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Fractal Image: Vertigo
Half-Size Images:
![[Half-size image of the fractal: Vertigo]](../images-full-size/vertigo.jpg)
Full-Size Images:
About the Fractal Image (Artistic):
Before computers, there were no computer-generated special effects in Hollywood movies. Special effects consisted of things like an actor in a rubber Godzilla suit stomping radio-controlled models of army tanks. Although primitive by today's standards, some movie special effects did efficiently convey information to the audience. One such effect was the "vertigo" spiral: if a character in the movie was afraid of heights, panicking, or just "freaking out", the character would be shown on their back flailing their arms and legs, superimposed on top of a large, slowly rotating spiral. It made you kind of dizzy to look at it on screen, but when you saw this effect used in a movie, you immediately knew that the character had totally lost it. This was used so often that it actually became a clichι (last used in the 1977 movie comedy "High Anxiety" by Mel Brooks which poked fun at the technique). When I first saw this fractal, I immediately recognized it as the "vertigo" spiral from all those early films.
About the Fractal Image (Technical):
The "Vertigo" fractal is one of the Mandelbrot type or Type M example fractals. Type M fractals are infinitely detailed (literally) and are interesting for the patterns formed by the filaments, especially at high magnification. The Vertigo fractal is a portion of the Mandelbrot fractal shown at a magnification of only about 4,100X which is a relatively low magnification for Type M fractals. Even so, the Vertigo fractals' size in the original Mandelbrot image (magnification = 1X) was only about the width of a human hair!
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