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Choosing one's clip is perhaps the most difficult aspect of doing a phylm project. Essentially you are looking for a well defined question or small set of questions. Your question should be interesting to you as well as accessible. Make sure you are asking a question that you can solve. You may choose to approach your phylm project in several ways; these are to a great extent determined by your choice of video footage. Your primary task is to look at the clip critically, making use of the mental tools you have developed in your physics class. After this, you are expected to repackage the footage and provide an analysis and commentary to accompany the clip. As we discussed in Planning 2, your clip footage should be less than 3 minutes long. For logistical reasons (e.g., available computer memory and in-class time), however, your clip will probably need to be much shorter. As this is your first phylm project, the material you choose to analyze should be of an appropriate level. Although you will be asked to provide a detailed mathematical description of the scenario(s) presented in your clip, the primary focus of your analysis should be a single central "event," perhaps a collision, fall, or other such instance of a body or bodies in motion (e.g., any problem in kinematics, dynamics, conservation of momentum...). This event itself might be as brief as a few seconds in length. This will allow you time to show us some of the action leading up to the event so that you may place it in context. You are only limited in your choice of events by the skill set you have developed as of this date. If you have an event you aren't sure of, consult your instructor for suggestions. The approach you take depends a great deal on the nature of your footage. In all cases you will take stock of what is happening in the clip, estimate the values of physical quantities in the clip to the best of your ability, and answer a question about the event using your estimates. You will most likely choose one of the following three approaches. A word of caution: make sure your clip has the information you think it does. Can you really measure the speed of objects by looking at the frame count, or are they moving in "slow motion?" Fictional Footage:
Using what you know of the world and what you can find out through research, estimate values of physical quantities for relevant objects in your clip. Accept some of the less believable aspects of your scene and attempt to determine some value for something in your clip that interests you. For example, if you are examining a clip where someone puts to use some super-human power, you may choose to calculate exactly how super-human their power is. For example, you see a character lift a car and toss it across the street. You could, through research, arrive at an estimate for the mass of the car, say from the manufacturer's web site and stated standard factory weight. By examining the footage you could determine the car's velocity during the toss in question. Putting these and other observations together, you could calculate a lower-limit for the character's strength by seeing what force would have been necessary to impart the observed acceleration. You might then compare this to the force necessary to achieve say the current world record for shot-put. Realist Approach: Using what you know of the world and what you can find out through research, estimate values of physical quantities for relevant objects in your clip. For example, if you are determining whether or not the bus in Speed (Speed, ??? pictures. 1996) can make the jump across the unfinished section of road and continue driving along at 55mph, you would want to have an estimate of things such as the gap's length, the bus' velocity, the force required to get the bus to that velocity, the pitch of the road, the mass of the bus, and so on. You could then use your knowledge of projectile motion to determine if the bus was moving sufficiently fast and if the pitch was sufficiently steep to allow it to clear the gap. In such a case you should tell us what values would have been needed in order to allow for what we see. For example, "The bus would have had to travel two or three times as fast as we saw it moving," or "Its engine would have had to be three times as powerful as the standard bus diesel." Drawing attention to this, you should give us an idea of how farfetched or realistic the presentation of the event was.
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