PERFORMING ILLUSIONS
Cinema, Special Effects & the Virtual Actor
A Book By Dan North
Book submitted by Wallflower Press
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They say the camera never lies! From the early days on, trick films existed and since George Melies started his trickery, there was really no stopping the filmmakers! These days, nothing is real anymore! Thanks to effective computer graphics, one can create all kinds of illusions and still make it as realistic as real live! The book starts with a perfect example: King Kong. In one of the last scenes you can see an actress sharing the screen with the giant ape, with New York city in the background. Although we all know the ape is an illusion (and the background as well), the interaction of the two is so realistic that during the film the spectator simply doesn’t think about the used effects. These tales of magic, of make believe if you wish, has been going on forever in the film industry. Since the early days, magic, trickery and exploitation attracted all kinds of people. What started as a circus, moved on stage to sideshows and freak shows! Often combined with science and pseudo science these kinds of trickery were slowly overtaken by the film (industry). Magicians started to show moving pictures as part of their act. And not much later they were even appearing in films, showing their acts! This however was also the beginning of the end for them, since cinematographic trickery took over from documentary.
As the technology moved on over the years, new methods arrived! Glass-painted sceneries, stop motion techniques, miniature process projection, robotics… and eventually the computer! From its earliest form until the make believe of today’s CGI extravaganza, everything is discussed here in great detail with King Kong (in al his versions and rip offs) as the common thread. But there is more than King Kong in this book! (Fifties) Sci-fi movies and B-movies are discussed as well and with the power of computer generated graphics ever growing, we find inclusions of movies like Tron or Blade Runner as well.
Performing Illusions is an easy to read study, that sheds a light on the different techniques and guides us through a history of tricks & illusions. However don’t be fooled, this book is definitely aimed at film scholars and comes with a certain degree of difficulty that might scare off common fans! It’s not a book about special effects and how to learn them, but a study about special effects and the importance of them in film!
--- Pat ---
Performing Illusions, Wallflower Press, 224 pages, ISBN 978-1-905674-53-4 (PBK) & ISBN 978-1-905674-53-1 (HBK)
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