This is a pretty amazing video featuring daredevil Danny MacAskill jumping fences and off of roofs…on a bicycle. It’s a pretty awe inspiring video to watch just to marvel at his sheer skills which is why I chose it as the Buzzworthy Wednesday for this week. The video was originally published in April and has steadily chugged along since then to almost 10 million views. It’s lightly branded by Inspired Bicycles which is what makes it so effective.
Danny MacAskill reminds me of Hans “No Way” Rey who pioneered the sport of Mountain bike trialing in the 80′s when I was growing up. I would try to “emulate” Hans while going over “jumps” on my Schwinn Varsity 10 speed in my neighborhood. Bikes are one of the first methods of transportation a kid gets to their own freedom. You can go places on a bike you couldn’t by foot and jump over things just to test yourself. I remember lusting after certain brands of bikes because that was what Hans Rey or Greg Lemond were riding on.
If this was just a video about the bike brand with their message slapped all over it no one would watch it, but to watch a master of trialing perform while set to the perfect soundtrack of “The Funeral” by Band of Horses makes you watch with your jaw dropped open at what this guy can do on a bike. If I were into trialing or if I were a kid today after watching this video…this is the bike I’d want because every kid on a bike dreams of doing the stuff Danny does in this video.
Everyone who knows me, knows I’m a big fan of stop motion animation. This week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday is a video tribute to some classic 80′s video games including Tetris, Mario, PacMan and they’re all made of LEGOs using stop motion animation. The music in the video is by Daniel Larsson and the animation was done by Tomas Redigh, the two members of Rumdreglage, who spend 1,500 hours in creating this amazing video.
Tomas Redigh spent over 7 months creating this video in his studio moving LEGO bricks around and taking pictures. In it’s first 5 days online it racked up over 1.7 million views and a month later is over 3.5 million views.
While its hard to say what exactly caused this music video to be such a huge success I think part is due to the pain-staking process of stop motion video and even the casual viewer can appreciate the effort that goes in. I also think the use of LEGOs was brilliant not only to visualize that 8-bit video look but also because of the huge online community of passionate fans that LEGOs has. I hope LEGO as a corporation gives these guys and other independent stop motion artists an opportunity to work with them and produce animations for future LEGO online video marketing projects…if the guys from Rymdreglage are interested.
In honor of everyone returning back to school there were a number of laptop videos released in the past couple of weeks. Nokia released a video for a brand new breed of portable devices, called the Booklet 3G. What does it take to make a netbook sexy? While it’s a pretty straight forward product demo – it’s done elegantly, with a great soundtrack, branded color scheme throughout and takes advantage of YouTube’s HD which really shows it’s stuff in this video when you watch it in full screen mode. All that combined makes it this week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday selection.
As a mobile market industry leader, Nokia has been expected by the mobile market to release a product in the world of netbooks. With the fierce competition in the mobile market raging on, Nokia chose to widen their product range with the Nokia Booklet 3G and step into the netbook arena with authority.
The video was picked up worldwide immediately after it’s release on August 24th by some influential blogs which already has resulted in over 660,000 views and over 20 duplicate videos.
This was a tough week because there were a ton of contenders for Buzzworthy Wednesday, but I made my choice by what hit me the hardest. One of my pet peeves is people who text and generally cause a nuisance on the road trying to use their phones while they are driving. It’s no better than drunk driving and people need to figure this out. This was a PSA put together by the Gwent Police Department in the UK to show the dangers of texting while driving.
It’s been viewed over 5 million times since it’s upload at the end of June with the views split between about 20 duplicate videos.
Chief Inspector John Pavett from Gwent Police Roads Policing Unit hopes the serious message in this film will hit home to viewers: “I hope that after watching this film motorists will think twice before picking up their mobile phone when behind the wheel and realize that a quick reply to a text message or answering a phone call is never worth putting theirs and other people’s lives at risk.”
Warning: it is graphic but with good reason. Seriously…no phone call or text is that important.
Sorry this wasn’t posted earlier…minor problem with my WordPress install delayed me.
Typically I select a video from YouTube or some other video sharing site to profile here, but this is a site that is taking video and thinking outside the box…literally.
Quiksilver, which specializes in surf, snow and skateboarding clothing and gear put together a website focused on their skateboarding side which utilizes the skateboarding talents of Tony Hawk, Alex Olson, Danny Garcia, Reese Forbes and Kyle Leeper set to The Heartaches music. It comes up looking like a standard website with navigation but quickly degenerates from there – utilizing the entire browser frame as their skate park. I have no coordination and it even made me want to skateboard. All ending with easy ways for you to share it on your favorite social media site. So check it out by clicking the screenshot below.
On a rant here but isn’t it amazing that Tony Hawk is 41 and is still seen as the epitome of cool going on 20+ years as a skateboarding phenom? I’m just saying – that’s pretty awesome.
