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  I can see through timeOct 22, 2010 9:05 AM PDT | url
 
Got nearly twice as many storyboards done for episode 11 today as I did yesterday; just gotta do about the same number tomorrow, and I'll be set for kicking off the first real pages of the episode on Monday. Because this is taking a day longer than I'd have liked, and because yesterday's were not exactly the pick of the litter due to me wanting to avoid spoiling certain things, you get an extra-large batch today, in random order:
 
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#6 (close-up of Proctor's glasses) and the last one are alternate layouts that I'm not going to use. And no that first one isn't Proctor's grampa, it's just him undergoing the g-force of of a rocket launch! Notice how he uses a hair net to stay neat and tidy. >_> And yes, that *is* Mar's nose bending in the foreground in front of him.
 
Some research I did just for the sake of completeness today turned up some nifty stuff. First, we've got U.S. Air Force surgeon John Stapp, who served as their human test subject for g-force and other acceleration testing in the '40's and '50's. This dude survived the force of 46.2 Gs in one test! Although that was one of his last ones, and left him with permanent damage to his sight. I used this sequence of one Stapp test for reference for g-force distortion of the human face:
 
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image by USAF (source)
 
Here's the "rocket sled" they strapped him into for these tests:
 
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image by USAF (source)
 
Looks like some fun, huh? :o Stapp was a trooper, that's for sure.
 
The other thing I was double-checking was visual effects of near-light-speed travel, although I'm only moving something at a pretty tiny percentage of light speed in episode 11, so the funky distortions of relativity won't really be evident anyway. Still, it's pretty trippy stuff to see demonstrated, for instance in simulated images and movies on these pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
 
That last one is Carl Sagan from his "Cosmos" series, and it isn't quite accurate, since he covers only Doppler shift and the aberration of light. The aberration of light is the phenomenon of stuff in your peripheral vision actually curving around into your forward view as you approach light speed, so everything--except what's directly behind you--gets compressed into a tunnel in front of you, kind of, because you're catching the photons carrying that data right in your face; the usual analogy is that when you drive faster and faster in the rain, you get more raindrops in the face--so imagine photons are raindrops as we accelerate to light speed.
 
And while Sagan discusses color changes due to the Doppler effect--something moving very quickly toward you will shift blue, and something moving away will shift red--he doesn't take that to the extremes, where stuff moving toward you close to the speed of light will go all the way to white, apparently (?), and stuff moving away from you close to the speed of light will red shift so much that it goes black. Like, stuff falling into the event horizon of a black hole won't actually just vanish as it crosses that invisible horizon; rather, it will gradually get redder and redder, and fainter and fainter, until it just fades out completely. ... Well, in theory.
 
Then there's the *really* weird stuff: stuff moving at near-light speed gets compressed in its direction of travel; this is called the Lorentz contraction, which involves a lot of math I don't understand at all. You can't even exactly see it, apparently, because the photons hitting your eye simultaneously weren't necessarily released simultaneously from the moving object, since it's going so darn fast. Supposedly you will still see a sort of contraction effect in many cases, and that is a visual distortion resulting from Lorentz contraction and all that jazz, I think; anyhoo, it's called Terrell rotation, aka the "Penrose-Terrell effect," where your view of the object warps in a very funky way, and generally gets shorter (except that a sphere won't get shorter, since when you rotate a sphere, it's still a sphere), because you're seeing the back part of it nearly simultaneously with the side...or something like that, I dunno. Heck if I'm ever going to try drawing it, though! See that third link above in particular for some 3D-rendered examples of it.
 
 
 
 
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