For Grands Canons, the French artist Alain Biet made extraordinarily precise drawings of hundreds of ordinary things – pencils and pens, flyswatters and corkscrews, shampoos and spatulas – to build a ‘visual symphony of everyday objects’. Biet adds another level of artistry via his meticulous stop-motion animations, ordering and arranging these lifelike illustrations to build an oddly entrancing viewing experience, complete with a jazzy score by the duo YeP* that evokes the sound of the objects fluttering across the screen. The resulting short film forms something of a tribute to human ingenuity – or, at the very least, a testament to Biet’s knack for mining magic from the mundane.
Director: Alain Biet
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Information and communication
Coverage of the ‘balloon boy’ hoax forms a withering indictment of for-profit news
17 minutes
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Childhood and adolescence
Marmar is living through a devastating war – but she’d rather tell you about her new dress
8 minutes
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Computing and artificial intelligence
The ‘cloud’ requires heaps of energy to stay aloft. Could synthetic DNA be the answer?
12 minutes
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Art
A puppeteer makes sense of an overwhelming world by shrinking it down to size
5 minutes
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History
There are fragments of Romani Gypsy history all over the UK – if one knows where to look
3 minutes
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Biology
Brilliant dots of colour form exquisite patterns in this close-up of butterfly wings
3 minutes
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Anthropology
Does Mogi’s future lie with her horses on the Mongolian steppe, or in the city?
16 minutes
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Genetics
Why it took a century to work out that humans interbred with Neanderthals
22 minutes
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Art
The sprawling mural that depicts an unflinching people’s history of Los Angeles
7 minutes