Here’s another cool example of what’s possible when you combine creativity with an insane amount of dedication: animator Jonathan Chong spent hundreds of hours creating this stop motion video for the song “Against The Grain” by the Australian band Hudson. He animated everything by hand, and captured 5125 individual photographs of 920 pencils for the three-minute long finished product.
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Want to see what pure dedication looks like? This music video for the song “In Your Arms” by Kina Grannis is a stop-motion animation done with a background composed of jelly beans. It’s a crazy project that required 22 months, 1,357 hours, 30 people, and 288,000 jelly beans. They could have used CGI, of course, but each frame was carefully created by hand and photographed with a still camera. It’s even more mind-blowing given this fact: none of it was done with a green screen.
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Here’s a super-awesome way of using stop-motion photography to announce the birth of a new baby.

(via Fstoppers)

Mouthpiece is a series of photographs by photographer Justin Quinell in which he documents some of his life’s experiences as seen by his mouth. The photographs were captured using a custom pinhole camera created from a 110 film cartridge. It’s a unique perspective of the world that we don’t often see in photographs.
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Update: Looks like the video was taken down due to a copyright claim. You can watch it here.

This is more related to filmmaking than photography, but it’s so creative that I just had to share: Gatorade recently released this 5 minute commercial featuring professional skateboarder Chaz Ortiz. What’s mind-blowing is that it captures the passing of a school day in one take. Any mistakes (e.g. Ortiz failing to land a trick) would have ruined the entire shot. You can find a behind-the-scenes video showing how it was made here.

(via Fstoppers)

Here’s an interesting video in which Jack White — singer and guitarist of The White Stripes — shares some thoughts on work ethic and restriction, and how they relate to creativity:

Deadlines and things make you creative, but opportunity and telling yourself “you’ve got all the time in the world, all the money in the world, you’ve all the colors in the pallete you want, anything you want” — that just kills creativity.

For photographers, this means you should keep on shooting even if you feel dry and devoid of fresh ideas — “maybe something good will come out of it.”

(via Chase Jarvis)

Nokia held a competition with a $10,000 prize this year asking filmmakers to create a short film using only the Nokia N8 cell phone. Director JW Griffiths won with this super creative and beautifully shot film titled “Splitscreen: A Love Story”.

(via Laughing Squid)

Here’s a nice bit of encouragement for times when you feel like everyone else is coming up with neat ideas while you’re stuck with lame ones.

(via Nice)

Have you been running low on creative juices lately? Fill up again with these 29 simple ways to stay creative.

You can also check out the list of 13 tips for staying motivated in photography we shared a while back.

(via Laughing Squid)

London filmmaker Temujin Doran created this great little video for Lego that doesn’t involve any flashy effects or fancy camera techniques — just a child-like imagination. It won a prize at the prestigious Cannes Lions advertising festival in 2010.

This concept would work great with other toys and small objects, and can obviously be done as a series of photos as well.