When history is a blur, when pixels feel like wild nature, when bees aid a poorly child... Videos to incite wonder

Some videos, abstract and concrete, to give you a sense of wonder and potential. Above is Chroma III, the third in a series (here’s one and two) of wildly organic animations from Ian Frederick (with music and sound design from: Flank Audio). We have a longstanding taste for this kind of stuff…

From Aeon:

For his short film The Five-Minute Museum (2015), the UK director Paul Bush was given access to objects in some of the premier historical museums of Europe, including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Bern Historical Museum in Switzerland.

The resulting short video provides a whirlwind survey of human history, from arrowheads to plastic toys. Flipping through objects at a rate of 24 images per second, Bush builds a series of stop-motion animations spanning from the Bronze Age to the Information Age, and touching on such timeless and intertwined human endeavours as religion, recreation, food, currency and war.

Meticulously crafted with impressive sound design to match, the resulting film forms an arc that perhaps mirrors the character of humanity itself – brimming with contradictions, and cascading ever forward.

Again, from Aeon:

Pien is 10 and having treatment for cancer. After learning that crop pesticides and other human activities pose a mounting threat to bees and, by extension, the many foods they pollinate – she developed a passion for the creatures and took up beekeeping.

Despite occasional stings, she finds a kinship with the insects, which, like her, are small, industrious and fighting for their survival. While her doctors are hopeful that Pien will make a full recovery, her chemotherapy treatments are an unwelcome intrusion on time she’d much prefer spending with her friends and her colony.

With atmospheric cinematography and an observational style, the Dutch filmmaker Ellen Vloet’s short documentary Pien, Queen of the Bees is a sweet and touching portrait of childhood – even as weighty challenges for Pien and her hive hover throughout.