Week 12 Questions

Christopher Diaz-Mihell

DAI 227, David Cox

April 26, 2011

Week 12 Questions

1) What was the name of the film made by Edwin S Porter that made use of a double-exposure to show a train window view of passing landscape?

            - The Great Train Robbery

2) Who invented the traveling matte shot in 1916?

            - Frank Williams

3) How many weeks did it take to animate the main character in 1933’s KING KONG?

            - 55 weeks

4) Which film made use of the ‘slit scan’ process in the 1960s?

            - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

           

5) In his essay “Industrial Memory” theorist Mark Dery argues that the silver fluid T1000 cyborg character represents a ‘masculine recoil’ – but from what?

            - “Feminization of electronic technology”

6) Tim Recuber in his essay “Immersion Cinema” describes the key idea – that of immersion cinema itself – what is it? What makes it unique?

            - According to Tim Recuber, “Immersion Cinema”, emphasizes the spectator’s experience. He highlights the term by saying, “immersion cinema”, occurs when the “spectator experiences a participation in or interaction with the filmed spectacle through a series of technologically driven simulations on screen and in the theater”. I believe what makes “immersion cinema” so unique is its ability to take numerous technologies and create an illusion or a “new level of simulated audience participation”.

7) In the special effects history links, in the Time magazine history of special effects, there is a description of ‘motion control’ cameras developed for “Star Wars” in the 1970s. What is motion control?(1 paragraph)

            - Motion control is defined as “controlling the motion of a camera or special effects object (eg. model space ship etc), using commands from a computer, so that the exact moves can be repeated as many times. This makes it easy to composite it (i.e. combine it with another shot). George Lucas strived on the success of Star Wars and especially its success that came from its top-notch revolutionary special effects work. With its success they created their very own special effects company called ILM being one of the first purveyors of computer generated imagery and the original parent company of animation giant Pixar.

8) Out of the 14 minutes of Jurassic Park’s dinosaur footage, how many minutes were computer generated imagery or CGI?

            - 4 minutes

9) In the ‘denofgeek’ website, what is the name of the film that features an army of sword fighting skeletons, made in 1963?

            - Jason and the Argonauts

10) In the ‘denofgeek’ site, which 2005 film used a special effects shot to sell the idea of a remake of a famous science fiction story to Steven Spielberg?

            - War Of The Worlds

DAI 227: Virilio Summary

Christopher Diaz-Mihell

David Cox, DAI 227

A summary of: “A Traveling Shot over Eighty Years” a chapter from “War and                                                                                                     

                             Cinema,” written by Paul Virilio.

            In this final chapter, Virilio re-introduces what he called a fusion of perception and warfare. He begins by bringing forth the use of searchlights in the Russian-Japanese battle of Port Arthur in 1904, describing those searchlights as war’s first projectors. From those searchlights on, Virilio describes the ever-growing pace of the development of observation and destruction.  Ultimately meeting one another to create the disaster at Hiroshima, which Virilio describes as a “flash, which literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became the war’s recording surface, its film” (Virilio, 70).

            Virilio continues on to later mention the wide variety of invisible weapons developed by the military to make things visible. For instance we saw the creation of radar picture. Virilio writes, “in the wars of old, strategy mainly consisted in choosing and marking out a theatre of operations, a battlefield, with the best visual conditions and the greatest scope for movement. In the Great War, however, the main task was to grasp the opposite tendency: to narrow down targets and to create a picture of battle for troops blinded by the massive reach of artillery units, themselves firing blind, and by the ceaseless upheaval of their environment” (Virilio, 70). Therefore we began to see the surveying of land and its wartime features, such as trenches, moving front lines, shell shock, and even the destruction of landmarks, all of which “impeded vision in one way or another,” and all of which lead to the usage of aerial photography.

            In conlusion you can see how closely related Virilio’s points are to our present time issue with War on Terror. Terrorism and its unseen threat is truly what tends to scare the most of us, very possibly being the reason the U.S. has turned towards increased levels of secrecy and spying.   

Week 11 DAI227 Questions-Topic-Theme Parks & Shopping Malls

Christopher Diaz-Mihell

DAI 227, David Cox

April 21, 2011

Week 11 DAI227 Questions - Topic - THEME PARKS & SHOPPING MALLS

1) In Margaret Crawford's Essay "The World in a Shopping Mall she outlines that 'the size and scale of a mall reflects "threshold demand"' - what is meant by this term?

         - The term “threshold demand” is used to describe a theory put forward by Crawford that describes the correlation between the scale of a mall and its potential customers living within a geographical range to secure profit. Crawford puts forward this idea to highlight the correlation of mall sizes to revenue.

2) In the same article Margaret Crawford describes something called "spontaneous malling" - what does this mean?

         - In the essay “The World in a Shopping Mall”, Margaret Crawford defines “spontaneous malling” as a process that transforms urban spaces into malls without new buildings or developers. This idea is used to describe a society that is dominated by consumerism, where any public shopping zone becomes transformed into a mall.

3) According to Michael Sorkin in his essay 'See you in Disneyland', how did Disneyland have its origins?

         - According to Sorkin a hagiographer had claimed the idea for the park came to Disney in 1938 on a trip to Chicago’s Railroading Fair, “where he was invited to don engineer’s overalls and climb behind the throttle of a historic locomotive, fulfilling a childhood dream” (Sorkin, 206). Which led to Disney creating his very own miniature railroad that traveled around his house, “anticipating the rail-ringed parks to come.” Another myth claims that the parks origin came from Disney’s disgust at its failures of hygiene after a visit to a conventional amusement park. Unlike these stories, Disneyland’s immediate origins are specific. “Strapped for cash to finance spiraling construction costs, the previously TV-shy Disney cut a deal with ABC, then struggling far behind its two rivals” (Sorkin, 206).

4) Michael Sorkin writes in his essay that Disney's EPCOT Center was motivated largely by frustrations Disney felt at his Anaheim CA park. What were those frustrations?

         - These frustrations derived from Anaheim’s surrounding area. Sorkin writes, “Disneyland was beleaguered by an undisciplined periphery: the huge success of the park prompted developers to buy up miles of surrounding countryside, which was promptly converted to a regulation less tangle of hotels and low commerce” (Sorkin, 224). Sorkin also describes how Disney’s troubles or frustrations doubled when he figured he was losing millions to other Hotels housing his visitors.

5) In his essay "Travels in Hyperreality" Umberto Eco describes Disneyland as 'a place of total passivity' - what does he mean by this?

         - Eco uses the phrase ‘a place of total passivity’ to describe how we as visitors must agree to behave like robots when visiting Disneyland. Eco goes on to say “access to each attraction is regulated by a maze of metal railings which discourages any individual initiative.” Eco also writes that the number of visitors entail the pace of the line and “properly dressed in the uniforms suited to each specific attraction, not only admit the visitor to the threshold of the chosen sector, but, in successive phases, regulate his every move (“Now wait here please, go up now, sit down please, wait before standing up.”

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