I heard a quote once that was attributed to Stephen Spielberg: “The best special effects are the ones you don’t know are there.” Part of the significance of Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n’s “Gravity” is the extent to which you don’t<\/i> think about what you are seeing as special effects.<\/p>\n
This is in marked contrast to some other effects heavy films, such as “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” or “Prometheus” where the extreme foregrounding of what were obviously CG special effects overwhelmed the film itself. There are, alas, plenty of similar examples.<\/p>\n
Noel Coward once said of a musical he didn’t like (The 1962 London production of Lionel Bart’s “Blitz!”, if you must know): “I came out humming the sets.” This is about the most damning thing you can say about a musical. One could argue that the same principle applies to effects heavy feature films. If you leave the theatre only admiring the CG effects, it means somebody didn’t do their job right.<\/p>\n
But why is any of this important? Why do we care so much whether Hollywood special effects can manage to transcend visual gimmickry to bring us something deeper?<\/p>\n
This question brings us to Willis Ware, the great computer pioneer who passed away this last weekend at the age of 93. Here’s something he said in 1966 (quoted in last Sunday’s NY Times): “\u201cThe computer will touch men everywhere and in every way, almost on a minute-to-minute basis. Every man will communicate through a computer, whatever he does. It will change and reshape his life, modify his career and force him to accept a life of continuous change.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now suppose we combine Ware’s highly prescient prediction with what we can see, nearly fifty years later, on the big screen in a film like “Gravity”? To be continued…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I heard a quote once that was attributed to Stephen Spielberg: “The best special effects are the ones you don’t know are there.” Part of the significance of Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n’s “Gravity” is the extent to which you don’t think about what you are seeing as special effects. This is in marked contrast to some other … Continue reading “Reality bytes, part 2”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13873"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13873"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13880,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13873\/revisions\/13880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}