SCALE: CONTRAST

I’ve learned more and more about scale, and how it’s reinforced through multiple departments: modeling, texturing, layout, rigging, animation, lighting and compositing. For this study, I wanted to focus on how scale is shown through animation.

I wanted to learn more about just why large creatures in film seem to move slowly, and I read an interesting article on how midsize animals are the fastest:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/why-midsized-animals-are-fastest-earth

Jurassic World follows the same rules for large creature movements. Not only does it slow down the movements of the dinosaurs to show their large scale, but it contrasts them against normal-speed movements to show that the shots are not in slow motion. Look for the fountains and fire in the background, and Claire’s hair moving the wind (if you zoom in, you can see high frequency movement on her top hairs to show the shot is playing in real time).

Similar scale contrast is shown in footage of a volcano eruption. Notice how long the rocks take to fall down to the ground after the eruption, contrasted with the speed of the foreground wave. It reinforces just how high they are in the sky.

The last concept of scale contrast in the video below is sound. This is a visual blog, but sound can sell distance and the scale of a scene. As shown in a recording of Mount Tavurvur volcano on August 29th, 2014. The longer sound takes to travel to the viewer, the further away it is. The scale contrast is shown by the realtime reactions of the ship crew with the slow travel of the eruption sound.