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- Squid vs. Octopus: What’s the Difference?
Squid vs. Octopus: What’s the Difference?
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Archival documentary explainer · 50 seconds · English
A 50-second archival-documentary explainer: an octopus has eight arms, a squid eight arms and two tentacles, and both come from one shelled, ten-armed ancestor that made two opposite bets.
- The brief
- “Squid vs. octopus: what’s the difference?”
- Style
- Archival documentary
- Length and frame
- 50 seconds · 16:9
- Made for
- Lessons and courses
How it was made.
The whole brief was the question, worded the way people search for it. The director picked the style itself. It laid two old engraving plates on a naturalist’s table and counted the arms with the viewer.
Its last line sums it up: a squid became a spear, an octopus became a hand. It cost $4.45 of model spend to make.
Every film on explain.film is made the same way: one sentence in, a storyboard you approve, then the director paints, voices, scores and animates it, and a critic model grades the cut before you see it.
Transcript
- Count the arms: an octopus has eight, and so does a squid.
- But a squid has two more limbs, and they aren't arms.
- They're tentacles: long whips with suckers only at the tip, fired out to grab prey.
- Both probably descend from one ancestor, with ten matching arms and a shell.
- Squid turned two arms into tentacles and kept a sliver of the shell, a stiff inner pen that braces a body built for speed.
- Octopuses lost two arms and nearly all of the shell, so even a big one can pour through a gap an inch wide.
- A squid became a spear.
- An octopus became a hand.
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