- Feb 5, 2002
- 167,213
- 56,587
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Others
To pull off this classic Hollywood stunt, you gotta know your physics!
JUST BECAUSE YOU see something done in a movie, that doesn't mean you should try it yourself. Take, for example, a human running on top of a moving train. For starters, you can't be sure it's real. In early Westerns, they used moving backdrops to make fake trains look like they were in motion. Now there's CGI. Or they might speed the film up to make a real train look faster than it really is.
So here's a question for you: Is it possible to run on a train roof and leap from one car to the next? Or will the train zoom ahead of you while you're in the air, so that you land behind where you took off? Or worse, would you end up falling between the cars because the gap is moving forward, lengthening the distance you have to traverse? This, my friend, is why stunt actors study physics.
Continued below.
www.wired.com
JUST BECAUSE YOU see something done in a movie, that doesn't mean you should try it yourself. Take, for example, a human running on top of a moving train. For starters, you can't be sure it's real. In early Westerns, they used moving backdrops to make fake trains look like they were in motion. Now there's CGI. Or they might speed the film up to make a real train look faster than it really is.
So here's a question for you: Is it possible to run on a train roof and leap from one car to the next? Or will the train zoom ahead of you while you're in the air, so that you land behind where you took off? Or worse, would you end up falling between the cars because the gap is moving forward, lengthening the distance you have to traverse? This, my friend, is why stunt actors study physics.
Framing the Action
What is physics anyway? Basically it's a set of models of the real world, which we can use to calculate forces and predict how the position and velocity of things will change. However, we can't find the position or velocity of anything without a reference frame.Continued below.
Can You Really Run on Top of a Train, Like in the Movies?
To pull off this classic Hollywood stunt, you gotta know your physics!
