Faber-Castell's been making pencils since 1761 and wants to show-not-tell you about them. Wordless cinematography and a epic soundtrack right out of Hollywood.

Producing 2.3 billion pencils a year and being in the business for over 257 years, Faber-Castell has a sound know-how of how quality pencils are made. Have a look behind the scenes of our manufacturing.

The beauty of this video is the tension between two advertising concepts: "make the industrial process look artisanal" vs "glorify the scale of the industrial process." So you end up with intimately-recorded pencil-scatching noises played comically loud, fighting for attention against Logic Pro's orchestal sample library.

Previously

• Epic glove ad explains benefits of gloves • Epic chains ad explains benefits of chains Read the rest

As tomatoes move down a conveyor belt and into a hopper, the machine identifies the green tomatoes and actuates a lever to kick them out.

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My favorite part of this video is the hand-cranked machine that strips dried kernels of corn from the cob, then grabs the denuded cob and deposits it out of the hopper (hopefully later to be turned into corncob pipes [I had a friend in college who smoked pot in a corncob pipe.]). After that the kernels are ground into meal with a gas=powered mill that has pulleys and a belt that are just begging for a person to get their finger close enough to bite off. Read the rest

Ever wonder how they tie up enormous trees for transport? One option is this three-armed model, though you might be distracted by the guy not wearing a hardhat as a giant metal arm spins near his head. Read the rest

Inertia friction welding joins two metal objects by spinning one at high rates of speed, then pressing it against the stationary piece. The friction heats both pieces and makes a weld sturdy enough for drive shafts, jet engines, spacecraft, and other machinery where joined pieces will endure tremendous stresses. Read the rest

If you've never gone down a rabbit hole of watching tractor videos, that may change after watching tractors topping tulips or planting potatoes on Tractorspotter: Read the rest

See sample pages from this book at Wink.

Walking through the children’s section of any given book store, this book will immediately catch your eye. The front cover has gears sticking out the side, and if you turn them, you can see one of our main characters moving up and down on a wheel and axel system. Open the book, and you’ll be treated to even more interactive illustration done in the book’s playful art style.

The plot of the story follows two friends who live in a zoo, Sloth and Sengi. After many years of living there, they have decided to escape using some simple machines. Along the way, they encounter many problems (as you can imagine would occur when a sloth and a variety of elephant shrew attempt to scale a zoo enclosure). Each page outlines a different type of machinery and invites the reader to learn about how each system functions. When Sloth and Sengi try and use an inclined plane to escape, the narrator demonstrates why it takes less effort to climb up an inclined plane than straight over the vertical fence. Later on, this idea of the inclined plane returns when Sloth and Sengi try and use a screw to escape. Probably my favorite section of the book involves the section on levers. The author outlines how a lever functions with an effort, a fulcrum, and a load. You can construct a lever from cardboard cut-outs in the book, and then use it to try and fling Sloth and Sengi over the fence of their enclosure, usually with more success than our main characters. Read the rest