"The ceiling would have to be so high, and the light would have to be so bright."

 For April the First, my favourite accidental physicists "The Corridor Crew" loose their visual-effects-dissecting acumen on the moon landing, providing typically conclusive, keen and concise insights into its unfakeability. Watch and learn why this shot from 2001 couldn't possibly have taken place inside a vacuum, and why moonwalk footage from Apollo 11 couldn't possibly have taken place outside of one.

 

 

 (And further confirmation, of course, can be found here.)

Have You Heard The Good News About J. Theophrastus Bartholomew?

 It is only sitting down to post about how disappointingly intimidated I feel not just by the tone but by the content of J. Theophrastus Bartholomew's introduction to his Games You Can Play In Your Head - a book promoted by my new youtube heroes the Corridor Crew, and edited down by two of their number from an initial, sixteen-volume set found in a yard sale in Bayport, Minnesota - a book I was incredibly excited to receive, but whose opening pages contained such red flags as "You might think to yourself: but what about all my friends? To which I retort, of course, and without hesitation: who needs them?" or "if you are an adult who attempts to function as a cog in the blood-soaked machine we call the American Dream..." or "Say it aloud: I am playing a game, Father. A game that requires you to leave me in peace and allow me to be a more fully formed human" - it is literally only now, sitting down to write about how worried I am to continue reading this book, that it occurs to me what may already have been blindingly obvious to you: that there is of course no J. Theophrastus Bartholomew. That there never was an original sixteen-volume set, that this is an original work which would explain why J. Bartholomew's name is not on the cover, and that Sam Gorski and D. F. Lovett are entirely aware of how intimidating he sounds because they made him up to sound like an embittered, nihilistic kook because that's the joke. So all I want to share with you now, having sat down, is my absolutely genuine relief at that realisation. He never existed. Oh my god. It's okay. It was a joke. Oh. That feels so good.

"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.