Behind the Scenes
- More Than Meets the Eye
- Monsters, Motion, and Mechanics!
- Mysterious Makeup and Preposterous Props!
- High-Tech Reality
- Monsters, Motion, and Mechanics!
Mirror, Mirror
Reflection is when light bounces off a surface, like the smooth, shiny surface of a mirror. You can see how this works when you shine a flashlight into a mirror. The beam of light goes into the mirror and bounces back out. A flat mirror gives a clear image because the light reflects off the object and into your eyes without spreading out. If the surface of the mirror is not flat, like that of a spoon, the image is distorted. The back of the spoon is a convex mirror and the inside of the spoon is a concave mirror. These types of mirrors are great for fun houses and weird special effects. They are also essential in telescopes that peer into the universe.
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So Close and Yet So Far
Seeing is more than our eyes taking a picture. Our brains use clues from what is around an object to decide how big or how close it is. As long as we have enough information about what's around an object, we will perceive its correct size. However, when we view objects through a tube, the surrounding information is gone and objects close to us appear larger than when they are farther away, even though they remain the same size. This difference is called perspective.
More Upper Elementary School Activities
- More Than Meets the Eye
- Monsters, Motion, and Mechanics!
- Mysterious Makeup and Preposterous Props!
- High-Tech Reality
- Monsters, Motion, and Mechanics!
Flip into Action!
Like the movies, animated cartoons are a series of still pictures. When we look at something, our brains retain the image for a fraction of a second. If the same image follows immediately in a slightly different position, our brains interpret the change as a movement. Animated cartoons and movies use 24 still pictures per second to create the appearance of a single moving image. Your flipbook works best at that speed, too.
More Upper Elementary School Activities
- More Than Meets the Eye
- Monsters, Motion, and Mechanics!
- Mysterious Makeup and Preposterous Props!
- High-Tech Reality
- Monsters, Motion, and Mechanics!
Do you Did You See That?
We detect detail and motion at different points in our field of vision. We can see details best wherever we are focusing our attention in our field of vision, while at the far edges of that field we can see only motion. Filmmakers can make an object in motion fuzzy but must carefully detail objects that are standing still or that they believe will be the focus of our attention. When a ship flies by Luke and Han, our eyes are focusing on our two heroes and don't ever really see whether it was a ship that flew by or a tennis shoe. Many of the settings for movies that capture our imagination are actually painted scenes on flat panels called mattes. Using what you have just discovered about perception (how we see), matte artists paint the greatest detail where they think you will be focusing on and carefully blur and fade the images in other areas of the matte.
More Upper Elementary School Activities
- More Than Meets the Eye
- Monsters, Motion, and Mechanics!
- Mysterious Makeup and Preposterous Props!
- High-Tech Reality
- Monsters, Motion, and Mechanics!