TED

Jason Silva calls himself a media artist, filmmaker and “idea-dj”. His video “Radical Openness”, supported with a multitude of Shutterstock footage, premiered at the TEDGlobal Conference in 2012 and has since gone viral. Together with his other videos, Silva’s inspiring anthems have been seen nearly two million times on his Vimeo channel.

Scott Liedtka, visual effects supervisor for Tippett Studios, talks to Dell about how they went about making the talking teddy bear Ted present at this year's Oscars.

He explains, "We had two big challenges. First we had about one-third of the time to finish a shot as we did on the feature film, and second, we had to create a tuxedo for Ted to wear. Cloth simulations are always tough to get right and for our lead cloth effects artist we got a monster box – a Dell Precision T7600 workstation fully loaded to capacity – so he could push through a ton of iterations on the cloth sims. He would get this wicked smile on his face as he put more and more load on the machine trying to get it to crumble, but the box never even stumbled. It was amazing."

Read the full piece here.

Don Levy talks about the evolution of visual effects within the history of cinema in this TED Talk from March 2012. See his montage taking us from George Mélies through Inception below.

In this TED talk, Ryan Merkley demonstrates Popcorn Maker, which lets users edit videos on the fly. He says, "Video has been left out. It arrived on the web in a small box. There it has remained completely disconnected from the data and the content all around it...Popcorn changes all of that. It's an online tool that allows anyone to combine video with content pulled live directly from the web."

Watch the short demo below.

From Rob Legato talking special effects to James Cameron ruminating on curiosity, FilmmakerIQ collects 10 fascinating recent TED talks that are most relatable to filmmakers. See their full list here.

In his entertaining TED talk, visual effects supervisor Rob Legato (Titanic, Avatar, Hugo, Apollo 13) talks about how he created some of the most memorable scenes he's worked on, including the launch of Apollo 13 and the sinking of the Titanic.

Watch below and go here to read the five films that most influenced Legato visually.

SlashGear talks to Jenny Fulle of The Creative-Cartel about the motion-capture technology they used to create Seth MacFarlane's raunchy teddy bear in hit movie Ted.

Director Koemer Union and creative boutique We Are Pi are responsible for the dreamy human kaleidoscope found below, significant because the entire effect is created in-camera with the help of a mirrored overhead structure. The video opened up the TEDxSummit.