Word: screens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hollywood's magic moments used to be mostly quiet ones: Rick telling Sam to play it again in Casablanca, Charles Foster Kane muttering his dying "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane. The memorable screen moments of recent years are more, well, eye-catching. A fleet of rebel spaceships enters the Death Star for a climactic battle against the Empire's forces in Return of the Jedi. The shards of a stained-glass window are transformed into a sword-wielding knight in Young Sherlock Holmes. Runaway mine cars career at a breakneck pace through hairbreadth twists and turns in Indiana Jones...
Creatures, spaceships and other objects are inserted into the action of the film by means of the blue-screen process. The figure is photographed against a blue background and then combined in an optical printer with the scene into which it will be placed. This procedure must be repeated each time a new element is added to the scene. The pastry creatures that came to life in Young Sherlock Holmes, for example, were hand-manipulated rod puppets, each shot individually and added one by one in as many as twelve layers. For a brief shot of a space battle...
...technicians are accustomed to seeing months of effort speed by in just a few minutes of screen time. Kenneth Smith, who operates the optical printer, estimates that he and his co-workers spent eight months creating just 3 1/2 minutes of special effects for E.T. like the bicycles that flew through the air at the film's end. "I compare it to working on a cathedral," he says. "I'm just a stone mason working on a gargoyle in a corner. I want to make the best one I can, of course. But I just wish they'd use more...
...critics who fear that ILM-style effects are driving out more traditional movie values, like characters and plots, Lucas is unsympathetic. "Special effects are just a way of visualizing something on screen," he asserts. "They have expanded the limits of storytelling enormously. ILM is a wonderful tool that allows the imagination to run wild...
Also linking the two banks from Weeks Bridge to Eliot House will be a gigantic rainbow-like sculpture, designed by an MIT professor of advanced environmental design. In addition a water screen will shoot up toward Weeks Bridge on which aquatic laser images will be projected...