Top 5 videos of the week: From amazing 'sky ladder' fireworks to Hong Kong's all-female video game warriors

Every Saturday, the South China Morning Post presents its top video picks from SCMP.tv and the web, highlighting news, features, mini-documentaries and more.

This week, we highlight the Hong Kong teen girls who are rocking the video game world, along with stunning or shocking visuals from the news including footage from the deadly and tragic Tianjin warehouse explosion in China.

Huge explosions rock Tianjin in northeast China

Dozens of people were killed and up to 700 were injured from a warehouse explosion late on Wednesday in the northeastern Chinese port of Tianjin. The amateur footage shows huge fireballs and thick smoke forming a mushroom cloud in the night sky. The fire was caused by exploding cargo, and was so strong that it blew doors off buildings and shattered windows up to several kilometers away.

Benedict Cumberbatch tells his fans to stop filming him during Hamlet

We live in a technology-fuelled world, but that doesn't mean we should do away with theatre etiquette. After a live performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet, English actor Benedict Cumberbatch gave an impromptu speech to fans outside of the Barbican Theatre in London, asking them to stop filming him during the show and offering a good lesson on living in the moment. 

“I can see red lights in the auditorium,” he said. “It may not be any of you here that did that, but it’s blindingly obvious. We had to restart again tonight at ‘To be or not to be’, which is not the easiest place to pick up a play full stop, but this made it harder. It’s very, very obvious. It’s mortifying, and there’s nothing less enjoyable as an actor on stage, experiencing that.” 

Listen to the man, folks. Things are just better experienced in real life. 

Chinese artist creates sky ladder fireworks

It looks like a stairway to heaven. After a couple of loud pops, you'll find that this fiery ladder in the sky is just a work of art by Chinese artist Cai Guoqiang.

The stunning display was executed by the New York-based artist in June at his hometown of Quanzhou in Fujian province. Guoqiang proposed the idea of this stunt 21 years ago, but it took him three failed attempts before finally seeing a burst of success.  

For the stunt, Guoqiang used a weather balloon and a 500-metre-high structure made from wires laced with fireworks to achieve this effect. Touchingly, he dedicated the artwork to his grandmother, who recently celebrated her 100th birthday. 

Spaghetti-like creature spotted in Angola

No, it's not a sci-fi creation. This alien-like creature was found off the coast of Angola and according to Daniel Jones from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, Britain, it is a kind of siphonophore (a fancy word for a class of marine animal) called Bathyphysa conifera.

Um ... that's a lot of words and syllables to remember. I think we'll stick to "Spaghetti monster" instead. 

Meet Hong Kong’s first all-women e-sports gaming team

Video gaming remains a male-dominated world, but these girls are on the trail to changing that. HK Girls by Logitech is a newly formed all-girls e-sports gaming team here in Hong Kong, competing in the game League of Legends. The team only started two months ago and already these 18-year-olds have garnered 50,000 Facebook fans and are set to take on Taiwan's Logi-A team later this month at the E-Sport Festival 2015.

You go, girls!