Hidden gems: films and talks you probably missed
18 videos · Quiet, lower-profile favorites: vanishing crafts, mid-century design films, forgotten identity work and small human stories about making things. Start with the hand-made crafts and work toward the strange machines.
12:53Art of the Marbler
A 1970 film from Bedfordshire Archives showing the craft of marbling paper by hand, featuring the marbler Sydney Cockerell. It follows the process step by step, from floating colors on a bath to lifting the pattern onto paper.
2:41Globe Making: How the World is Made (1955) | British Pathé
A 1955 British Pathe film showing how globes were made at the time. It is archival footage of a craft and manufacturing process, with the film's own period narration.
9:07The Great Wave - Part 1
The first part of David Bull's long series on reproducing Hokusai's Great Wave by traditional Japanese woodblock printing. Bull is a woodblock printer in Tokyo, and the series follows the work as he does it.
11:41霓虹的製作 The Making of Neon Signs | NEONSIGNS.HK 探索霓虹
A short documentary from the West Kowloon Cultural District on how neon signs are made by hand in Hong Kong. It follows the craft of bending glass tubes and building the signs.
8:17The Lost Art of Paste-Up
A short film from the London Review of Books about paste-up, the analogue method of assembling magazine and newspaper pages by hand before desktop publishing. It shows how text and images were laid out on boards and prepared for printing.
28:46FarewellEtaoinShrdlu
A documentary from the late 1970s on the last day the New York Times was set in hot metal on Linotype machines before the move to computer typesetting. It follows the whole process from the newsroom to the press.
13:37A Step Saving Kitchen, 1949
A 1949 US Department of Agriculture film, held by the US National Archives, on redesigning a kitchen so a cook takes fewer steps. It lays out how to arrange work centers, storage and appliances around the flow of preparing a meal.
9:57SX-70
A short film by the Eames Office about the Polaroid SX-70, the folding instant camera, made by Charles and Ray Eames. It combines a technical explanation of the camera with a promotional tone.
53:51The Legacy of the NASA Worm Logo (Official NASA Broadcast)
An official NASA broadcast on the legacy of the NASA worm logo, the stylised modernist wordmark that NASA used for years before bringing it back. It tells the story of the identity and why it still resonates.
27:00AT&T Archives: Saul Bass Pitch Video for Bell System Logo Redesign
A roughly half-hour film in which Saul Bass pitches the redesign of the Bell System logo to AT&T. He sets out the thinking behind the new mark and the identity system around it.
5:04Meet the Engineer Preserving The Last Analog Motion Graphics Machine
A VICE TV piece on an engineer who is preserving and restoring the Scanimate, an analog machine that produced the motion graphics seen in TV broadcasts before digital tools took over. It shows the machine at work and the effort of keeping it running.
14:10Meeting Mr. Kid Pix
Jeffrey Alan Scudder, known as Whistlegraph, made this short documentary after meeting Craig Hickman, the creator of Kid Pix. It covers the paint program made for children.
8:29The Pixel Painter
A short documentary about Hal Lasko, a partially blind retired man who made detailed pixel artwork in Microsoft Paint well into his nineties. It shows his method and his late-life turn to digital art.
18:37The Man Who Invented More Than 800 Iconic Toys | Eddy's World | The New Yorker
A New Yorker documentary short on Eddy Goldfarb, the toy inventor behind more than 800 toys, including Ker-Plunk and Chattering Teeth. It follows him through his work and his approach to inventing playthings.
10:17Extreme transformer home in Hong Kong: Gary Chang's 24 rooms in 1
Kirsten Dirksen tours the roughly 344 sq ft Hong Kong apartment of architect Gary Chang, which he reworked with sliding walls and fold-away fittings so it can become up to 24 different rooms. It is a tour of one very small home and the thinking behind it.
1:00Machine with Concrete - Arthur Ganson
Machine with Concrete is a kinetic sculpture by Arthur Ganson. A motor drives a chain of worm-gear pairs, each cutting the speed to one fiftieth, so the last gear, embedded in concrete, turns far too slowly to see.
5:15Box
Box is a short art film by the studio Bot and Dolly that combines projection onto moving surfaces with industrial robots moving them. The result is kinematic art in which the projected scene and the moving panels are choreographed together.
10:00Guerrilla Public Service 2011
Artist Richard Ankrom documents how he made and secretly installed a missing exit sign on a Los Angeles freeway in 2001. He matched the look of the official highway signs closely enough that it stayed up for years.