Week 1
Title: 2001 A Space Odyssey
Year of production: 1968
Director: Stanley Kubrick
2001 A Space Odyssey, is about evolution. something nudged monolith on Earth, evolution then enabled humans to reach Moon surface.
2001 didn't involve CGI, 2001: A Space Odyssey Used Massive, Rotating Sets, A Space Odyssey Used Models For The Spaceships, A Space Odyssey Used Wires (& Tape) For Zero-G Effects, Trippy Star Gate Sequence Used Slit-Scan Photography
Title: The Abyss
Year of production: 1989
Director: James Cameron
Married engineers, they are drafted to support Navy SEAL with top secret operation. Nuclear submarine has been ambushed and sunk under uknown circumstances.
Only one shot of the pseudopod - where it transformed back into ordinary water was composited digitally.
Title:Jason and the Argonauts
Year of production: 1963
Director: Don Chaffey
This movie is about, Jason who was prophesied to take the trone of Thessaly, he is sailing with crew and Hercules to Colchis. During the voyage crew is replete with battles.
Harryhausen created stop-motion animations, including seven-headed hydra.
Title: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of Black Pearl
Year of production: 2003
Director: Gore Verbinski
Tale following Captain Jack Sparrow and William Turner, as they search for Elizabeth Swan who was kiddnaped by Captain Barbossa, who has been cursed, doomed for eternity to neither live nor die, that is, unless a blood sacrifice is made.
The Curse of the Black Pearl introduced new uses of motion-capture technology to create computer-generated characters.
Title: Luxo Jr.
Year of Production: 1986
Director: John Lasseter
A larger lamp watches while a smaller, younger lamp plays with a ball.
Catmull and Smith rationalized the project as a test of "self-shadowing" in the rendering software- that is, the ability of objects to shed light and shadows on themselves.
Title: Tron
Director: Steven Lisberger
Year of Production: 1982
The production of Tron marked the first time that computer-generated imagery (CGI) had been extensively used in a feature film. A full fifteen minutes of the film consists of moving images generated entirely by computer. Additionally, there are over two hundred scenes that utilize computer-generated backgrounds.
Title: A trip to the Moon
year of Production: 1902
Director: Georges Méliès
An association of astronomers has convened to listen to the plan of Professor Barbenfouillis, their president, to fly to the moon. Most of the preparation for the trip is in building the vessel and launching mechanism, which resemble a large bullet and a large gun respectively. Hitting the moon in the eye
Méliès developed a special effects style of the day that involved stop-motion animation; double, triple and quadruple exposures; cross-dissolves; and jump cuts
Title: King Kong
Year of Production: 1933
Director: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
Carl Denham needs to finish his movie and has the perfect location: Skull Island. But he still needs to find a leading lady. This 'soon-to-be-unfortunate' soul is Ann Darrow. Soon they will find out that on this island, Giant Gorilla is living.
King Kong is well known for its groundbreaking use of special effects, such as stop-motion animation, matte painting, rear projection and miniatures.
Title: The Lord of the Rings:
The Two Towers
Year of production: 2002
Director: Peter Jackson
Frodo and Sam discover they are being followed by the mysterious Gollum. Aragorn, the Elf archer Legolas, and Gimli the Dwarf encounter the besieged Rohan kingdom, whose once great King Theoden has fallen under Saruman's deadly spell.
Weta Digital made significant advances in character animation and the use of motion capture to create Gollum, o bring Gollum to life, a ‘sub-surface scattering’ lighting software for the animation of realistically translucent human skin was developed
Title: An American Werewolf in London
Year of Production: 1981
Director: John Landis
Two American college students are on a walking tour of Britain and are attacked by a werewolf. One is killed, the other is mauled. The werewolf is killed but reverts to its human form, and the local townspeople are unwilling to acknowledge its existence
The stretching effect was achieved through a unique material that essentially dissolved over time after production wrapped. The actual sequence took a full week to shoot, working backward with the hair growth.
Title: Tron Legacy
Year of production: 2010
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Capturing 3D footage on camera is only part of the process. Many of Tron: Legacy's shots are 90 percent CG. During pivotal light-cycle races, for instance, actors rode bike rigs on a soundstage, then their movements were rotoscoped by computer and animated into a virtual environment that was completely computer-generated.
Title: Terminator 2 Judgement day
Year of production: 1991
Director: James Cameron
Terminator 2 is heralded as a milestone in computer graphics and marked the first time that a lead character in a feature film had been created, as least in part, through the use of computer graphics.
Title: Young Sherlock Holmes
Year of Production: 1985
Director: Barry Levinson
The film represents the first all-CG character in a feature film. It was digitized and animated by John Lasseter in the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Division.
Title: Total Recall
Year of Production: 1990
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Rotoscoping the Raw Footage
Title: Raiders Of The Lost Ark
Year of production: 1981
Director: Steven Spielberg
Live action footage was enhanced with opticals and matte paintings, including the creation of the now famous warehouse where the Ark is stored. More than 50 passes were made on some shots to increase image quality for the film’s climactic ending
Title: Interstellar
Year of production: 2014
Director: Christopher Nolan
The ranger, Endurance, and lander spacecraft were created using miniature effects
Title: Nosferatu
Year of production: 1922
Director: F. W. Murnau
Title: Starship Troopers
Year of production: 1997
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Starship Troopers was created with a similar mix of miniature effects, animatronics and CGI, with each technique carefully chosen to suit its particular sequence. While CGI was the main method of realizing the creatures, some practical appliances were built by Amalgamated Dynamics, including two full-scale mechanized Warrior bugs capable of lifting an adult in their jaws
Inception
Prince, S. (2010) 'Through the Looking Glass: Philosophical Toys and Digital Visual Effects'. Projections, 4(2), pp. 19-40.
Stephen Prince examines perception of realism, and partnership between art and sience which combination is known for us as special effects. The author begins with demonstrating the evolution of art and sience mentioned above and how were the scientists working together creating digital effects.
Professor Prince introduced us to something called philosophical toys, showing the viewers perceptual realism, and making them more curious. They were called toys because of their simple construction. Those were images rotating in a cycle creating an illusion of movement. Prince mentions stereoscope and its creation, which was a result of investgation made by scientists about human vision.
At the end, the author is giving examples of movies and how the shots were created. For example, the flyover of the port in San Francisco from the movie 'Zodiac' was made by only using a CG sequence, having a geometrical model that was treated with 3D matte painting, as the director could not go to the place to shoot, because he wanted to depicit San Francisco in acurate terms.
