On a day when NASA celebrated its Juno probe successfully entering Jupiter’s orbit after a five year voyage from Earth, we take a journey through space in what is considered ‘one of most famous short films ever made’. Created by iconic designers Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten embarks on an adventure in magnitudes, as we travel from a lakeside picnic in Chicago to the furthest reaches of the cosmos, until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others.

Described in its opening as ‘a film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effects of adding another zero’, Powers of Ten has not only become an important entry into the short film arena, but also an essential tool for teaching and understanding the importance of scale.

Groundbreaking for its time (Powers of Ten was created almost 40-years ago in 1977), the short’s archetypal aesthetic is one that has now been replicated many times in the world of filmmaking (the film has even been reimagined by 40 innovative artists from around the world – including SotW favourites Max Hattler & Zumbakamera) and its now hard to look at the film without thinking of Google’s now quintessential Maps/Earth projects

An adaptation of the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke, director Paul Schrader perfectly summarises Powers of Ten as a film that enables an audience member to “think of himself a citizen of the universe” and it’s this timely reminder of mankind’s tiny importance in the history of the universe, that makes (and will always make) this groundbreaking film from Charles and Ray Eames such an important watch.