Cinema Du Look and ILM

Dear Professor Schlegal and classmates:  I am going to be straightforward and honest….I am thoroughly distracted and having a hard time concentrating so I apologize beforehand for the short and somewhat rambling of this blog.

Monday we watched a documentary on Industrial, Light and Magic which was a special effects company started by George Lucas.  I have enjoyed many of Lucas’s films and I realized as I watched this documentary that he was a brilliant business man.  The way he hired his crew and then made an atmosphere of free spirited, open minds was equally brilliant.  He saw that film and special effects are an art and therefore, you had to hire and have an art like atmosphere.  By also starting a company not tied to any movie production house, he was actually able to expand.  This expansion happened because any one could come to him and bring their unique situation, which needed unique answers.  Thus ILM has made huge leaps and bounds in the special effects industry and created a new type of art, and a new way of filming.  In this documentary they talked about “creating the Impossible” and “from the sublime to the ridiculous.”  I also didn’t realize that so many special effect went into a movie like Forrest Gump.  If they had not pointed out in the documentary that they had changed the sky color, removed limps, and the ping pong shots I would never had known.  I would have gone on believing that Tom Hanks was a champion ping pong player.  😊

I made a mistake of sitting in the back to watch Diva and unfortunately my eyes are not what they use to be so between my distraction and having trouble reading the subtitles, I did not understand the movie.  What I can say is it was definitely in the Cinema de luc genre.  The different scenes of statues, people walking, skylines, sunsets and such was wonderful, especially with the powerful, mood enhancing music.  I consider Cinema De Look to simply be Eye appeal not mind appeal.  Beautiful to watch and the story really doesn’t matter.