Image via Wikipedia

I just watched this film for the first time after it being recomended to me by Bryann Ellis a few years ago in Graduate school at UNCG. Why did I decide to watch this now you ask? I was going through my grad school notes and stumbled upon the name of this short film.

Here’s the link ,

Powers Of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames

How does Wikipedia describe the film?

Powers of Ten is a 1968 American documentary short film written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten (see also logarithmic scale and order of magnitude). The film is an adaptation of the book Cosmic View (1957) by Dutch educator Kees Boeke,^[1] and more recently is the basis of a new book version.^[2] Both adaptations, film and book, follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work.

After watching this film I was reading something in CABINET MAGAZINE that mentions the film. Through out the article called, Adventures in the Vertical the writing contains  some great ideas   about perspective and seeing scale. The article is a review of the W. Watson-Baker’s 1935 book, World Beneath the Microscope.  Later on the same article goes into depth about the film the Eames husband and wife team made but keeps the ideas of scale and perspective in the dialogue. The I deas I like best and take away from the reading are about the mirror between traveling into outer space and inner space as part of one dialogue in the terms of scale. Mark Dorrian puts it best when he says, “… this in turn endows the film with a strange circularity, almost as if the poles of the vertical line along which we have passed were bent to meet one another. ”

Check out the film on You Tube by clicking the link above and enjoy!

– Sam a.k.a. Raygunlab’s overseas consultant/advisor