How slow motion became cinema’s dominant special effect
21 comments
·July 17, 2025kuboble
One related observation about time slowing down.
When you get better at juggling, objects really start falling down in slow motion (e.g a glass from a cupboard).
I guess my brain stores trajectories in cache instead of having to compute them and I get higher fps than I used to.
MIC132
This is also very noticeable in Video Games. I remember the first time I played One Step From Eden, I thought I would never be able to keep up with it's frantic pace, but the more practice and understanding I had the more the game "slowed down". To a point of course, it's still a fast game but it feels orders of magnitude slower than initially.
throw310822
Interesting, recently I'm playing squash more often and I'm improving. One of my observations, or mental notes, is that the ball is slow. I have all the time to look at it, see where it's going and decide what's the best moment to hit it back. I thought this observation was the result of being more calm and focused, but maybe it's my brain that's getting faster at this precise task.
krior
Relevant kurzgesagt-video on how brains predict the future to "slow things down": https://youtu.be/wo_e0EvEZn8
adzm
It's great when the footage was shot with an appropriate shutter angle. And terrible when you become familiar with interpolation artifacts from artificially generating frames, because then you will start to notice it everywhere, kind of like bad kerning.
rowanG077
I expect it won't take too long for this to be fixed with AI.
superb_dev
You don’t have to know what you’re doing if AI can just paper over it!
rowanG077
I don't understand this comment. Of course the person mastering/editing the movie will have to know what they are doing. They need to ensure it's done properly. AI image generation is just a technique in the toolbox to achieve that.
Joeboy
A few hasty, disconnected thoughts about slow-motion:
1) Back in the day, you'd use slowmo if you wanted to make something look bigger and more impressive, like scale model work or making a human-sized person look like a giant[0]. Maybe people just figured out the same effect works at 1:1 scale. Or maybe it started working at 1:1 scale after people got used to it being associated with big and impressive things.
2) It's just become a lot easier and cheaper, in the same sort of way that shallow depth of field was everywhere after large-sensor consumer video cameras started appearing (notably the Canon 5D mkii). You don't even have to remember to overcrank the camera, you can fake it in post with Twixtor or its descendents.
3) Not sure what the state of play is now, but for a while higher frame rates were one of the main things distinguishing "cinema" cameras. Eg. maybe you could shoot at 180fps but only with an extra crop factor or with certain codecs. Maybe that focused film makers' minds on it a bit.
4) I don't think you ever see step printing [1] anymore (which is when you repeat frames, instead of overcranking or interpolating them). Maybe it's due a comeback.
pavlov
I watched Pixar’s “Elio” with the kids yesterday and I could swear there was a step printing effect in a montage.
So I don’t think it’s quite that uncommon. For editors it serves a useful purpose as an effect that feels perceptually different than regular slow motion and adds variety to cuts.
deadbabe
Slow motion is just the visual equivalent of describing things in great literary detail, so it was always going to be this way.
mc32
Or macro/micro zoom-ins and exploded diagrams: people are interested in detail.
nicoloren
No mention of John Woo in the article but The Matrix is here... Weird choice.
mrob
Slow motion is a workaround for the bad motion quality that results from the extremely low frame rate of 24 fps. If we standardized on something less bad, e.g. 120 fps, it wouldn't be necessary. With modern digital cameras and efficient LED lighting this won't be unreasonably expensive.
pjc50
Plenty of people are still unhappy with any change from the 24fps standard.
mrob
I don't understand it at all. As I child, I once visited Futuroscope[0] in France, a kind of cinema theme park. It has many different projection systems, e.g. 3D, dome screen, ultra-wide screen. The one that impressed me most was the Showscan[1]. This is analog film running at 60fps. I liked it so much I watched both Showscan movies they were showing twice. 60fps is by no means high frame rate, but even that was an enormous improvement over 24fps.
I'm not aware of any movies shot in non-interleaved 120fps (AFAIK all the movies advertised as "120fps" are 2*60fps stereoscopic with the frames interleaved between the eyes). Considering how much better games look in high frame rate compared to 60fps I'd love to see a non-interleaved 120fps movie.
Joeboy
> I'm not aware of any movies shot in non-interleaved 120fps
I think Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk? Although I'm not sure if you can actually watch it at 120fps.
> About 20 years ago, a neuroscientist named David Eagleman strapped a bunch of students into harnesses, hoisted them to the top of an imposing metal tower, and then, without warning, dropped them 150 feet. Though the students landed safely in nets, the experience was—by design—terrifying. Eagleton wanted to simulate the feeling of plummeting to one’s death.
FYI, the experiment is not as insane as the article makes it seem.
The subjects knew there would be a drop involved, and they timed others doing the drop first before estimating the elapsed time in their own drop.