Special Effects New Histories, Theories, Contexts

by North, Dan; Rehak, Bob; Duffy, Michael

• ISBN13: 9781844575183
• ISBN10: 1844575187
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-07-31
• Publisher: British Film Institute

Summary

As blockbusters employ ever greater numbers of dazzling visual effects and digital illusions, this book explores the material roots and stylistic practices of special effects and their makers. 
 
Gathering leading voices in cinema and new media studies, this comprehensive anthology moves beyond questions of spectacle
to examine special effects from the earliest years of cinema, via experimental film and the Golden Age of Hollywood, to our
contemporary transmedia landscape.

Wide-ranging and accessible, this book illuminates and interrogates the vast array of techniques film has used throughout its history to conjure spectacular images, mediate bodies, map worlds and make meanings.
 
Foreword by Scott Bukatman, with an Afterword by Lev Manovich.

Author Biography

Dan North is an independent scholar based in the Netherlands. He is the author of Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor, and the editor of Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films. His essays have been published in Film & History, Early Popular Visual Culture, Shakespeare Bulletin and a number of anthologies. He is currently researching the history of puppetry on film.

Bob Rehak is Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College, USA where his research and teaching focus on special effects, video games, animation, and fandom. His essays have appeared in Cinema Journal, Film Criticism, and Cybercultures Reader.

Michael S. Duffy is Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at Towson University, USA. He has taught classes on film history, special effects, East Asian cinemas, superhero films, and James Bond, and has published essays on popular/cult television and in numerous anthologies including Volumes I and II of Directory of World Cinema: American Hollywood.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Foreword; Scott Bukatman
Notes on Contributors
Introduction; Bob Rehak, Dan North, and Michael S. Duffy
PART I: TECHNIQUES
1. Ectoplasm and Oil: Methocel and the Aesthetics of Special Effects; Ethan de Seife
2. Fleshing It Out: Prosthetic Makeup Effects, Motion Capture and the Reception of Performance; Lisa Bode
3. (Stop)Motion Control: Special Effects in Contemporary Puppet Animation; Andrea Comiskey
4. Magic Mirrors: The Schüfftan Process; Katharina Loew
5. Photorealism, Nostalgia and Style: Photorealism and Material Properties of Film in Digital Visual Effects; Barbara Flueckiger
PART II: BODIES
6. Bleeding Synthetic Blood: Flesh and Simulated Space in 300; Drew Ayers
7. Blackface, Happy Feet: The Politics of Race in Motion Capture and Animation; Tanine Allison
8. Being Georges Méliès; Dan North
9. The Battlefield for the Soul: Special Effects and the Possessed Body; Stacey Abbott
10. Baroque Facades, Jeff Bridges' Face and Tron: Legacy; Angela Ndalianis
11. Organic Clockwork: Guillermo del Toro's Practical and Digital Nature; Michael S. Duffy
PART III: SCREENS
12. Digital 3D, Technological Auteurism and the Rhetoric of Cinematic Revolution; Chuck Tryon
13. Shooting Stars: Chesley Bonestell and the Special Effects of Outer Space; Bob Rehak
14. Designed for Everyone Who Looks Forward to Tomorrow!: Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the 15. 1970s Expanded Blockbuster; Julie Turnock
16. The Right Stuff?: Handmade Special Effects in Commercial and Industrial Film; Gregory Zinman
17. 'Don't You Mean Extinct?': On the Circulation of Knowledge in Jurassic Park; Oliver Gaycken
18. Inception's Timespaces: An Ecology of Technology; Aylish Wood
19. Afterword: An Interview with Lev Manovich; Dan North
Index