More Than Meets The Eye: Special Effects And The Fantastic Transmedia Franchise

From comic book universes crowded with soaring superheroes and shattering skyscrapers to cosmic empires set in far-off galaxies, today’s fantasy blockbusters depend on visual effects. Bringing science fiction from the studio to your screen, through film, television, or video games, these special effects power our entertainment industry. More Than Meets the Eye delves into the world of fantastic media franchises to trace the ways in which special effects over the last 50 years have become central not just to transmedia storytelling but to worldbuilding, performance, and genre in contemporary blockbuster entertainment. More Than Meets the Eye maps the ways in which special effects build consistent storyworlds and transform genres while traveling from one media platform to the next. Examining high-profile franchises in which special effects have played a constitutive role such as Star Trek, Star Wars, The Matrix, and The Lord of the Rings, as well as more contemporary franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean and Harry Potter, Bob Rehak analyzes the ways in which production practices developed alongside the cultural work of industry professionals. By studying social and cultural factors such as fan interaction, this book provides a context for understanding just how much multiplatform storytelling has come to define these megahit franchises. More Than Meets the Eye explores the larger history of how physical and optical effects in postwar Hollywood laid the foundation for modern transmedia franchises and argues that special effects are not simply an adjunct to blockbuster filmmaking, but central agents of an entire mode of production

An experiment in playground design.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of City and Regional Planning. Thesis. 1967. M.C.P.Bibliography: leaf 222.M.C.P

Indiana Jones and the Joystick of Doom: understanding the past via computer games

In 1997 Jane Murray published "Hamlet on the holodeck: the future of narrative in cyberspace", which forecast the computer as a future platform for interactive drama. Yet a great deal of recent literature has focused on the failure rather than success of virtual environments (particularly three-dimensional ones) as an engaging medium of entertainment and education. In this article I will discuss three key problems in designing virtual environments that in some way depict the values of past cultures. The first problem is how to create a feeling of immersion or of presence in a virtual environment - how we make the past come alive for people so that they feel they are transported "there". This goal is often seen as limited by technical constraints such as the speed of the Internet or network connection, limited processing power, or the computer's capacity to render a large number of objects on the screen in real-time that are seen to impede the production of realistic virtual scenes. By contrast, this article emphasises the need to foster engagement not through realism but interaction. Secondly, our idea of what reality is may be at odds with understanding the past or a distant place from a local perspective. What does reality mean when we are trying to recreate and understand cultural perspectives? Is it useful, desirable or even possible to interact with digital reconstructions of different cultures in a meaningful way? Culture understood from the distance of a hotel or guidebook is obviously not the same as the culture that guides, constrains and nourishes a local inhabitant. I would like to bring the same distinction to culture experienced through virtual environments, and argue that a virtual traveler is not the same as a virtual tourist. Despite or perhaps because they have a goal to solve, and have more constraints and more direct immersion in the local way of doing things, people who travel rather than tour arguably have richer and more interesting experiences. Thirdly, if we do manage to create an engaging and believable virtual environment, will the novelty or entertainment value actually interfere with the cultural understanding gained by the users? In virtual heritage environments this is particularly evident in the conflict between individual freedom to explore and the more pragmatic need to convey historical information. We may for example create an entertaining game but will that allow us to convey varying levels of historical accuracy in reconstructing the past

Museums, discourse, and visitors : the case of London's Tate Modern

This thesis examines the conceptualization of the visitor within the discursive construction of the contemporary public art museum. It takes the rhetorical formulation of the interaction between the theorized visitor figure and the discursively rendered museum to constitute the ‘visit’. This work argues that the position of the visitor within museum discourse has radically shifted in the past generation; the primary claim being that the visit is reconceived as a personally customizable experience less oriented toward the transfer of information from the curator (regarded as expert and educator) to the visitor figure (regarded as ignorant pupil), and more oriented toward meeting the particular needs and preferences of the visitor. This conception currently appears in museum discourse and in the minds of influential actors who shape this discourse. To analyze this claim, this thesis draws on the institutionalization of the visit via a case study of the Tate Modern museum, which provides the primary empirical evidence demonstrating the above claim. The resulting study relates the questions, structure, and findings of a systematic investigation into the historical, social, and museological conditions necessary to an institutionally manifested personalized, visitor-centered visit. The conceptual development of the visitor figure is traced through implicit accounts of the visit within academic studies of the museum, institutional records, marketing reports, advertisements, and the public discourse convened around Tate Modern’s opening thematic displays that served as an extension of Tate’s marketing and audience development programs. This visitor figure is now coextensive with and conditioned by a neoliberal participatory agenda that trades on the notion of personal agency and enlightened cultural consumption, which is, in turn, undergirded and conditioned by the intertwined forces of consumerism, marketing, and branding