I'm curious what you felt made it dismal? I found it rather delightful and was much better than my expectations as I've not seen this style of artwork before using a physical camera. I was particularly impressed with the glass sphere animation.
I find the resulting videos to be no more interesting than animated renders, but the mechanics, engineering, and software skills to set everything up, connect it, and get it reliable/precise enough to produce anything at all I find utterly astounding.
He just built the machine from scratch. I don't think the very first bit of video rendered from after effects was something that made it on the criterion collection either, but you learn to use a new tool to do things of increasing sophistication as you go.
I do think he could probably use a bit more rigidity on the long thing that holds the end of the light tube since it appears to have a bit of wobble, but I'm sure that somebody with this level of competence is already on that issue for the next revision.
For the proper application, you could do stuff with this which would absolutely make a raytracing renderer vomit its bytes in anguish. All my motion design buddies are very excited about this video.
