Filed by KOSU News in Science.
December 22, 2012

What if, and I’m just being silly here, but what if houses were warm-blooded, and got cold in December like we do? What if?

Then, you’d do to them what we do to ourselves: you bundle them up in something warm. That’s what this charming little video (an ad for a natural gas company) does: it dresses a house, covering floors, banisters, radiators, the odd sneaker, toys, stoves, teapots with comfy looking wool. Even the shower gets a wool-over.

This ad was created by Lovo Films, a Belgian company, and I found their “How We Did It” video, which shows the crew (40 people working 4 days and nights) carefully attaching yards of yarn to walls, radiators, banisters, pipes, and then — and this amazed me — pulling stitches, unwinding the wooly surfaces, sometimes thread by thread.

The purpose here, says director Olivier Babinet, was to show the TV audience what “warm looks like.”

Chemists, of course, think “warm looks like” highly excited atoms careening about. But that’s so mechanical, so 19th century. In this version, “warm” is excitable atoms imagining themselves as snuggly bits of sheep. I wouldn’t try this metaphor in a chemistry lab, but hey, it’s the weekend — the chemists are all Christmas shopping — who’s going to mind?

I found these videos on a site called Colossal, curated by Chicagoan Christopher Jobson, who champions people who design, build, draw, shape, paint, weave and sculpt. He (and his spouse) have impeccable taste, post frequently, and try to remind us “that in this digital age there are still countless people making incredible work with their bare hands.” [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]