Visual Analysis of "The powers of Ten"

This film is very interesting, it is a informative video that can teach people physics, while not making audience feel boring. The video starting with a family having a picnic in Chicago, then  the camera start zooming out the point of the view by power of 10 every few second, which give us a farther view from the subject. The image keep zooming farther away, and we can see the earth, our solar system, and finally the whole galaxy. After that, the image start to zoom back in, at a much faster pace, and stopped at the same angle as the beginning of the video. After that, the video start to zoom in to subject’s hand slowly, and explain the cellular level, and atomic level.  

This film used a very unique way for audience to see the image, especially at its time, which is 1970s. The smooth transition between each perspective scale played a very important role in this film. Since most audience at that time or even today, don’t have a chance to see those scale in real life. The smooth transition can bring a realistic feeling to the audience. The amount of perspective change in this film is extreme, when the point of view zoomed out from people to the whole earth, the audience can feel how small they are as a human compare to our planet. By the time it zoomed all the way to outer space, audience can realize how small our planet is compare to the galaxy.

The way this film is made is very creative. Since many footage in this film is not possible to record by a camera, such as atomic level and outer space, those footage is likely made purely by special effects. The maker did a great job on mixing those different footage together, using a very smooth transition, so the audience wont notice too much difference between each footage. Although the effect is not as realistic as today’s film due to technological advancement, this was very impressive at its time.

By watching this film, I learned and used some of the techniques from this film into my own film. I used a smooth camera zoom in and zoom out effect to the hand of my subject in the film. I made the camera zoomed very close to his hand with drawing pencil, which bring audience a very detail image of him drawing on paper. This perspective is not very common in our everyday life, since we don’t usually pay as much attention into other people’s hand when they are drawing.