why do giants in shows and movies always look like they’re moving so slow?
In: Physics
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
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