Why is it when a character in a film has grown large (such as Ant-Man in the Avengers and Civil War), do all their movements appear slowed down, as if they are moving through water?
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Same phenom in old TV series _Six Million Dollar Man_. He gets superpower speed but is portrayed in slo-mo. I just don’t get it.
Is mainly for effect but its also because something that grows big has more mass and therefore is harder to move around.
When I studied engineering, we would calculate something called the Reynolds number. Ignoring for a moment (ba dum bump) what it’s actually used for, I always felt like it was an indicator of natural realism. There was a sweet spot of Re values where the phenomenon (waves, for example) *looked* plausibly real. Outside that range, things just looked… wrong.
Its due to their impulse during movement.
Small Animals like Ants can easily reorient their movement. Compared to their size they are verry fast and agile.
Big Animals like blue whales are slwo in their changing of direktion, they have a huge mass and therefore a change in the direction of movement is slowed down.
In Films this natural behaviour is simulated.
My theory is this: When you film a scale model of something that’s supposed to be large, you need to play the film back more slowly than you recorded it, otherwise it still looks small. The reason is that gravity accelerates things (like water, or dust, or sparks) at the same rate regardless of how large or small it is. That means that if you drop a 1/32 scale model of a boat from a foot above the ground, it will take a small fraction of a second to reach the ground. But if you drop a full size boat from 32 feet, it will take a full second to reach the ground. So if you film a 1/32 scale boat, you have to play the film back at 1/32 the speed you recorded it.
Somebody also mentioned that the weight of things (and their momentum) doesn’t go up linearly with ~~volume~~ height. It goes up linearly with volume. So an ant that is 100x the size of a normal ant doesn’t weigh 100x as much, it weighs, like 10,000x as much or something. That means that if it were to move at the same speed as a tiny ant, it would just come apart. It’s flesh wouldn’t be able to stay together. It would be too heavy and the forces would be to great. So you slow it down.
People get used to seeing this, and that weird slow-motion look starts to mean “large” in your head. So when you want to make something look really big, in the language of film, you make it move slowly.
edit: formatting, correction (thanks barzamsr!)
Good theory, did it get any momentum?
In addition to the limiting effects of weight on acceleration mentioned by others, there is also a psychological effect.
Essentially, bigger animals tend to perceive time as passing more quickly than smaller animals. This is theorised to be because signals in their nervous system simply have more distance to travel, so their thoughts are slower. Because they can think less in a given time frame, that time frame will seem to be shorter.
For example, imagine a wasp, a human and an elephant all watching the *same* 90 minute film in a cinema. For the wasp, the film would seem to go on *forever*. The wasp would be super bored because everything in the film is in literal slow motion and the pacing of events is horribly slow. For the elephant, the film would feel pretty short, the elephant would not be able to keep up with the dialogue or the storyline at all because it is too fast.
So going back to antman, physically his mass doesn’t allow for agile movements (keep in mind his actual speed is still much faster, like if he swings his arm the tip of his fingers would be going super fast, but the swing would still take forever because the distance is so high). But at the same time, from his perspective, he is moving at normal speed and everybody else is buzzing about being hyperactive like a swarm of bees because his thoughts are just as slow as his movements.
They don’t actually move slower. (Well, they do, because of special effects, but if it was real…)
Example: When Ant-Man is human size (6 feet or so, just shy of 2 meters), and takes one step, he moves about 1 meter (3 feet) If he takes two steps every second, he’s moving 2 meters per second.
Now, when Ant Man is, say, 600 feet tall, he’s 100x the size. So, one step now covers 100 meters. Say he still takes two steps per second, that’d be 200m/s. That’s over 450 MPH! He’d be moving at 2/3 of the speed of sound JUST WALKING. Ever stick your hand out the window of a car at highway speed? Now imagine doing that in a jet aircraft! You’d tire yourself out just TRYING to take a step.
On top of this, each of his legs would weigh more than a locomotive, and you just can’t speed a locomotive up to half the speed of sound, then bring it to a complete stop again, and do that two times per second. It’s just too much weight to start and stop again so quickly.
So, when the camera zooms out to show all of 600 foot high Ant Man, he looks slow. He only takes maybe a step every other second, instead of twice a second. But… he’s actually moving across the ground way, way faster than a normal sized person would. But if you were right under his heel, it’d go flying past you like a race car.
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