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- What Are Shooting Stars?
What Are Shooting Stars?
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Layered papercut explainer · 52 seconds · English
A 52-second layered-papercut explainer: a shooting star is a crumb of comet dust the size of a grain of sand, hitting the air 100 km up so fast that the air itself glows.
- The brief
- “What are shooting stars?”
- Style
- Layered papercut
- Length and frame
- 52 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 opened on a streak over a paper valley and followed the grain back to the comet that shed it.
Meteor showers come in near the end: cross a comet’s whole trail and they come by the dozen. It cost $4.65 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
- The shooting star you once wished on was never a star.
- It was a crumb of comet dust, about the size of a grain of sand.
- It drifted around the Sun for ages, until Earth ploughed straight into it.
- A hundred kilometres up, it struck the air at up to seventy kilometres a second, two hundred times the speed of sound.
- It crushed the air ahead of it so hard that the air glowed, and the grain boiled away in a second.
- Cross a comet's whole trail, and shooting stars come by the dozen.
- So your wish was made on a crumb of comet, left over from the birth of the planets.
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