At least it did, for me. Therefore writing this blog post. It is only a 9-minute film, but it gets you thinking for much longer than that. In case if you haven’t seen it, it is here.

One can now see the helix, and and then further and further in, till down to one single proton in an atom. The scene is now focusing on the man’s hands.įinally it then zoomed in at normal speed, all the way, the indices now decreasing in the negatives - ten to the power of minus one metre, ten to the power of minus two metre, and so on. Thirdly, it then stopped, and then it fast-forwarded like a rollercoaster ride on turbo speed, with the powers of ten decreasing, towards the direction of the earth, back to where the picnickers were sitting down again. It didn't just stop there. Secondly the creators of the film used a square frame as a focal point, a viewfinder to emphasise a single object on the centre of the screen. The last frame was a picture of a cosmic web. The film is one where I found to be mesmerising, albeit the primitiveness of it, of something which speaks to me on many levels across art, science, mathematics, the abstract, the precise, the close up, the infinity, the contemporary, and of time, and scale, of stillness and change, of something we recognise in the everyday, and of course, the mystery of the universe.įirstly, it was about illustrating the powers of ten, zooming out from where the picnickers were sitting, till you can see the size of the state, which according to the narrator is Chicago, then the size of the country, then further, and further, until one then can see the view of the earth, the solar system, all the way out to the vastness of space in billions of lightyears away. The verbal and visual techniques used to show this - were the guided narration and a thin white square that frames the focal point of the story, zooming in within and out in great magnitudes almost like looking through a viewfinder of an extremely powerful telescope/ camera/ microscope. What if we were atoms for another universe? It makes you think because, as much as we think of how big the earth is, it is tiny, in relation to the universe. (I mentioned almost, because, in obvious comparison to the vastness and the deep mysteries of space, we are not in the middle (that depends on what you determine as a start or end point, and finding the middle ground but that is another thought by itself)). The important scene was where two people having a picnic, whom were (almost) in the centre of this film, being the intermediary of two separate worlds and/ or films. This short film, Powers of Ten, a 1977 non-fiction documentary work by innovative and influential American designers Charles and Ray Eames was commissioned by IBM. First released in 1966, it was produced before drones and Google Earth existed, and during the era of the “ race to space”, a period when there were also many space-travel and moon related themes in popular culture, hugely influenced by the many successful missions by NASA.

Eames power of ten