ILM (Industrial Light & Magic), created by George Lucas to create the special effects for Star Wars, has maintained a lead role since pioneering computer graphics in Hollywood movies. This Encore Special, covers ILM’s story from the first Star Wars film to its role in movies like Iron Man and Transformers. One of the more interesting aspects covered in this documentary is seeing how the company transitioned from analog to digital effects.

Matt Diffee, a cartoonist for the New Yorker since 1999, talks at Cusp 2011 about how he designs jokes. Titled “Things You Might Not Think I Think About”, Matt shares his process for coming up with jokes and many of the tips and rules he uses. From the composing the visuals that maximize the comedic effect to the word play, there is no doubt that Matt is right as rain speaking at a design conference.

Yves Béhar talks at Cusp 2011 on his company’s projects including the Puma shoebox, NYC condoms, Herman Miller Sayl Chair, One-Laptop-Per-Child, and many others. With every project, Yves team strives to make long-term partnerships with their clients and are keen to strive for innovative, sustainable, and ethical designs.

National Geographic goes behind the scenes with this Megafactories special in HD. Get a complete end-to-end view at the detailed, hand crafted, and highly specialized manufacturing process of this one-of-a-kind machine. Part car, part aircraft, jaw-dropping facts abound, including the fact that only 17 titanium bolts hold the front and rear sections fo the car together, each of which costs $100 to create.

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Miguel Endara, creates a drawing of his father composed entirely out of 3.2 million ink dots. The beautifully crafted video shows the progress from the very first dot and the fine precision and detail produced as the result after a mear 210 hours (8.75 solid days or 5.25 full-time office weeks) of work.

This short documentary, created by Hira Verick and Gary Hustwit tours the Sony Ericsson design house. The documentary focuses on extracting the design philosophy from the designers that goes into the entire user experience including the hardware, the software, and even the soundscape. The documentary interviews the entire design team including George Arriola, head of Human Interface Design, Rei Fukuda, Marten Jonsson, Hanne-Marte Holmoy, and many others.

Scott Farquhar, the co-founder and CEO of Atlassian talks about his experience growing the company to $100 million with no sales team. Nothing short of a must-see for entrepreneurs, Scott presents 10 commandments for startups at the Business of Software event. A few of the commandments are ‘Use your own product’, ‘measure everything’, ‘think long term’, and ‘build somewhere that you want to work’. For a full writeup, check out Mark Littlewood’s notes.

Bonnier R&D and BERG created a conceptual video about how the magazine experience would translate to touchscreen devices. The video was made back in 2008, before the iPad was on the scene. With magazines like Wired and Project, it is easy to still long for an experience envisioned in this two year old video. To date, perhaps the best interactive reading experience is that of “Our Choice” from Push Pop Press which incorporates several of these ideas but takes interactivity to a whole new level.

Lyle Alzaldo and his friends cooked up this cute video on being an Interaction Designer. In short the colorful video is a rallying cry around the love of sticky notes and prototyping, and creating overall great user experiences. As UX designers we thrive on bringing clarity to complexity, finding order in the chaos, and now there is a video that expresses our excitement for just that.

Hans Rosling, famous for his lectures which explore enormous amounts of public data and presents it in a storytelling fashion, presents data on 200 countries in 200 years. Weatherman and sports commentators can step aside as Hans presentation style is both exciting and engaging and for the first time steps it up with the use of augmented reality. In this video Hans shares the story 200 countries have moved from being poor with low life expectancy to wealthy and high life expectancy using over 120,000 data points in the process.