Cosmic Zoom

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Cosmic Zoom
Directed by	Eva Szasz
Produced by	Joseph Koenig Wolf Koenig Robert Verrall
Music by	Pierre F. Brault
Distributed by	National Film Board of Canada
Release date(s)	1968
Running time	8 minutes
Country	Canada
Official website
IMDb profile

"Cosmic Zoom" is a 1968 short film directed by Eva Szasz and produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It depicts the relative size of everything in the universe in an 8-minute sequence using animation and animation camera shots.

[edit] Synopsis

The film starts with an aerial image of a boy on a boat and slowly zooms out, revealing more of the landscape all the time. The continuous zoom-out takes the viewer on a journey from Earth, past the Moon , the planets of the Solar System, the Milky Way and out into the far reaches of the known universe. The process is then reversed, and the view zooms back through space to Earth, returning to the boy on the boat. It then zooms in to the back of the boy's hand, where a mosquito is resting. It zooms into the insect's proboscis and on into the microscopic world, concluding at nucleolus level. It then zooms back out to the original view of the boy on the boat.

[edit] Inspiration and follow ups

The film was based on the 1957 essay Cosmic View by Kees Boeke. The 1977 short film Powers of Ten used the same idea and techniques, as did the 1996 IMAX film Cosmic Voyage.