"Obviously You Have a Bunch Of Physics And Stuff Going On..." Learning Science With The Corridor Crew.

 If people didn't love special effects we'd never have had the Renaissance. Leonardo and Michelangelo didn't study the sciences out of idle curiosity, but because mastering their art meant fooling the eye, and that meant understanding perspective, light, physics and biology. Even John Dee started out in special effects at Trinity College. I arrived at this conclusion after a couple of days down a rabbit hole with Los Angeles-based Visual Effects youtubers, the Corridor Crew. I'd come to them through their "stuntmen react to stunts" videos, which led me to their "VFX artists react to VFX" videos, and I was just enjoying the clips and vicariously getting off on their work ethic, but then realised I was also beginning to learn some science. The penny dropped when they were reacting to 2012. I knew from Helen Czerski's zero gravity reports over on the Cosmic Shambles Network that physicists have been after a general theory of granular material, but it hadn't occurred to me that CGI artists working on disaster movies would also be after exactly the same thing. Here. (I think all these videos begin at the appropriate point)...

 And it's not just a one-way street. Instead of producing concept art for the black hole in Interstellar for example, an astrophysicist was approached to provide equations to feed into a purpose built rendering engine, and the resulting visualisation produced two research papers...

 I've also learnt from these videos how light acts beneath the surface of the skin, and how important an understanding of this "subsurface scattering" is in producing non-gummy-looking CGI humans. (I've also learnt that far too many artists think there's a muscle linking the filtrum to the upper lip)...

 Less universally applicable, but still fascinatingly, I've learnt that being set on fire as a stuntman is surprisingly feezing...

 And that for all the battle scenes in which you may have seen a flying arrow sliced in half, it turns out you shouldn't actually try to intercept a missile with a weapon specifically designed to pass through things (that's my conclusion, not theirs)...

 These are just examples of the science I picked up by the by. The Corridor Crew also produce more traditionally educational videos, and they're also superb. As Visual Effects Artists the Corridor Crew are first and foremost communicators, so they don't just understand the science that they're explaining, they understand how people receive information. For example here's a very simple idea that's hard to communicate: the scale of the Universe. As a potentially unfair comparison, here first is Arvin Ash, zooming in and out a lot, wasting our time on how a shrew is bigger than an ant, and throwing in a weird amount of stock footage of blondes in their underwear.

 And now here's the Corridor Crew's contribution. A problem has been identified and addressed, and fun has resulted. First scaling down...

Then scaling up. (In summary, if the planck length were the diameter of a tennis ball, an American penny would be ninety thousand times wider than the entire universe)...

 There's such a glorious clarity to all their stuff, and I really can't recommend their channel enough. And it reminds me how much I love Los Angeles. The city's a workshop, and as was true in the Renaissance, the polymaths are all there, working in VFX.