The Most Dangerous Man In Edublogging
June 3rd, 2009 by Dan Meyer
Rhett Allain picks apart the dubious physics of Up, Pixar's latest kiddie joint:
If you can model the hairs on the head of a man in an animation, don’t you think you could use Newtonian mechanics to plot the position of the GPS? I don’t know, maybe it would have fallen too fast or something. Oh well.
He has graphs and everything.
Sometimes real physics is boring looking. If you’ve ever seen an actor fall down vs. a real person falling down you get the point. Willy E. Coyote falling into the canyon is funny because of the completely wrong physics. The delay creates anticipation and delivers the punch line.
When they make games or movies they model things because it makes it easier to get close to realism, but then the designers back off and undo the reality to add impact, suspense or other drama. They wouldn’t bother modeling a single thing falling, it’s cheaper to do it by hand. But for hair, it’s easier and cheaper to use mathematically accurate models. But I’m sure in some scenes they modified the final output by hand if the hair looked “funny”.
By the way, this is one of the reasons that the “games will save education” meme is misguided.