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- What Colors Can Dogs See?
What Colors Can Dogs See?
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Risograph print explainer · 49 seconds · English
A 49-second Risograph explainer: our eyes print the world in three inks, a dog’s in two, blue and yellow, which is why a red ball vanishes on green grass.
- The brief
- “What colors can dogs see?”
- Style
- Risograph print
- Length and frame
- 49 seconds · 16:9
- Made for
- Lessons and courses
- Also on
- YouTube
How it was made.
The whole brief was the question, worded the way people search for it. The director picked the style itself. It chose Risograph and made the print process the explanation: three spot inks for human eyes, two for a dog’s.
The film stamps out the black-and-white myth and ends on a practical tip, throw a blue ball. It cost $5.72 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
- Throw a red ball onto green grass, and your dog may run right past it.
- Not because dogs see in black and white — that's a myth.
- Your eyes print the world in three inks, one for each kind of cone cell.
- A dog's eyes have only two, tuned to blue and yellow.
- So red, orange and green all print as the same dull yellow, and the ball melts into the lawn.
- Yet most mammals see the world in just those two inks.
- Our primate ancestors regained a third, probably for spotting ripe fruit.
- So throw a blue ball.
- In a dog's yellow world, blue is what pops.
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