Monday, October 27, 2014

Science Fact or Cinematic Fiction.

Humans are known as a species for causing nature to change for them, instead of being defined by their surroundings.  Instead of using caves for shelter, we build homes.  Instead of letting the weather determine our temperatures, we simulate cool air with air conditioners when the outside swelters, or warm ourselves with heaters and flame while the outdoors are covered with frost.  At nearly every turn to defy, if there is a way, they seem to seek to attempt it sooner or later.  And if it isn’t physically possible, not something we can feel and create for all our senses, then we will simulate it for just a few with a different method.  Thus, so follows much of our entertainment, stretching and bending the rules of physics for a more dramatic, ‘beyond reality’ sort of feel.  Intentional or not, it seems to be incredibly pervasive in today’s entertainment media, be it in movies, the shows we watch on tv, or the games we play on various screens.  And though few rules have been left untouched as a whole by our defiance, one most often exploited is the Action-Reaction Principle, as well as laws of acceleration in relation to a force and the objects it affects.  Taking a couple television shows, the popular show Supernatural, the more tame Once Upon a Time, and the movie X-Men, a few isolated scenes can show these mentioned stretches of reality for the sake of entertainment.
                But first, let’s examine the Action-Reaction Principle itself.  The Principle states first, that for every action force there is an equal reaction force in the opposite direction.  So someone pushing on a wall will, of course, be pushing on the wall, but the wall will also be exerting a force back onto the person.  Furthermore, action and reaction forces always occur in pairs, and are always simultaneous (as with the wall and the person, the forces acting on each other were, together, a pair; and they also happened at the same time.)  Another important factor in this is the acceleration of the objects involved.  The magnitudes of the action and reaction forces are equal, but the resulting accelerations are usually not equal.  And by the Law of Acceleration, when objects or characters push apart, the heavier one will accelerate less than the lighter one.  This is to say that while acceleration isn’t the same as speed, it is the change in speed, or more specifically, the change in velocity towards the direction of an unbalanced force.  The net force, or the combined value of forces acting on an object, result in the acceleration, and is what is important in finding the acceleration of an object.  So with these few things in mind, that forces affect all objects involved, and that heavier objects accelerate more slowly but would need more force to move them, let’s look at these examples.
                The first instance we can look at with a number of unrealistic depictions of the Action-Reaction principle is the popular show Supernatural.  As its title suggests, it centers around supernatural phenomena that two brothers track down and attempt to stop from causing harm to humanity.  There is a particular number of fight scenes in which people get thrown across rooms or large spans with little effort on the part of the ‘thrower’, and once such case occurs in Season 9, Episode 23 of the show called ‘Do You Believe in Miracles’ at about 31 minutes and 7 seconds in.  One of the brothers, Dean, is attempting to stab one going by the name of Metatron who’s attempting to take over heaven and earth.  However, what looked like a simply block from what may have been a side swipe to the neck became a tossing of Dean through the air of what looked like more than 10 feet away and up high into the air.  Metatron, who did the tossing, didn’t seem to have much recoil from the block, nor follow-through afterward, standing simply, nevermind the amount of force it would take to toss someone after only catching their arm along that far and high.  It is physically impossible, especially with no visible force appearing to affect Metatron.  In this case, the title of the show speaks well for these actions, however, such a thing between two people would never be able to occur in the world as we know it now.
                The next show, Once Upon a Time is similarly of an otherworldly scenario, along with otherworldly physics.  The show itself is less violent, but not without its conflicts, and centers around fairy tales that have come to life in a place called Storybrooke, with the troubles and connections of the characters there trying to live together.  This particular scene, though, starts with some unfamiliar side characters.  There is an old sorcerer’s apprentice guarding some sort of box from someone called The Dark One.  The Dark One manages to get around the apprentice by pushing him back with magic (the apprentice flew through the air, though didn’t seem to accelerate fast enough for his mostly straight trajectory; that, or the arcs were wrong for the velocity), and gets to the box.  However, there seems to be a magical ward on the box that exerts an outward radiating force when the Dark One gets near.  Based on the Action Reaction Principle, even a very strong force would send the Dark One flying back perpendicular to where he attempted to get close to the box.  However, in this scene, not only does he fly up in the air at a rather slow acceleration, but flips backwards through the air 3 times in an incorrect arc spanning only about 14 feet.  There didn’t appear to be any additional force keeping him rotating through all that, other than the outward radiating force of the box, which only would have acted on him once when he was in proximity.  The box itself didn’t move at all, and the flying Dark One flipped far too much too slowly for the force acted on him.  This scene can be viewed at about 2 minutes in during episode 4, season 4 of the show.
                And the last example of strange physics mentioned here is from the movie X-Men (2000). Following the trend of the extraordinary, the film is about a new evolution in the human race, people who call themselves ‘mutants’ and seem to have a particular power of their own.  Though it appears that some of these powers allow them to defy physics, even when their powers aren’t at play, there are flawed mechanics around the Action-Reaction Principle.  Leading up to this scene, however, there seems to be one that is somewhat more believable; Logan has taken Rogue into his trailer, and they’re driving on the snowy road.  Just as Rogue mentions Logan should wear his seatbelt, and he brushes the comment off, a large tree falls in front of the car, causing it to crash while throwing Logan out the front window from the impact and his continued forward motion.  However, having the power of essential immortality and rapid regeneration, he quickly comes to despite his injuries to find the whole thing was an ambush from another mutant called Sabertooth.  From here, the physics get sketchy.  Sabertooth leaps from some ambiguous part of the forest, as though he would have landed on Logan.  However, the next scene shows him standing and seemingly hurling Logan about 20 feet away and 15 feet into the air, with little to no recoil or effort seen on his part.  This scene is about 19 minutes and 30 seconds into the movie.  For it to at least be a bit more believable, Sabertooth would have had to throw his weight into the toss more, he wouldn’t be standing straight and stiff with feet shoulder-width apart, and most likely instead would have used his feet and the ground to give him additional force for the maneuver.  Even then, the way Logan flies hardly fits what the toss would’ve had to be.  Overall, powers or no, the entire scene is very contrived.

                In conclusion, it seems very clear that people often find ways to bend physics in their entertainment if they couldn’t otherwise do it themselves, as is proven at least once in the shows Supernatural and Once Upon a Time, as well as the movie X-Men.  Though, really, it doesn’t stop there, but it would seem that to emphasize just how strong, powerful, or otherwise ‘unnatural’ something is, one often resorts to using these inaccurate means.  Certainly, it could be done better and more accurately; and despite attempts to defy nature at every turn, it seems that not all methods have been mastered yet. 

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Outline for the Second Term Paper

* Action-Reaction Principle and laws of acceleration Violated (particularly in fight scenes, where people go flying)

* Once Upon a Time
- scene where the previous Dark One flips through the air like three times and then lands
- not true to action-reaction principle at all
- arcs wrong
- acceleration wrong.

* Supernatural
- Fight scene with Dean vs. man who wants revenge on him, where single punches from Dean send the man flying.
- Also not true to action-reaction principle.
- acceleration is wrong.
- recoil is near non-existent.

* X Men movie
- Sabertooth's both attacks that send wolverine flying, and his 'leaps' are entirely exagerated.
- not true to the action-reaction principle.
- arcs are wrong
- acceleration is also wrong.
- minimal 'recoil' as well.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Stop Motion Animation of Falling.


When creating this little short, I briefly planned out the idea before actually getting to it.  I used a tripod to shoot a number of photos, and had the stuffed animals laying down on a desk.  The sphere actually has a hidden stand underneath it, since just setting it on the desk would have it rolling all over the place.  From there, I edited out my hand (which often held the Mew (aka the pink animal) in position ) with a photoshop equivalent program called SAI, and touched up the few shots where the 'sphere stand' was showing.  Then I resized all the images to some much more manageable dimensions, and put them all together in Quicktime, where I shifted around frames and framerate to make the timing a bit better.  The more believable motion is at the beginning, whereas the ending toss was just mostly meant to be silly.