Mirrors of time

Duration: 23

Year Published: 1991

Creator: The Board

Format: 16mm

Color: Color

Sound: sound

Description: A collage of animation styles, including 3-D computer graphics and computer animation, is used to chronicle the history of the measurement of time. From the Babylonian moongazers to the Egyptian sun worshippers, through ancient Rome to the present, this film meshes mythology, history and science to explain how the moon, the sun and other heavenly bodies have served as indicators of time, specifically in the calculations of days, months and years. Monumental discoveries and missteps are charted, including Eratosthenes' groundbreaking postulant that the earth is round, Ptolemy's erroneous pronouncement of an earth-centered universe and Sosigene's revolutionary contribution of the leap year. The film analyzes the development of the Julian calendar devised during the reign of Julius Caesar which named the days of the week and the months of the year according to the planets and the gods of mythology, nomenclature still in use today. In the 1500's, the Julian calendar was finely tuned to become the Gregorian calendar, our present framework for discerning the divisions of time.