Power of scale

Powers of Ten

1977

by Eames Couple

Although, Charles and Ray Eames were architects and designers, they made a lot of films. Their works are great in terms of the time, when they created their films, they did everything by themselves and even created their own ways of shooting movies. Moreover, their films cover very interesting topics, no matter the fact that all their movies were scientific, they are absolutely clear to everyone, even to a kid, and this is absolutely amazing.

  

In this article, I want to introduce you their film - "Powers of Ten". You can find and watch it in Video 1.

Video 1. "Powers of Ten", by Eames Couple, 1977

 I really like this film, because of the fact that it gives us the idea of importance of scale in every single thing, and for us, as interior designers, this film is extremely interesting to watch. In this film they show relative size of things in our universe and amazing effect of adding a zero. They start this film from the scene, where person just lays on a picnic and camera goes far away from him, (you can see it on Picture 1) moving every ten seconds to the point, which is ten times father, until it reaches the edge of known universe, and after it comes back to the person and goes directly inside his hand, closer and closer, till the very atoms (you can see it on picture 2). This is amazing, how you can actually be so far and so close. I think this idea of film can be related to interior and architecture, because when you build something you can imagine as if you were on some points above your building or lower something, and it can give you more ideas or can help to solve some problems, because when you higher you can see more outside things and detect some outlook problems, and when you are lower, you can detect more details, which is extremely important. For example, imagine you are on a level of flying bird, which is above the building, and you may notice that actually shape of roof is not suitable at all, because of some climate issues, or, imagine as if you were a mouse, running inside the house on the floor and you notice that the meeting points of wall and floor have some cracks, which is awful. So understanding of scale is really helpful, because you can define problems, rethink and remake. I think that one more important point is that we all need to look around more and imagine ourselves in places of others, because one of the secrets of perfect work is to give a lot of attention to what is around us, to details.

   Picture 1. "Powers of Ten", Camera farther.        Picture 2. "Powers of Ten", Camera closer. 

Actually, Eames dedicated a lot of attention to the details. As you can see on picture 3, Ray is designing a picnic carpet, because everything in the film must be perfect, even such small things as a fruits on a picnic, the way person lays, the way woman near the man seats. Moreover, they first started their movie from shooting real scene with a man on a picnic in a Chicago park, but later they used helicopter and photo collage system, they combined different pictures, videos and even painted, drawing something to create perfect vision (you can see it on picture 4). For example, to show the universe they asked EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, S.D., for a satellite photographs, but these photos did not have the scale they needed, so they had to draw on them, to make corrections. It means that they had to have perfect colours match, which implied big work. I really like the fact that they spend so much attention to every single detail.

       Picture 3. "Powers of  Ten", Process.                                                      Picture 4. "Powers of Ten", Process.