Curly-Wurly Stretching

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License: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike Curly-Wurly Stretching Jonathan Sanderson
Views: 1442
10 Oct, 2007

Duration: 06:37
Team: Jonathan Sanderson
Region: South Yorkshire

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Categories:
Adult , Experiment , Investigation , Miscellaneous , Physics

A world-record attempt, and a serious investigation into the properties of materials. It is, it is, it is!

Director's Notes:

The British Interactive Group is a professional organisation for people working in museums, science centres, and associated businesses. Every year, it holds a conference with lectures and workshop sessions on skills development, evaluation techniques, and so on.

Then in the coffee breaks, we do things like this.

James Piercy — who now works with Science Made Simple — came up with this nonsense idea. Now we could go on about how we were investigating material properties, exploring the effect of low temperatures on ductility, and honing our measurement and data-collection techniques.

But really, we just fancied eating a load of Curly-Wurlys.

The record was verified and entered the books, however it was broken less than a year later.

SciCast Notes:

This is a very long film for SciCast, but it took me the best part of a day to hack it down to even this length, so… this is what you get. I still think it’s watchable, though — mostly because James is extremely good value. His little dance, for example, sums up the lunacy of the event.

Shooting this sort of thing is extremely difficult. You have to run around and point the camera where you think something might happen next, and then stay there for long enough that you can use the shot. Just waving the camera around and trying to chase the action will get you a tape full of nothing.

I think I was partially successful here, but having a second camera would have been extremely valuable. Mind you, then I’d just have had twice as much material to deal with when editing, so… maybe I did this right after all.

— Jonathan.