Warning: this film features sequences of flashing light that could be unsuitable for photosensitive viewers.
Since 1990, scientists have gone from merely speculating about the existence of exoplanets to having identified some 5,000 and counting. And beyond just discovering them, increasingly powerful telescopes and new detection techniques are helping astronomers determine the astoundingly diverse forms that planets can take. This sprawling work from the US filmmaker and musician John D Boswell (also known as Melodysheep) melds hard science with informed speculation to take viewers on an interstellar journey to some of the most fascinating exoplanets scientists have yet discovered. Via a futuristic interstellar spaceship, Boswell sends viewers on an operatic, 3D-animated tour of nearby solar systems, revealing Earth-like planets that could potentially harbour life, as well as far-out worlds of metal clouds, burning ice, double sunsets and breathtaking auroras.
Video by Melodysheep
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Knowledge
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Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
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War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
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Physics
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Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
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Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
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