Saturday, February 19, 2011
Is this how the Escher Waterfall machine works?
Boing Boing: "Yesterday, I blogged about an anonymous YouTuber who appeared to have built a machine that could make Escher's impossible self-replenishing waterfall a concrete reality. David Goldman thinks he knows how it was done, and sent this diagram along.
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3 comments:
In PTM the other night before crew a group of us poured over this video for practically an hour trying to figure out how they had created "the impossible." We knew it couldn't be REAL; IE, that water traveled upwards to a higher platform to the fall back down onto a waterwheel. Still, nothing like what David Goldman suggests here was brought up as a possibility. It's funny, as much as CGI gets thrown around as a realistic possibility, I seriously doubt it. Occam's Razor (the simplest explanation is likely, the correct one) suggests that optical illusion, like what Goldman cleverly outlines, is probably more correct than anything else.
Yeah, in PTM we never questioned the construction of the machine, though we thought maybe it might be really really deep and perspective can play tricks on how we see the water flowing. The suggestion here makes sense and is a good lesson in KISS. We do so many cool tricks in theater and there has been so many different technical solutions. How do you build an Escher waterfall? It's easy: YOU CANT. Build something that looks like it and let the audience believe what they want. The complexities of the illusion is in how they see it, not how to do the illusion.
I didn't know how he'd done it until reading the description either. I like the idea in his machine of using perspective in this manner; his construction goes beyond forced perspective of an object by using multiple objects to make a single impossible object. The applicability of this to our field is evident - there are many times when scenery calls for an object on stage that cannot actually be there, and so we too are prompted to cheat.
Even though the effect wasn't achieved via editing, the splicing of the two takes still seamed (it's a pun) well done.
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