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A Googol Film Clips Play at Once in This Experimental Short

Filmmaker Kevin McGloughlin gathers a googol video clips—one of the biggest numbers used in math—into an abstract light tunnel.

A googol of anything is a slightly intimidating thought. It would take us two lines of text just to write out the 1 followed by 100 zeroes. As filmmaker Kevin McGloughlin explains, the number is so large it's usually only used in mathematics in the context of infinity, or when talking about the size of the universe. And yet, McGloughlin attempted to capture the overwhelming number in the video above.

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McGloughlin, who previously turned blurred lights into a twisted timelapse, set out to cram a googol repeated video clips onto one screen—a process he calls "tedious and precise." The video, made from 1 x 10^100 shots of a car driving down a road, turns into a brief, but beautiful, abstract light tunnel. We reached out to McGloughlin to learn more about the construction of the near-inifite film:

"My method was such that there wasn't intense render times and for the entire googol videos. I only ever had to manage 10 layers of video footage. The trick was what was in the footage.

Ten videos were set out in 3D space, all very visible. These were rendered out to create a movie (the second clip).

Each of the 10 video layers were then replaced by this new movie. This scene was then rendered out as a new movie (the third clip). The fact that each of the ten layers now displays a video which itself is displaying 10 videos means the new movie is already displaying 100 videos.

When this process is repeated once more,there are already 1,000 videos being displayed (the fourth clip), so its easy to see how quickly the numbers grow. This process was repeated 100 times, producing a final video (the last clip) which contains every other video in its own process."

McGloughlin skips most of the iterations between clip three, which contains 1,000 repetitions of the video, and clip 100, containing a googol, but the math adds up. It should be noted that there likely aren't a googol pixels on the screen you're watching this video on, so you can't actually see a googol videos at once, but as McGloughlin explains, "Exactly one googol videos are contained in one way or another."

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Visit Kevin McGloughlin's Vimeo page for more experimental films.

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