A spark of insight! A concept seen in a flash of premonitory clarity! A creation that overtakes and remakes society! Few aspects of the scientific process capture the imagination quite like the invention of something wholly new. There's a dynamism even in the word itself: it suggests a sudden overwhelming breakthrough and practically demands the finality of an exclamation point. If this cultural conception of the "Eureka!" moment persists at the expense of the less thrilling reality that most technology advances by incremental hard work, it still captures something significant: that once a pivotal creation or convenience enters our lives, even if by years of slow progress, it creates a sense of critical advancement in retrospect. Soon, it's hard to even imagine life before the light bulb, the radio, the internal combustion engine, aeroplane flight, the home computer, the modem, fidget spinner, the hoverboard. And by this, the unitary act of invention maintains it mythic status in our pop-scientific narratives.
A taxi ride to the Patent Office becomes an expedition into the realm of scientific research. While driving in the cab, a nervous scientist explains his invention – a novel cancer agent, whose specialty lies in the way of transportation of the active ingredient – to his annoyed taxi driv
When Milo's newest invention, the Reverse Microwave, actually turns out to be a time machine, he and his best friend Levi set out on an adventure through time.
On a small island crowned with sharp cliffs, a single house looks out to sea. Obsessed by the dream that humans may one day fly like birds, an inventor experiments with his machines on this parcel of abandoned land. For this man, only a pure, light, and naive person would be capable of this feat. Re
Young inventor Alice likes to keep to herself but is cruelly humiliated by three spiteful girls who post a video of her online. Stanley, an eccentric little boy and wannabe superhero, vows to avenge Alice, leaving her feeling obliged to protect him. With Stanley overpowered by the bullies, three mec
Genius Marius Borodine's spectacular new invention that can transform any and all objects into drinkable water, bewilders the public, scientific communities, and the family of the misunderstood creator, especially after he takes one step too far.
Salome, 15 years old, works in her father's workshop, a famous painter for his blue color. But now that the painter, too old, is no longer able to make his famous color, jeopardizing his workshop. Salome begins to hope that her father forward its closely guarded secret until then ...
Is there anything more Canadian than a moose-antler electric guitar? After a near-death experience, retired machinist Lorne Collie started making whimsical stringed instruments. His DIY inventiveness transformed lawn rakes, stop signs, and bent pitchforks into fully playable banjos, fiddles and viol
Two 16mm camera rolls shot at the Collective Unconscious during a performance of "Teslamania" featuring Gecko Saccomanno and Tesla Coil Engineer Jamie Mereness. The film's visual effects, double exposures, and refracted images, were all done in camera, just as we see them here.
In the warm light of a glowing filament the moving machine parts resemble spools, wires and gearwheels. A turntable with a numerical scale spins slowly and shows various readings, though their significance is never revealed. Details, parts of which are out of focus, appear on a black background, and
David Liu and his team at Harvard have taken the basic premise of CRISPR technology and enhanced it in a way that is simply stunning. CRISPR 2.0 is one of the most important scientific innovations in the last 100 years, and like everything else in the natural world, it's all Chemistry.
An engineer, hired by a venture capitalist for an impossible task, gets trapped in physics and the creative process. Written & Directed by Laurence Rosier Staines Produced by Agnieszka Switala Director of Photography – Pavel Trotsenko Production Design – Hugh O'Connor Edited by Laurence
Muybridge´s Disobedient Horses is a series of four episodes in which the artist Anna Vasof investigates where she can find the essence of cinematic illusion when she looks into everyday life and what happens when she uses everyday objects and movements as cinematographic mechanisms. Even if th
Tilda Swinton's hypnotic voiceover and a treasure trove of rare archival footage culled from hundreds of films from the 1880s through the 1930s—much of it previously unseen—combine to trace the anxieties of today's hyper-connected world back a hundred years. Then, too, electric media spa
Journey of a Bright Idea. A beginner needs to literally kill time, and invents the world's first throwable alarm clock. Professional inventors cheer him on, by sharing independent research, prototyping, and marketing wisdom.
Irinyi is a steampunk short film about the secret invention of the famous scientist. In 1858, ten years after the downfall of the Hungarian freedom fights, Irinyi János (the inventor of the non-explosive match) is still working on restarting the revolution. The success of the new fights would
What do trees know that we don't? 13-year-old inventor Aidan realized that trees use a mathematical formula to gather sunlight in crowded forests. Then he wondered why we don't collect solar energy in the same way.
At the height of the Internet age, the first driverless car casualty sets off a chain of events for CEO Lazarus, Chief Executive Officer of technology conglomerate and driverless car company, Dyne Motors. Amid plummeting stocks and investor faith, Dyne Motors enlists the aid of a former race car dri
A small prairie town has few secrets but in Balgonie, Saskatchewan, Bill Gibson had one. Each night, when most folks were home asleep, Bill was busy in his workshop. You see, Bill had a dream. He was building a flying machine. This charming puppet animation film tells his story.
The Tesla World Light is an 8-minute 2017 black and white avant-garde film by Montreal director Matthew Rankin imagining the latter days of inventor Nikola Tesla in 1905 in New York City.
Have you ever wondered about the evolution of human tool use? How are Paleolithic stone tools related, cognitively, to the development of genetic engineering tools like CRISPR? Genevieve Dewar, a paleoanthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Toronto, and Kate Krueger, a molecular biolog
Since 1987, the anthropologist Pierre-Jacques Dusseau, who works in prisons, has collected objects made by detainees. Refused by museums of ethnography, these everyday objects and artistic creations are gathering dust in his attic. Each one has a story that sheds a different light on penal instituti
It is no secret that shoes say a lot about the person wearing them. The shoe´s form, material and condition provide insight into social status, character, and, last but not least, potential desires. In Down to Earth , Anna Vasof refers to this multifunctional significance while putting a very
We went for it without any hesitation. We've formed the world at a quickening pace. What on earth is this world that we've created?
The story of a pioneer of the engine who dreamt of dragonflies as a child and died living out his dream. Life and death of a 20th century Icarus.
Animated still photographs reveal movement and light on the forest paths that are otherwise invisible to the human eye.
One man's exploration of his desires leads to significant consequences that go far beyond his control.
Zhenan Bao and her team at Stanford University are one of many teams around the world harnessing Polymers to help us develop a near perfect replcation of human skin.
A fictionalized retelling of one of the great discoveries of the 20th century: the rabies vaccine. France, 1885. Little Albertine lives just across the laboratory of famous professor Louis Pasteur. Every night, from her bedroom window, she watches him as he works… But what is he doing to thes
This short film serves as a poem-on-film about the coming of the machine age on the eve of World War I. Images and sounds combine to recreate a bygone era of scratchy phonograph records, faded photographs, hand-cranked movie cameras, staccato Morse telegraph messages, and rhythmic steam pumps. Machi
After a long one-shot journey through crackling dead leaves, the camera slowly comes to a stop perched ontop a small robots with four wheels in the forest. This curious machine with spherical charm held by a wooden structure holds inside its heart a crystal ball that reflects the landscape at-large
Film is. consists almost exclusively, of sequences from existing scientific films. These films are about the acrobatic flights of pigeons, the intelligence testing of apes; about reversed worlds and stereoscopic vision; hurricanes and impact waves in the air. How glass breaks, children walk and how
After watching Back to the Future 2, an imaginative young girl and her stuffed teddy bear try to invent a real, working Hoverboard.
Tagged introduces us to the raging debate over the ubiquitous Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip, touted as a tool with invaluable medical applications by its supporters and denounced as the death knell for civil liberties by privacy advocates. This playfully smart short doc lets the audienc
Ghostcode is a 3d animated science-fiction film set in 2056 uncovering advancements in sonic warfare, holographic entertainment and its weaponization, the synthesis of corporation and nation state, and the unstable intentions of net-born artificial intelligence. This is an era in which human flesh h
In a dark expanse that could be the cosmos, we hear the voice of Arthur C. Clarke, whose face – taken from a BBC archive dating back to the 1960s – appears in the distance. His features quickly dematerialize into a multitude of shimmering pixels, creating an enveloping and immersive spac
Eugeniusz Rudnik revolutionized the idea of music itself with a pair of scissors and a magnetic tape. As part of the legendary Experimental Studio of Polish Radio, he revealed hidden value in rough and rejected sounds long before the rise of the DJs. In an era of electronic music created in a worksh
'Oramics: Atlantis Anew' is conceived of as an artist's film in homage to Daphne Oram, the pioneer of British Electronic Music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958. The film features a close-up encounter with her unique invention, the Oramics Machine, housed at the Science Museum i