The Denali Experiment: A Test of Human Limits

How does the say­ing go? It’s the jour­ney, not the des­ti­na­tion, that counts?

The short film above, The Denali Exper­i­ment, doc­u­ments the gnarly expe­di­tion of some rock star skiers. Their goal? To sum­mit Denali, the high­est moun­tain peak in North Amer­i­ca, and then ski down its steep slopes. The beau­ti­ful­ly-shot film by Jim­my Chen focus­es almost entire­ly on the jour­ney up the moun­tain, a big 20,320 feet. For the skiers, the high alti­tude moun­taineer­ing was the hard part, the test of human lim­its. Not the trip down. Sit back and enjoy the jour­ney.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Extreme Pho­tog­ra­phy: Shoot­ing Big Climbs at Yosemite

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Stanley Kubrick’s Photographs: Browse Them or Own Them

In 1945, a young Stan­ley Kubrick grad­u­at­ed from high school and almost imme­di­ate­ly start­ed work­ing for LOOK Mag­a­zine as a pho­to­jour­nal­ist, becom­ing the youngest staff pho­tog­ra­ph­er in the magazine’s his­to­ry. It’s dur­ing this peri­od that Kubrick began to mas­ter his visu­al craft and pro­duced some stun­ning images. Now, more than 65 years lat­er, you can pur­chase … or sim­ply browse through … Kubrick­’s pho­to­graph­ic work for the first time.

Work­ing with cura­tors from the Muse­um of the City of New York, VandM.com has select­ed 25 images to show­case (out of a larg­er col­lec­tion of 10,000 images). Pho­tos include prize­fight­er Wal­ter Carti­er in the cor­ner between rounds; the ele­gant actress Bet­sy Von Fursten­berg read­ing in a win­dow; street scenes from New York City; and a young woman walk­ing down a steep set of stairs while car­ry­ing a pile of books, all rather pre­car­i­ous­ly.

You can browse the full col­lec­tion here, or vis­it anoth­er set of Kubrick images, all tak­en in Chica­go, here.

Relat­ed Kubrick Con­tent:

Mak­ing The Shin­ing

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange: Mal­colm McDow­ell Looks Back

Post-Apocalyptic Cover Art Created in Amazing Time-Lapse Film

Dei Gaztelu­men­di is a young Span­ish artist. He was com­mis­sioned recent­ly to cre­ate a cov­er illus­tra­tion for the com­ic book mag­a­zine Xabiroi, and decid­ed to make a time-lapse video of the process. The result is a fas­ci­nat­ing look at how the artist begins with a rough sketch on paper and then builds lay­er upon lay­er of detail using the Adobe Cre­ative Suite soft­ware. Thir­ty hours of work are com­pressed into 11 min­utes. “A lot of emo­tion went into this paint­ing,” Gaztelu­men­di said on his blog, “since I made it as a gift to one of my bud­dies, who trag­i­cal­ly lost a leg in a motor­bike acci­dent about a year ago.” Gaztelu­men­di was born in San Sebas­t­ian, Basque Coun­try, Spain in 1987, and began illus­trat­ing chil­dren’s books as a teenag­er. He stud­ied ani­ma­tion at Sheri­dan Col­lege in Ontario, Cana­da, where his the­sis film was a whim­si­cal tale called Earlth & Moonch. Since grad­u­at­ing with high hon­ors last year, Gaztelu­men­di has been work­ing as a com­mer­cial illus­tra­tor, spe­cial­iz­ing in crea­ture and char­ac­ter art. You can see more of his work at Deisign.com.

A Brief Visual Introduction to Saul Bass’ Celebrated Title Designs

Title sequences begin and end every movie. They can be “engag­ing or wild­ly enter­tain­ing … or sim­ply drop dead beau­ti­ful.” They can “ooze with visu­al poet­ry and sophis­ti­cat­ed imagery.” And they can put the audi­ence in the right mood for the movie, or close it in the right way, says the web site For­get the Films, Watch the Titles.

When it comes to title design, no one did it bet­ter than Saul Bass (1920–1996). Dur­ing his long career in Hol­ly­wood, Bass designed sequences for Otto Pre­minger’s The Man with the Gold­en Arm (full movie here), Scors­ese’s Good­fel­las and Cape Fear, Kubrick­’s Spar­ta­cus, and sev­er­al films by Alfred Hitch­cock. And that’s just begin­ning to scratch the sur­face.

Cre­at­ed by Ian Albinson, the mon­tage above offers a brief visu­al his­to­ry of Bass’s most cel­e­brat­ed work, stitch­ing togeth­er designs from 25 films. (Find the full film list here.)  If this whets your appetite, you’ll want to check out the new­ly-pub­lished book Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design and this web site ded­i­cat­ed to Bass’s title design. And don’t miss our big col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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All Together Now: Every Beatles Song Played at Once

The idea is sim­ple, real­ly. Take every Bea­t­les tune, all 226 of them, and play them togeth­er, sequenc­ing them so that they end at the exact same moment. And here’s what you get. The Bea­t­les as you’ve nev­er heard them before … and may nev­er want to hear them again.

h/t kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Bea­t­les’ Rooftop Con­cert: The Last Gig

Jim­my Page Tells the Sto­ry of Kash­mir

The Bea­t­les Com­plete on Ukulele

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.