It should come as no surprise that when ILM submitted a sample of their work on The Avengers to be considered for the Best Visual Effects Oscar, it would be focused on the Hulk more than any other element of the film. What you might not expect would be that they’d bookend the reel with some adorable old-timey stop motion recreations of scenes from the movie by their “stop motion guru.”

Yes, I said bookend. Hmm… what was the last scene of The Avengers, again?

(via SuperheroHype.)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Lock Guillermo del Toro in a room and tell him he can’t have any supper until he finishes his work. In this case, his work being the countless projects he’s currently juggling. More fuel was added to that fire back in November of last year when a rumor was reported about the director working on a superhero project for Warner Bros., one that would be based on DC Comics’ magic characters. Well guess what? Del Toro says it’s definitely happening and he even shared a few small details, including that of an impending DC film continuity that involves Batman and Superman. 

And here you thought all the Harry Potter fun was over. (At least until they reboot the film franchise, anyway.) Warner Bros. has been working on two projects sure to excite fans. A secret mini-film has been shooting while a Harry Potter shop has opened at King’s Cross station in London between, you guessed it, platforms nine and ten. 

I think the fake tie is my favorite part. I can feel all sophisticated and collegiate while I’m lounging around with a hot chocolate Butterbeer watching bad TV reading A History of Magic.

Like a (female, wizarding) sir.

(via: FashionablyGeek)

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Well, that didn’t take long. JK Rowling‘s The Casual Vacancy, a global bestseller and the first adult book by the author, is being adapted for the small screen by the BBC. As of yet there’s no specific information on anyone who will be involved in the projectsave Rowling herself, whom the BBC reports “will collaborate closely with the project, with the number and length of the episodes to be decided once the creative adaptation process has formally begun.”

I can’t be the only one who thought “AHHHH! Dementor!” when seeing this Harry Potter robe, can I? The association is more clear in the profile view (pic past the jump.)

OK, first, a caveat: We’re not quite up to Harry Potter-level shenanigans yet. The “cloak,” created by a team at Duke University led by graduate student Nathan Landry, isn’t a cloak in the swirly-cloth sense, but rather a diamond-shaped box made out of something called metamaterial. It can only shield a 3×0.4″ cylinder from being seen from a specific direction. And the cylinder can only be shielded from microwave radiation, not the visible light spectrum.

Still, this is the first time that any invisibility cloak of any description has been successfully brought into the realm of reality. They’ve been around since 2006, but previous models always reflected some of the incident light instead of channeling 100 percent of it around the object, which is what makes it truly invisible.

Plenty of people are excited (and worried) about Warner Bros. finally putting together a Justice League movie and that’s all well and good but what I’d like to know is, will we see any of the magic characters in the film? I couldn’t care less about that right now though, Guillermo del Toro is planning on making his own DC Comics film with ALL OF THE MAGIC CHARACTERS. I think I just died and went to The House of Mystery. 

“It’s a diorama depicting two space-traveling modern ponies discovering an ancient pony ruin on an exotic world,” says the artist behind this diorama, prepared for My Little Pony Project 2012, “I was going for a mix of Planet of the Apes plus Lost, meets Prometheus where the new Friendship Is Magic ponies discover a Stone Age relic of the original style of pony. This suggests they have encountered evidence of their prehistoric extraterrestrial origins.”

Let just hope they know better than to take off their helmets or touch any mysterious space goo. Seriously.

YouTuber Feedsy’s My Little Pony animation was inspired by a fascination with the design of the six main characters of the show. The results is frankly hypnotic, as you try to catch the tiny ways in which he imbues simple shapes with the personalities viewers know so well.

(via PotatofFarmGirl.)