Примечание для начинающих критиков:

Все эти выражения, для меня, не содержат никакого смысла, потому как нуждаются в расшифровке, пояснениях и дополнениях.

Отредактировано Winaver (2006-01-10 06:22:22)

Wonders to behold - Special Effects

Special visual effects have enhanced motion pictures for almost a century. This magical image from E.T.—the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) is a much admired example of modern effects work by Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), a division of Lucasfilm. It was created through a melding of art and technology.
The earliest ancestor of E.T. was The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, a ruthless ''historic dramatization" produced only four months after motion pictures had first been introduced to the American public. It was made at the Thomas A. Edison laboratories in Orange, New Jersey, on August 28, 1894. Horrified patrons saw the headsman chop off Her Majesty's head before their very eyes. The director-cameraman (hence the world's first special effects cinematographer) was Alfred Clark, one of Edison's lab assistants. Clark halted the camera crank after the axe was raised, had the players "freeze" while the queen fled and a dummy took her place, then resumed cranking as the axe fell.
This elementary idea was to visual effects what the invention of the wheel was to industry.
The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots was made for the Kinetoscope, a slot-machine peep-show device, before the introduction of projected movies. The elaborate Princess Nicotine, made in New York in 1909 by Albert E. Smith for Vitagraph, utilized double exposures, steam jets (as smoke), and oversized props to create the pranks of a pair of tiny "smoke fairies."
For First National's The Lost World, made in 1925, 49 dinosaurs averaging about 61 cm in length and made of metal and rubber were animated in stop-motion technique by Willis O'Brien. Human actors, photographed to appear much smaller than the animals, were double exposed into masked areas. O'Brien improved his methods enormously for RKO's 1933 King Kong, one of the most popular pictures of all  time. Seemingly a gigantic ape, Kong was a 46cm stop-motion model made to interact with the actors through new techniques such as projecting images of previously photographed actors onto tiny screens concealed in the miniature sets. Animated action of Kong was also projected onto large screens behind the actors.
Before-and-after frames from MGM's The Cross of Lorraine (1944) illustrate the use of paintings to create settings that would be prohibitively expensive. These are called matte  shots. The painting of village rooftops against a stormy sky was blended into a live-action scene played on a set for which only the lower portions of the buildings were constructed.
Until some 30 years ago most special effects were created in studio departments. Now most are the work of specialized independent studios or by groups specially organized for specific projects. An important breakthrough was 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for which a team of British and American effects artists was assembled. In addition to stunning space vistas, 2001 popularized the use of technologies relatively unexploited until then: front projection, in which actors are filmed in front of a highly reflective screen onto which a background image is projected from the front via a two-way mirror.
The actor cannot move into the painted portions of the frame without creating a ghostly double exposure. To solve this problem, the filmmaker must use a traveling matte. Here the actor is photographed against a blank, usually blue, background. In laboratory printing, the moving outline of the actor is "cut out" of footage of the desired background. After further lab work, the shot of the actor is "jigsawed" into the moving gap in the background footage. It is traveling mattes that present shots of Superman's flight or of spaceships hurtling through space. The bird attacks in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds required dozens of traveling mattes. You can often detect traveling mattes on the screen, because even the most expensive and carefully executed special effects do not always manage to join the various portions of the shot together perfectly. A thin dark line, called a matte line, may shimmer around the moving sections. In The Empire Strikes Back, matte lines are particularly evident during the battle with the Empire's "walkers."
Another landmark was Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in which a giant alien ship, an exquisitely detailed model by Greg Jein, visits Earth. The actors and the base of the ship were photographed in an airplane hangar, the background was projected onto a 30-meter screen, and the intricately lighted model was superimposed later.
Computer-graphics visual effects got a tentative introduction in the Disney production Tron (1982), in which a video game comes to life. Fifteen minutes of the film consist of action generated completely by computer, and many other scenes were computer enhanced. A small army of animators, computer experts, and technicians were necessary. In the 10 years since Tron, computer technology has developed into one of the most important tools of the visual-effects industry.
By 1977 the cinema verite trend to starkly realistic cinematography had reduced the art of special visual effects to a very minor role in motion pictures. Then, in 1977, came Star Wars, George Lucas's marvelous homage to the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers cartoons and movie serials of the 1930s. The team assembled to create the interplanetary adventures of this photographic marvel was the nucleus of one of the largest visual-effects studios today, Industrial Light & Magic. Several of its leading supervisors are still with the company, while numerous others have since founded other effects facilities ranging from cottage industries to studios that rival ILM in scope. These include Apogee, Boss Film Effects, Praxis Filmworks, and others.
Star Wars was a huge hit, as was Close Encounters of the Third Kind, released later that year. As a result, special effects quickly became "big box-office," launching a new era of extravagant effects-oriented movies.
The first Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), was even bigger and better. Among its many charms was the sluglike Jabba the Hutt, a full-scale monster. The giant walkers, metal war machines resembling ponderous prehistoric monsters 15 meters tall, were stop-motion models about 60 cm tall. Many seemingly vast settings actually were skillfully detailed paintings with live action placed into small areas. Matte paintings of the Ewok Forest were enlivened by putting campfires and real actors onto the giant branches.
Spectacular visual effects from the then-new Boss Film Effects made possible one of the most successful productions of 1984, Ghostbusters, a wild comedy with scary moments and some 200 effects shots. A 65-mm high-speed reflex camera and a 65-mm aerial-image optical printer were specially designed for the production. As many as 163 artists and craftsmen were involved in creating a nonexistent New York skyscraper, fantastic ghosts, two giant "terror dogs," strange weapons, weirdly colored clouds, and a towering "marshmallow man" statue that comes to life to terrorize the city. There were 56 creatures in all.
The marshmallow man was a complex, fully articulated rubber costume that lumbered through miniature streets while model automobiles pulled by wires tried to stay out of its way. He was optically printed into the scenes with the actors. The "terror dogs," sculptures that supposedly come to life, were stop-motion models in some instances and in other scenes were full-scale mechanical creatures. The strange clouds were made by dropping various chemicals into water. The ghost called Onionhead was a full-size suit operated by a man inside while several puppeteers actuated changes of expression. The strange building was partly miniature, partly real, and partly a painting. There were also laser effects, animated lightning, and myriad other eerie touches.
During the 1920s Max and Dave Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell cartoons and Walt Disney's Alice series regularly combined live actors with animated drawings. Live action was shot first, enlargements were made of the frames, and the stills were rephotographed with cartoon-cell overlays. Some 20 years later, optical techniques were being used by Disney to mingle his cartoon stars with real people in Technicolor features while Hanna-Barbera's Tom (cat) and Jerry (mouse) were dancing with Gene Kelly and swimming with Esther Williams in MGM musicals.
These enchanting moments remained state-of-the-art until 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit, ILM and Richard Williams Animation produced hundreds of scenes in which cartoon stars acted with film stars. The camera moved freely and the cartoon characters, with realistic shadows and atmospheric effects, blended perfectly into the scenes.
ILM took another leap with Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), wherein cinematography, digital technology, and computer imagery are combined with stunning results. Most remarkable are numerous scenes in which a liqueous robot metamorphoses into various forms. In this example, the robot changes imperceptibly from a woman into the liquid robot, which then takes on the form of a policeman.
In the early 1990s, the personal computer was a household item. During the 1990s, computer programmers were welcome guests at – if not masters of – every self-respecting studio.  In many hits of the 1990s - The Lawn Mower, Johnny Mnemonic or Matrix - film an in the good old sense of the term (creative work with and by the actors, shot design, scenography) was merely the background for the main attraction - computer-created virtual reality.
At the close of the last decade of the 20th century, electronic cloning was the rage in the motion picture world. In reached its peak in George Lukas' Star Wars. Episode I. Hidden Menace (1999). In it, there is almost nothing left for the actors to do. They do play - a little, and the viewers' attention is riveted almost exclusively to robot' electronic clones.
"Matrix" - most effective film of our time. In "Matrix," best movie of number of tricks and special effects. However, not all is making the computer. The actors trained by months, mastering Kung Fu. Received traumas and broke кости.
The main fight Neo and agent Smith occurs under a torrential rain. For this purpose have made special drops, the size it is bigger then usual - that the rain seem more appreciably. Fights in "Matrix" is most interesting part. On the screen they looked especially effectively, apply such reception: speed of shooting that slow down, that, strongly accelerate.
Let us open a secret as the clones "of the agents Smith" are created. For this purpose the dummies and actors - actors in masks with a face of agent Smith are used. Actors in masks stand in last line and turn heads of the fixed dummies simultaneously. Then on the computer, it is possible to copy the Smiths.
The fights in "Matrix" created on the computer, as well as armies of machines. Though not all, For example, the dead Hunters, which lay in corridors, - natural: it is models. But natural Hunters it is all computer.
Who knows what new miracles lie in store in the ever-evolving art of special visual effects?

DIRECTORS

Like Stallone, John Avildsen—director of Rocky and Rocky V —wanted to use the Rocky death scene. "I thought it was a great ending," says Avildsen. But if Stallone didn't have the clout to demand that ending, then Avildsen certainly didn't. Only a handful of Hollywood directors have considerable power—usually because they're financial titans like Steven Spielberg, whose string of giant hits like Jaws (1975), E.T.-the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and the Indiana Jones series (1981-89) enable him to finance his own films. Most Hollywood directors do not even have "final cut" - the right to decide exactly what scenes will be used in their movies.
Like actors, many directors get typecast by studios. The studios believe these directors are suitable only for the type of movie that they've been most commercially successful with. After Rocky, says Avildsen, "I got scripts all the time about people who came from behind and who win in the end. Studio executives think, "This guy makes this kind of movie, and this other guy makes that kind of movie.""
Even Steven Spielberg, Hollywood's most financially successful director, decries the conformity that commercialism has caused. "In the old days, in the golden age of Hollywood," says Spielberg, "gambling was just taken for granted. But the great gamblers are dead, and I think that's the tragedy of Hollywood today." The early studio moguls, says Spielberg, "were brave. They were gamblers—high rollers. There is paranoia today. People in high positions are unable to say 'okay' or 'not okay.' They are looking for the odds-on favorite. And that's very hard when you're making a movie, because all movies are a gamble."
Spielberg thinks that studios should gamble on artists' passions, instead of trying to follow trends or interpret market research. "[Director] George Lucas was the most surprised kid on the block when Star Wars (1977) became a mega-hit," says Spielberg. "A few weeks before the film opened he was predicting it would make $15 million." It made $524 million. ''You never say, 'This movie is going to the heart of America,'" says Spielberg, "I always plan for failure, and I'm surprised by success."

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Отредактировано Winaver (2006-01-10 18:59:08)