why do giants in shows and movies always look like they’re moving so slow?
In: Physics
Different reasons.
1) Your muscle move your leg at a certain speed when you walk, a giant have larger step to make, so even if their muscle would be proportional to us, and they could move their leg at the same speed as us, they would have to travel a longer distance with each steps. So each step take longer, but they don’t actually move at a lower speed, it just give that impression.
2) Squared law. If you double the size of a cube, you multiply by 4 the surface area, but multiply by 8 the volume. This mean that a giant twice the size of a human, roughly have 8 times more body volume, which mean 8 times the mass, but it only have 4 times the cross section of muscle. The bigger the animal, the less strenght proportional to it’s mass it will have. This is why large animal move slower, and small animal move faster than human. They have less muscle strenght by kg of mass.
3) The two first things is how it work in reality and your brain know that by experience. You probably see larger or smaller things everyday for your entire life, so your brain know that large things move slow and small things move fast. So when someone is doing a movie they use that to trick your brain. Film someone in a costume and slow down what you film. It will trick your brain into thinking that this is a giant person.
Think about how your brain and muscles work, the longer the muscles and nerves the longer it takes the brain to send the signal to move, larger animals will always move slower than small ones
That’s a good question. I don’t have a wholely satisfactory explanation for that, but I would note that it’s not just shows and movies. A huge plane for example always seems slower than a small one, even traveling at the same speed.
For some reason humans are to perceive large objects as being slow.
In ant man they kind of explain this. Smaller animals see the world in slow-motion. We tests this pretty simply using flicker rates.
Basically we flicker a light until the flickered light looks like it is always on. For humans the light needs to flicker 30 times per second for a fly it needs to flicker 300 per second. So for a fly we move in slow motion and if we were fly size to another animal they would appear to move slowly too.
Because our brains calibrate everything we see to our own scale. This sometimes causes problems, like perceiving the moon as being bigger than it actually is when it is low in the sky.
It takes a certain amount of time for us to take a step of a certain distance; a giant step would cross a larger distance. It takes a certain amount of time to move a lighter object, but more to move a heavier object. Since it takes more time for *us* to cross a larger distance or move a heavier object, our brains associate ‘larger distance’ and ‘larger mass’ with ‘longer time’… so to fool our brains into seeing a ‘giant’ as larger than us, to see it as being more massive than we are, we need to slow it down. A giant moving at human speed just looks like a human… even placed against a correspondingly-smaller background, a tiny little village perhaps, moving at human speed would look totally wrong because from the scale of the village – the way *we* would be experiencing things, if we were little people in that little village – the giant’s foot would be *whizzing* past at a speed that we ourselves aren’t calibrated for. It looks fake. We must slow it down, make it fit our own experience of the world, to make it look reasonable.
Correspondingly, a tiny character crosses much smaller distances with each step, so to fool our brains into seeing it as small it needs to move faster than we do.
edit: spleling
Best explanation I can give, it takes more energy and force to move something bigger so even if something is going fast and its large it still looks slow. Look at the earth, Iirc its spinning at like 1000 mph but since it’s so large it takes 24 hours to rotate. Something with a smaller mass would be going faster if it were going that fast so its seen as moving faster. I’m sure I’m missing things like restiance and gravity but that’s just how I understand it
Because in the real world, small animals tend to move quickly relative to their body size, and big animals tend to move slowly.
Think of a mouse or insect. It can scurry about very quickly, moving at way more body lengths per second than us, or than other, larger animals. Consider an elephant, for instance. It is large and lumbering and its movements are slower relative to its size.
Let’s look at some numbers to make this more concrete. Usain Bolt has a top speed of about 12 m/s, or well over six body lengths per second. A house mouse can run at over 3 m/s, but its body is less than 10 cm long, so it can do more than 30 body lengths per second. That’s faster (by this measure) than a cheetah, which tops out at a measly 16 body lengths per second. An elephant has a top speed of about 11 m/s, relative to an average body length of about 4 m, so it can do about 2.5 body lengths per second.
So, elephants are about as fast as humans (at top speed), but look a lot slower while doing it. Mice are slower than us but look faster. And it’s all in these numbers of speed relative to size.
Giants, if they existed, would be no different. They might outrun the fastest humans, but relative to their body size they would look slower. E.g. maybe your giant stands 10 m tall and runs at 20 m/s, which is way faster than a human. But, that giant still does only two body lengths per second, compared to our six. She will also be taking fewer, though larger steps. So, all in all, her movement looks a lot slower than those of a human running at top speed.
The reason why bigger animals get slower compared to their body size has to do with [square-cube law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square%E2%80%93cube_law)s that govern biomechanics. For instance, if you scale up an animal by a certain factor, its weight will increase with the cube of that factor, while its muscle cross-section (which governs its muscle strength) increases more slowly, with the square of the scaling factor (e.g. if you double the size, the animal’s weight increases eight-fold while the muscle cross section only quadruples). This makes it harder for animals with larger bodies to apply the same force per weight to their limbs as a smaller animal (they could grow larger muscles to compensate, but only to a point). Their muscles and limbs are still bigger so they can put out more power and be faster on the whole, but relative to their bodies big animals tend to be weaker (and slower).
(Of course this is only a general principle, and there is lots of variation between animals of the same size, depending on whether they evolved to prioritize speed.)
Intuitively, fictional things are usually modeled after real life things, and are made in a way that instinctively makes sense to our mind.
So why would a giant human move in a slow manner? Well, because that’s how we tend to see *animals* doing it. Elephants are the biggest land animals, and they’re not exactly nimble. They’re even physically incapable to jump. This is not by chance: as someone else has mentioned, it’s the result of the square-cube law, which means a bigger animal would be proportionally to their size less strong than us, and thus will be less fast and agile. So a real-life giant would indeed be pretty slow and clumsy.
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