Motion Picture Special Effects
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Motion picture special effects have been used since the beginning of the medium, with the early experiments of Georges MTliFs in France showing ways in which the new medium could be utilized to create images of things that seem to be happening but that in fact never happened at all. Special effects in recent years have taken a quantum leap forward with the advent of computer techniques to improve the use of established techniques of image processing and the use of traveling mattes and to initiate entirely new possibilities for such new effects as morphing and computer animation. Digital processing is clearly the wave of the future, and the wonders it has wrought already in films like Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, and True Lies are only the beginning. Computer animation techniques are being improved all the time, and the goal for many seems to be creating a film without actors or sets, a film made up entirely of computer-generated images. This is probably a distant dream but its fruition seems to be coming closer every day. The rapidity of change in this field is remarkable. An effects house called MetroLight won a special visual effects Academy Award four years ago for work done for Total Recall, where the effects house created an animated X-ray version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The senior technical director for the house says now that today they would not even consider doing this in the same way. He points to work done for the NBC television show Viper, which require
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zor where the shaver's face keeps transforming from one visage to another? How'd they do that? The answer: morphing, one of the most unusual special effects made possible by the digital technology that is now affecting all forms of communication. The same technology allows Goldie Hawn to walk around with a hole through her torso in the movie Death Becomes Her; John Goodman to play Babe Ruth in a stadium that no longer exists; Kevin Kline to talk to himself in the movie Dave; and Paula Abdul to dance with Gene Kelly in a Diet Coke commercial. In addition to the entertainment industry, digital technology will have a huge impact on data transfer over a proposed national computer information highway, video teleconferencing, ondemand video, interactive video, and more (Stevens, 1993, 30).
Digital technology is the expression of informationaudio, video, graphics, or printas computer data, or binary code, and in this form, the information can be transmitted and manipulated in ways never possible before. High-powered computers have become necessities in the special effects workroom. One of the effects which can be produced with this equipment is the seamless transition from one image to another called morphing (from metamorpho
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2013
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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