Of particular importance in movie-making

So, a couple of weeks ago, I saw Inception on Friday, and then Resident Evil: Afterlife the day after.

For those of you who don't follow box office trends, Inception has been the most successful movie this Summer in terms of box office sales and reviews.  As for Resident Evil: Afterlife, it's topped the box office for the weekend it came out.  Both of these movies are wildly different in many regards, save for a few.  Among these few similarities is something that has been common in movie-making for many decades now.  What I refer to is special effects; a key part in the movie-making process.

Special effects aren't solely limited to computer animation (also known as Computer Graphic Imaging, or by its abbreviated form, CGI).  Among the varying effects you'll see in a movie are explosives and pyrotechnics (think of any Arnold Schwarzenegger film); wirework, which most have seen in movies such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Matrix trilogy; as well as sound, which entails more than you would think. Cleaning up an actor's voice, as well as any sounds of crashes, punches, gunshots, screaming, and more, in order for the sounds and voices to be heard in excellent quality.  You wouldn't want to watch a movie where the actor is interrogating someone, and his voice is muffled as if speaking into a pillow.

Since the beginning of the millennium, most movie-goers have become accustomed to more special effects in the movies they see. Even live-action comedies have incorporated computer animation into the finished product. However, this wasn't always the case. Going back as far as twenty years ago, computer animation was a technical breakthrough, and pyrotechnics, stunt doubles, explosives, puppeteering, and mechanical props all increased the amount of time and money put into making a movie, usually pushing the boundaries of creativity and that picture's budget. Such examples of big budget movies that followed this formula are Jaws, ET, Back to the Future, and Tron. It wasn't until 1993, when Jurassic Park was released in theaters, that audiences saw what computer animation could bring to a movie-going experience.

Interestingly enough, there's evidence that, if not for one man's vision, special effects and movie-making in general, would have turned out quite different. Back in 1976, a young film maker who just graduated from film school named George Lucas worked alongside a dedicated production crew, as well as noteworthy and young actors in an effort to make a sci-fi epic called Star Wars. Dealing with constraints from the British Screen Actors Guild, budgetary problems due to financing from 20^th Century Fox, as well as expenses for props, filming locations, and the normal issues of film-making, he created a movie that was expected to fail, due to competing in the Summer movie bracket of 1977 with “Smokey and the Bandit” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”.

Yet, perhaps due to the subject matter of good versus evil and self-discovery, or the appeal to all ages, or because of technical and special effects work, or even due to being an upbeat movie after the end of the Vietnam War, it not only was a huge success, it spawned two sequels over the next six years, as well as a line of toys, commercial success, and gaining instant recognition for the actors playing the main characters.

During the making of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, George Lucas and his production crew refined techniques and utilized new ways of stage setup, sound and rigging, and special effects that ultimately became the effects studios Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound. After 1983, these two effects studios were involved in virtually every film being made by major Hollywood studios, and their influence has been seen in such ground-breaking movies as Tron, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Toy Story, Independence Day, up to recent special effects powerhouses, such as Transformers, Cloverfield, Iron Man, and Avatar.

First Week

Last Monday, I began my first semester over at Sacramento State, of which one of my classes is requiring me to write a personal blog.  The class eventually agreed for our first entry to be on each person's individual first week of this semester.

Mine could be considered standard, with a few humorous moments in between.  Just for reference, my schedule goes like this: Monday and Wednesday- Metaphysics at the Library from 11am to 11:50.  Then I have to hustle across campus over to Mendocino Hall for the Journalism class that this blog is an assignment for, which is from Noon to 1:15pm.  Tuesday and Thursday, I have a class on Shakespeare at Douglass Hall from 10:30 to 11:45, and after that, Astronomy at Mendocino from Noon to 1:15.  Friday I also have Metaphysics, since it's a MWF class.

Now that I have that out of the way, let's begin.  Monday started off with me hopeful to make it early to both classes; said hope would be quickly dashed in less than an hour.  The instructor of my Metaphysics class, by appearance, struck me as "average college professor", by way of semi-formal suit, glasses, balding gray hair.  Fairly soon, however, I found out his demeanor was a little manic.  Let me be more precise.  He was the good kind of crazy, as in, "haha, this guy's nuts".  Class continued until 11:55, which panicked me.  Add to that I had no map to navigate the campus, and I wound up late for Journalism about ten to fifteen minutes late, which was irritating.  I'll hold judgment on the instructor for this class until the end of the semester.  The class itself is engaging enough, and we were given our first assignment, which was sending an e-mail to the instructor. 

Tuesday was more relaxed in that my classes took place close to each other, so I didn't have to hustle between them.  The instructor for the Shakespeare class was friendly enough, and covered the syllabus well.  She also needed volunteers for a practice routine that would be in class in a week, which would be on "The Taming of the Shrew", so I volunteered to play a major part, having enjoyed that particular story.  As for Astronomy, the classroom was packed.  Think a lecture auditorium with a good projector in the middle.  Now picture that all the 120 seats, save one or two, were filled.  That's how looking for a seat to sit down in was.  The instructor was pretty direct in manner of how he taught, and taking notes was easy since he used a power-point presentation alongside his lecture.

Wednesday turned out a bit better in regards to getting from one class to another quickly.  In addition, I got a little bit more insight into the mannerisms and behavior of my instructors.  Once again, the instructor for Metaphysics was amusing, as he was lecturing on Plato's Beard and Ockham's Razor, which surprisingly to me, came up in the textbook for the Journalism class.

Thursday followed a similar mold to Tuesday, with an in-class quiz in Shakespeare and a bit more seating in Astronomy changing the flow.  After Astronomy, however, I went over to Calaveras Hall to speak with the Shakespeare instructor, along with another classmate, over the roles we would be playing for the practice routine, as well as a rough reading of the scene we'd be doing.

Friday, I only had Metaphysics, but it was probably the most entertaining one yet, due to the class getting engaged and asking some good questions of the instructor, as well as some funny interjections.  He jokingly mentioned after one part of his lecture how he sometimes thought a dictatorship would be better than what we had as a government.  I chipped in with, "Are we talking Darth Vader, Force choke kind of dictatorship or what?", to which he replied, "Your hate makes you strong"  Me and about eight other people in the class really got the joke, judging by the laughter.

Nerd humor is greatly underappreciated.