In the opening scene of the movie, Atlas does a card trick. He flips through a deck of cards and asks a woman if she saw a card clearly. She replies, "no," because he went too fast. He flips through them again and she remembers a card that she saw. Atlas then fans out the cards, and asks the woman if she sees her card. She says, "no." He immediately tells her, "you are looking too closely. The closer you look, the less you'll see." Atlas then throws the cards up in the air, and the woman's card, the 7 of diamonds, lights up on the side of a building.
It is true that when you look too closely at something, you wont understand it or see it as well. You cannot look closely at an illusion or else it won't work. Illusions are something that, when you first look at it, you see the illusion.
For example, when you look at this picture you immediately see that it says "life" without looking at it very closely. When you look at it closely you see that the word is made of of little lines in each checker. You cannot see an illusion if you immediately look too closely.
If you haven't seen the movie, Now You See Me, I recommend it not only because it is simply awing, but it has so many cool illusions.
Wow that super trippy! I never thought about that. Buts it is so true with many things. When you look at a specific thing you might not understand it. However when you look at the full picture it all makes sense. It works like that with illusions as well as many other things.
ReplyDeleteIllusions are pretty cool.
ReplyDeleteI think it's pretty cool that we can see concepts like this in our everyday lives - and even in the movies (because we all look to movies to define our lives).
With illusions I feel like if you just focus on one specific part you'll miss the whole thing -- you need the whole, big picture to see the illusion.
This movie was freaking awesome. Now that you've included it in your blog post, I realize that it would be so interesting to watch it again, knowing what I know about illusions now. A lot of illusions are mystifying because we look at them too closely, so I understand how this relates.
ReplyDeleteThis movie was indeed super cool. Thinking about the motto in retrospect, "the closer you look, the less you'll see," really clears some things up about the movie and illusions. This also kind of relates to the gestalt principles, that we tend to see things as whole. This is important for illusions because if you focus on only one aspect, you miss the clearer picture, the whole.
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