Smile of the Week: Professor and His Shadow

I love the gentle trick Biola math professor Matthew Weathers played on his class (with a little help from the University President at the end).

If I can just be a movie nerd here for a moment, I’ll point out that it reminds me of a pioneer of animated cartoons, Winsor McCay’s “Gertie the Dinosaur.” McCay was enormously successful as a political cartoonist and creator of comic strips “Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend” and “Little Nemo.” He realized that if he made a lot of drawings, varying each of them slightly, and made each into a frame of film, he could animate movement. So, he drew thousands of individual pictures. And, like Professor Weathers he interacted with the animated character. I love to see new technologies and approaches sharing this most analog and human element of story-telling.