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