Toddler confused about mirror's reflection: Hey, where did that baby go?

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/17/toddler-confused-about-mirror.html

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Imagine how much more adorable that would be if it wasn’t filmed with a potato. What the fuck is wrong with people? TYFS.

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Object permanence – how does that work?

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Brb dying from cute

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Came to check this was going to be shown. Left satisfied. Thanks.

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Me too. It wasn’t. Public service fulfilled.

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Relevant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

“Well, I certainly will not be making that mistake again…”

Check out Gilbert Gottfried’s Groucho impersonation. Being Gilbert, he does him as the decrepit old man interviewed by Dick Cavett. It’s both horrifying and funny.

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The best camera is the one you have with you. How many people carry around cameras that aren’t potatoes?

Besides me, that is.

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I assumed it was a potato, because I know of no video cameras that don’t allow for shooting in the correct landscape aspect ratio. Most video cameras are designed to shoot exclusively in landscape mode, actually.

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There’s nothing “correct” about landscape; it’s just a standard. Allow people to make their own artistic choice about portrait versus landscape — or even dutch angle — even if you disagree with their choice. Don’t claim it as moral correctness, because that’s hogwash.

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Nope, I’m not buying it. Landscape is always correct for video. Still images are another matter…

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Sadly, it probably won’t happen in a child this young, but imagine the epic ‘Eureka!’ moment in the kiddies head when he first gets it. I
t’ll be like: Wow, wOw!.. This thing…is AmazeBALLS! – Mom! Get in here, quick, you gotta see this thing!’

Yes there is.

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Don’t you have to learn the rules of any art before you can break them well?

Yes there are times where portrait video would work, but 99% of the portrait videos I see are a waste of vertical pixels, panning where panning would be unnecessary in a landscape video, etc. Then there is the problem where most video upload sites assume landscape format and portrait videos are downscaled to fit, resulting in a loss of resolution.

Human vision also has a bias towards landscape

I am not saying “do not do portrait video”, but I am saying “if in any doubt, use landscape”

Sure. But learning to do it well implies doing it badly a lot of times before you hit that level. The myth of the sushi apprentice watching their sushi master for years and then creating their own masterworks without having practiced is a terrible model for learning. Everything else in the world you learn by doing.

By all means criticise this video for having an inappropriate format, if you can back it up with more than “because”. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with this video being filmed in portrait. Besides the black bars — which is down to designer apathy from Youtube, not any nonsense theory of horizontal human vision — the vertical format fits the vertical aspect of the mirror, which is the context for the whole thing.

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No. There isn’t.

27tgai

And that shot from The IPCRESS File is landscape. It’s just that they included the lamp in that shot to obscure Bluejay. Clever, simple, elegant, effective, but still landscape.
And the same goes for all the splitscreen mania of the late 1960ies/early 1970ies. Very effective when used properly (off the top of my head, The Thomas Crown Affair, Grand Prix, The Andromeda Strain,… plenty more…), but the format in shooting and projection is always landscape.

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