People at the Italian Pirelli company believe that part of the reason special relativity is considered so complex by laypersons, is a failure in communication. As part of the World Year of Physics 2005, they decided to create a challenge.
The Pirelli Relativity Challenge, was to explain special relativity in about 5 minutes.
The best persentation gets 25,000 euro.
This was my (failed) attempt at doing that (though it did got to the semi-finals, with 36 other works, out of more than 250).

Download the clip:

Windows Media Video version (27MB)
XviD (mp3 for sound) version (30.5MB)
Smaller (320x240) versions for slow computers:WMV,XviD.

Or view it through YouTube

I read about this competition on January 8th edition of NewScientist, and workd on it (on and off - mostly in the last 2 and a half months) since January 21th, when I got a response from organizers, that videos are allowd to participate (the site says "interactive multimedia presentation" - I wasn't sure about the "interactive" part :) ) and worked on it up to August 2nd.
I used free software almost exclusively.

The winning work is Al's relativistic adventures. A very good flash presentation I'd recommend very much you see too.



While doing "Relativity in 5 minutes" we also shot some footage for a special effects clip (Though, in Hebrew). You can see it also as an AVI file (XVID).

Creative Commons License
The clip is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.