Ah, the good ol' Google Earth Zoom. Fun for the whole family. But imagine if you didn't have satellite imagery and warehouse-sized databases to pull all that sciencey eye candy from. What if you had to do it all by hand?
Check out the first and last few minutes of "Cosmic Zoom," an animated short from 1968. It's sorta cool, in a clunky, Newton-as-precursor-to-iPhone kind of way.
This charming-but-lo-fi effort also inspired "Powers of Ten," a timeless work of genius from Charles and Ray Eames. If you've never seen that three-way joygasm of science, cinema and graphic design, do so after the jump. (If you're already a fan, check out this freeking-awesome collection of P10-related production art, storyboards, and scientific correspondence between the Eameses and their egghead patrons at IBM.)
Finally, because there's no such thing as too much clever riffing on exponential growth, here's one of my favorite Simpsons lead-ins.
[via kottke]
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