INTEGRATION: GRAVITY part 1

This mini study series will look at how gravity can be shown on screen - from a 1951 musical to modern sci-fi films.

EMPHASIZING EARTH’S GRAVITY

This section will focus on A Royal Wedding (1951). This film features two Fred Astaire dances in rotating sets.

The first example is in a rotating room with a locked camera parented to the set. But besides Fred moving around the different faces of the room, how do you know the room is rotating? The props are locked down and the curtains are pulled taut to sell the room as steady.

While hiding the effects of gravity in the room makes Fred seem like he’s defying gravity, what if you wanted to emphasize that the room is moving? That brings us to the next example below.

Besides moments of the actors catching their balance, it’s not clear throughout the next shot that the set is tilting. The two factors that help sell gravity’s effects of a tilting set during the entire shot are the swaying curtains in the background and the sliding fruit in the foreground.

EMPHASIZING microGRAVITY

Outer Space has microgravity. One way to emphasize microgravity is to have props floating around the set, continually moving.

A real life example of footage in Space shows that objects are tied down and not always moving - so how do you sell gravity? One solution is showing long hair’s affected by microgravity. A Christina Koch video from NASA: