Slime
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Slime
Techniquest/MOSI
Download film (right-click)Adult , Chemistry , Demonstration , Physics
The household classic — slime made from cornflour and water.
Director's Notes:
The original look of this film was inspired by the fabulous breakfast sequence in Shaun of the Dead, where Simon Pegg’s character puts jam on toast in a series of quick, punchy shots. Trouble is, that turns out to be unexpectedly hard to achieve. But hey, we had a go, and parts of it work quite well.
Meanwhile, the combination of cornflour and water produces a mixture with very strange properties. It’s only runny when it’s moving slowly — try to move it quickly and it thickens up, so you can roll it into a ball, as you see here.
If you’d like a few more details about repeating this for yourself, try this video at YouTube.
SciCast Notes:
I like the opening of this very much, and it’s far more complex than it looks — listen carefully to the sound and you’ll hear the room hum keep changing pitch as different parts of the video are run at different speeds. There are also some nicely detailed close-ups, and the team got the microphone good and close to capture some of the slippery slopping sounds.
My only real criticism is that while the film starts well, it doesn’t go anywhere: it doesn’t so much end as stop. Mind you, I haven’t thought of anything much to do with cornflour slime either. Except run on great troughs of the stuff, which is a classic experiment you might have seen on How2, Tomorrow’s World, or Brainiac. Hmm… perhaps we should do that for SciCast, at some point?
— Jonathan