artist Julien Maire is taking animation back a few decades to a kind of nostalgic stop-motion era with the short film “Relief.”

Instead of drawings on pieces of film, Relief features tiny translucent resin figurines on a conveyor belt. The 3D figures roll around the belt with a light illuminating one at a time against a projector screen.

As they roll around the belt, the small figures act out a scene of a man digging a hole and then putting the dirt back into the hole. A total of 85 tiny men rotate around and around, eternally taking dirt out and putting it back in. Their never-ending labor is a unique combination of low-tech – stop animation – and high-tech – 3D printing.

Relief isn’t just a movie to be watched on the projector screen; it’s an experience that encompasses the entire humming machine and each tiny, 3D-printed little character that casts its individual shadow. The stop-motion shadow show was built while Maire was doing a manufacturing residency at the iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology in Brussels.

The post Stop-Motion Film Composed of Rotating 3D Miniature Men first appeared on Gajitz.

We all have our favorite movies, but it takes a special level of dedication to build a real-life replica of an object from one of those movies. Redditor scoodidabop built this crazy Ford Explorer straight out of Jurassic Park. It’s all decked out in the exact colors, configuration, and even contents of the park vehicles from the first movie – and it is truly awesome.

In-car monitors provide maps of the island the park is on, complete with the zones in which each type of dinosaur resides. The map won’t do you much good when the power goes out and the dinos escape, but maybe you’ll get a nice tour before that happens.

The car started out as a 1993 Ford Explorer and took over a year to complete. It was replicated in painstaking detail, though we can’t say whether the seats are hiding night vision goggles under them.

The Explorer’s dashboard even features two plastic drinking cups, presumably to act as an early warning sign when the T. Rex escapes and starts hunting every living being on the island. That probably won’t happen in this replica, but just to be careful we wouldn’t take it into any wildlife safari parks.

The post A Bumpy Ride: Perfectly Replicated Jurassic Park Tour Truck first appeared on Gajitz.

Don’t you just love it when two different gadgets come together to make one awesome technology that you never knew you needed until it was invented? Yeah, that’s what we were thinking when we heard about Netflix’s hack of their own system using a FitBit fitness sensor to determine if you’ve fallen asleep while watching something on Netflix. The FitBit tells your streaming device – computer, smart TV, Roku or whatever – when you have nodded off.

Netflix then pauses the program at that spot, saving your place for later so you don’t have to do the endless fast-forward searching for the last scene you remember. When you wake up, you just go right back to the bookmarked spot at which you drifted off. If you fall asleep watching movies as often as we do, this will seem like some kind of magical gift. This hack came from an internal hack session at Netflix, so there doesn’t seem to be much of a chance that it will actually be marketed – but we can always hope.

The post Ingenious Netflix Hack Pauses Movie When You Fall Asleep first appeared on Gajitz.

The marvel of the moving picture is now at your fingertips. Remember the first time you drew those sequential stick figures on the outer margins of your 8th-grade copy of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’? The GIF computer file is sort of the modern version, and a new camera gives you physical copies.

Designer Jiho Jang captured this novel concept with his camera, the GIF-TY. It uses the burst-shot technology of a Polaroid camera and a ‘Zero-Ink’ printer to give you sequential photographs. They print out in a strip that allows you to rip each frame apart and stack in order to make a mini-film. The GIF-TY has a timer that can make the flip books between 1-5 seconds.

The two principle ideas behind a ‘movie’ – persistence of vision and phi phenomenon – are very captivating. Jang seemed to have this in mind when he created GIF-TY. The camera fully realizes this, along with that unique memory GIF-TY helped you create.

The post Fun Movie + Photo Camera Gives You the Gift of Memory first appeared on Gajitz.

Watching movies on your iPhone is kind of amazing when you think about it, but the screen is so small that it’s not exactly a cinema-like experience. Designer Mike Enayah has created an interesting way to use the iPhone as a personal movie theater while blocking out the rest of the world.

The iPhone Theater consists of a set of headphones with a movable iPhone-holding arm. The arm holds the iPhone in front of the user’s eyes at the optimal viewing position. While the movie plays, the sound is piped through the headphones, creating an isolated movie viewing experience.

Whether anyone would be brave enough to use this contraption in public is still an open question. But it could definitely be useful for keeping a cranky kid (or a cranky adult) occupied on a long car or plane ride.

The post Head-Mounted Cinema Turns iPhone Into Private Movie Theater first appeared on Gajitz.