I'm a Reel Boy
"Through the magic of motion pictures, someone who's never left Peoria knows the softness of a Paris spring, the color of a Nile sunset, the sorts of vegetation one will find along the upper Amazon and that Big Ben has not yet gone digital," Vincent Canby once stated (Brainy). His statement teases about the rapidly changing industry of special effects and how it is revolutionizing the way we perceive things. The sight of a train passing by the camera flabbergasted and frightened early audiences, when motion pictures were jittery and lacked sound. Now, it has become increasingly difficult to decipher between what is reality and what a men tediously manipulated. The goal of visual effects artists, as magicians of the silver screen, is now to push our senses to their limits and create an illusion of reality without our knowing. George Lucas, one of the greats in film and special effects' and famed creator of Star Wars, said, "the secret to film is that it's an illusion (Brainy)."
Driessel in a bluebox
The special effects in House were purposely made i...
Special Effects StageAssessing the milestone events through out the history of film reveals how far we have come.
A number of technologies and inventions related to motion and vision developed in the early to late 19th century foreran the birth of the motion picture industry. Early in 1893, Thomas Alva Edison built the world's first film production studio, the Black Maria, or the Kinetographic Theater, on the grounds of his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, for making filmstrips. A Frenchman, Georges Melies, developed his own camera, and then set up Europe's first film studio in 1897. An illusionist and stage magician, Melies exploited the new medium with a pioneering, 14-minute science fiction work, Le Voyage Dans la Lune - A Trip to the Moon. Melies introduced the elemental...