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Dec. 25, 2004 Once there was magic. If you're familiar with "Gone With The Wind", you probably cannot think about that movie without recalling at least two famous scenes: The burning of Atlanta and the incredible crane shot at the railway station, where the camera pulls back and up to reveal all the wounded and dying soldiers. The number of prone bodies overwhelms you and, just when you think your emotions can stand no more tugging, the shot ends by revealing, at screen left, a tattered Confederate flag. Both are "impossible" shots and they work. Alfred Hitchcock, in his later years, included at least one "impossible" shot in every movie. In one of his last, "Frenzy", the camera is in close on a body in an apartment. The camera then backs away, out of the apartment, around a corner, down the stairs, out the front door, down more steps and it continues until we are seeing the house from across the street. The shot is seamless. But those days are gone and, with them, gone is much of the magic of moviemaking. In the recent film "The Alamo", many of the shots are in darkness - because darkness can "hide the wires", in this case softening the edges of props and "actors" that are not really there. Contrast that predawn assault with the full daylight scenes in the earlier John Wayne movie on the same subject. Where Wayne needed hundreds, perhaps thousands of extras to portray the Mexican army, he used real people. He had no choice. But in the later film, much of the Mexican army is generated by computer, a process whereby a the image of a dozen real actors can be replicated ad infinitum. I'm not certain where it began, although I suspect it was the few seconds of computer- generated Tyrannosaurus Rex in "Jurassic Park". Now, however, the use of CGI is so pervasive on film that one recent movie had NO sets and only a few small props. The actors did ALL their performing in front of a green screen and the sets were added after the fact. There was a time when we could walk out of a theatre shaking our heads and saying, "How did they do that?" Once there were a thousand different answers but now there is only one: CGI. And something wonderful is lost. ------------ About the author: Erv Bobo is a freelance writer. His first novel, THE VELVET BRAND, will be published in February 2005. Email: Dasher1945@aol.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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