Aucbvax.1792 fa.sf-lovers utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!JPM@MIT-ML Wed Jun 17 02:55:18 1981 SF-LOVERS Digest V3 #152 SF-LOVERS AM Digest Tuesday, 16 Jun 1981 Volume 3 : Issue 152 Today's Topics: SF Books - Dream Park, SF Movies - CEoTK & Clash of the Titans & Special Effects (Ray Harryhausen), SF Topics - Physics Today (Holograms) & International Animation & Children's TV (Space Angels) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 15 JUN 1981 0835-PDT From: FORWARD at USC-ECL Subject: Holograms, fact and fancy I have not read DREAM PARK (If I allow myself the luxury of reading I don't have time to write), so I can't comment directly on Larry Niven's use of holograms in the story, but I thought I would clarify Ayers comment on a hologram image appearing between you and an opaque object, such as a rock. Ayres is right if he meant non-reflective and non-emitting by the word opaque. If the rock was the emitter of the laser light, either directly or by reflection from some hidden laser projector, then your brain would interpret the lights coming from the rock as coming from the position of the holographic image between you and the seemingly non-illuminated rock. The rock does not have to be flat. The computer can compensate for its shape. What IS impossible is for a holographic image to appear when there is NO object in the line of sight. (Of course, the object could be subtle, such as a holographic tissue lens or mirror that is completely transparent and non-refractive or reflective except at three very narrow laser frequencies in the red, green, and blue. Bob Forward ------------------------------ Date: 15 Jun 1981 09:21 PDT From: Ayers at PARC-MAXC Subject: Re: Holograms, fact and fancy One can of course produce a hologram image between a viewer and a rock if the rock is a little special. It could, in theory, be filled with miniature lasers (diodes?) or, as Dr. Forward suggests, it could be reflective at several laser frequencies and its shape accurately known by a computer. But such a "rock" is basically a laboratory "rock", not an out-in-the-woods "rock". DREAM PARK has hologram images appearing between the viewer and his immediate landscape -- the grass and dirt he's kicking as he's walking through it -- and between the viewer and other character's bodies. I stick with my claim that this is hologram-as-hyperspace. That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the book. Bob ------------------------------ Date: 15 JUN 1981 0928-PDT From: FORWARD at USC-ECL Subject: holograms, fact and fancy If that's what Niven and Barnes have in DREAM PARK, they are hypergrams, not holograms. Bob Forward ------------------------------ Date: 15 Jun 1981 0955-MDT From: Spencer W. Thomas Subject: CEoTK Translate please??? =S [ CEoTK = Close Encounters of the Third Kind. -- Jim ] ------------------------------ Date: 15 June 1981 17:58-EDT From: Daniel G. Shapiro Subject: SF-LOVERS Digest V3 #151 Alright, here's my 2 cents. Pico-review: sucks dead bears, plan on seeing only half of it Micro-review: foul beyond belief, don't go unless you are forced at gunpoint Mini-review: Clash of the Titans has got to be the most misbegotten pile of trash to be plastered onto a movie screen since "attack of the killer tomatoes." FOUL as a description, is generous. The acting was absolutely disgusting. They must have hired Perseus by stripping a flat full of extra's to the waist (to examine their pectorals) and asking them to stare intently off into the distance. Perseus won. And he spends the entire movie doing exactly that. (I think it's because his eyes are close together.) The woman (girl) who plays Andromeda was so poorly cast that they had to use a stand-in for the bath scene. (Talk about ambarrassing!) And the cast of thousands was the most uninspiring bunch of Hollywood locals you have ever seen. At the very end of the film, when Perseus single handedly defeats the 500ft tall monster with a craving for human flesh, the villagers clap (singular) with appreciation and cheer, "oh yay, not bad, nice." Vile, vile, vile and dumb. The also-rans were pretty notable. Imagine being a Greek soldier (destined to die) who's boss climbs into the ferry piloted by a living skeleton, death's left hand man, Charon himself. What do you do? Quake with fear? Turn and run? NO! You plod onto the boat and take your seat with everyone else, thinking, "wher' we goin? Isle of Death? Yeah boss, right, you bet." And the special effects were spotty as well. A good medusa, a mostly nice pegasus (although some of the flight scenes were clearly taken with Perseus astride a bench with a beating wing-machine in the background), an acceptable cereberus, a lousy kraken (same scenes shown of its release several times) and a worthless vulture. Why bother? I had one interesting observation tho.. CLoT is the first movie I have ever seen which pays alot of attention to detail, and has absolutely no concern for the larger scale, like plot, photography, sets and acting. I wonder if this is a new trend. Dan ------------------------------ Date: 11 Jun 1981 2201-PDT From: Jim McGrath Subject: Film column By RICHARD FREEDMAN Newhouse News Service NEW YORK - The ads for ''Clash of the Titans'' boast such big box-office glamor names as Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Claire Bloom and Ursula Andress. They're all in the film - briefly - but the real star of this colorful fantasy on Greek mythological themes is a jovial, bald, 60-year-old man named Ray Harryhausen. Ray who? Ray Harryhausen is the special effects genius whose handmade monsters, filmed by a technique called stop-action animation, have enlivened the extravaganzas ''It Came From Beneath the Sea,'' ''The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad'' and ''Jason and the Argonauts'' - which some Harryhausen devotees consider his masterpiece because of a scene in which the legendary hero battles a whole army of animated skeletons. To honor his unique career in creating special effects, the Museum of Modern Art has mounted an impressive Ray Harryhausen retrospective featuring drawings and the actual working models for such engaging creatures as Pegasus the winged horse; Budo the wise owl; the fearsome, two-headed dog Dioskilos; the Kraken, who rises from the sea to terrify everybody; and - Harryhausen's personal favorite - the Medusa, whose hairdo, consisting of 12 writhing snakes, can turn a man to stone just by glancing at it. They're all from ''Clash of the Titans,'' but earlier Harryhausen creations are on display as well. ''When I saw the retrospective I shuddered because I realized all the things I should have done,'' the modest artist says. ''We had to do the best we could within the limitations of a budget and bad weather. Reality, I learned, is carting 100 people around four countries at the mercy of the weather.'' Harryhausen was turned on to special effects when he saw the original ''King Kong'' as a boy of 14 at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. ''It was such a startling revelation to see these things move,'' he recalls. ''You knew they weren't real - and yet they looked real. It was the illusion of a lifetime.'' Inspired, the boy went home to create a bear, using what he hopes was an old fur coat of his mother's for its realistic pelt. From there he went on to study anatomy, sculpture and animation techniques until, in 1946, he was able to join his idol, Willis O'Brien, who created King Kong, as an assistant on ''Mighty Joe Young.'' The technique he perfected involves filming his monsters a frame at a time, while he moves the serpents, tentacles or whatever a millimeter at a time. It involves immense patience, of course. ''I work in my studio at home in London, where I've lived since 1959,'' he tells an interviewer over lunch during which he passes up the soft-shelled crabs because ''I've made so much money from animated crabs I'd feel I was eating my children.'' ''The Medusa sequence took two or three months to film,'' he says of ''Clash of the Titans.'' ''I made the snakes different colors so I'd know which ones I'd moved and which I hadn't. My great nightmare is being interrupted by a phone call and forgetting where I've left off. ''For Perseus' fight with the Medusa I first cast it in bronze to help the director, Desmond Davis, show the actor, Harry Hamlin, how to react. Then I modeled the Medusa herself in clay, with liquid rubber around it. I even gave her hairy armpits ... for Continental audiences.'' Frequently Harryhausen will first make elaborate, gloomy drawings of his creatures that resemble the doom-haunted dungeons of Piranesi or the Dante illustrations of Gustave Dore. ''I can't draw in any other way,'' he says in acknowledging the influences. ''I'm a great admirer of Dore's, and recently found two rare oil paintings by him. Did you know that several of his paintings are supposed to have gone down with the Titanic? ''I also love Piranesi's gigantism. I think he and Dore are coming back in fashion because people are getting tired of looking at gunny sacks pretending to be art. ''The drawings are mostly to raise money for making the movie. But they should help the director visualize the set, as well. It always amazes me that certain directors can't judge from the drawings. Then they see the completed set and say they don't like it. ''Sam Goldwyn once said: 'Start with an earthquake and then build to a climax.' That's always been my motto in dreaming up my creatures. ''But we're not in competition with God. We want the audience to know they're watching animated creatures and not the real thing, because with most of my monsters there is no real thing - thank God!'' Harryhausen's hobby, when he isn't inventing, constructing, and laboriously moving his monsters for the camera, is collecting film scores, about which he has some pungent ideas: ''Did you know Max Steiner's score for ''King Kong'' was the first original movie score? It's still a masterpiece. Too much movie music in the last 10 years has been degraded to a pop-rock beat, and a lot of the young audience really hates it. They just don't know any alternative because not one radio station these days plays sane music. ''But television at least gives youngsters a chance to hear those wonderful old Warner Brothers scores - Steiner's for Bette Davis' 'Now Voyager,' for instance. Laurence Rosenthal's music for 'Clash of the Titans' is in the grand romantic tradition.'' Strolling up Fifth Avenue to his suite at the Plaza Hotel after lunch, Harryhausen stops to peer in the window of Steuben Glass to admire a toy trian. Then he enters the F.A.O. Schwartz toy emporium to check on whether they've got models of his ''Clash of the Titans'' creatures in stock yet. They don't, and he registers a child's disappointment. ''I'm especially interested in Bubo, the computerized owl,'' he says. ''It's a development of Athena's wise old owl, but a real owl is so untalented it would be boring to watch stretched out through a whole picture. ''So I had Hephaestus, the craftsman of the gods, construct this robot owl; you know there have been robots throughout all mythology. A good robot should be slightly menacing. What influenced me most after 'King Kong' was Fritz Lang's Metropolis,' which has a woman turned into a robot.'' Arrived at his suite to show off the foot-high models for his creations, Harryhausen chuckles at the hard time he had getting them through U.S. Customs, which didn't quite know what to make of them. Then his eye lights on a necktie his Scottish wife Diana Bruce has bought him during a morning's shopping expedition. The tie is lying in its gift wrapping on the coffee table. Its pattern is an elaborate assortment of lovely pastel monsters, all writhing together. ------------------------------ Date: 15 Jun 1981 15:25:33-PDT From: CSVAX.dmu at Berkeley Subject: more memory fragments That show W. Martin was asking about-- I think it was the ``International Animation Festival'' I used to watch it on PBS in the NYC area on Sunday nights right after (before?) Monty Python. It was certainly worth seeing. I've been waiting for someone to mention Space Angels. Wasn't the heavy sidekick's name Taurus? I recall that there were three crew, two men (including Taurus) and a shapely woman. Finally the seats in the rocket pitched so that our heroes (oops that's another show) were always upright w.r.t. the camera, whether the ship was vertical (take-off and landing) or horizontal (flying through space). Lastly, a bit of song (not from SA): When he gets in a scrape, he makes his escape with the help of his friend a great big ape! Then away he'll schlep on his elephant Shep when Ursula and Andrea(???) stay in step. . David Ungar ------------------------------ Date: 15 Jun 1981 1704-PDT From: Craig W. Reynolds from III via Rand Subject: International Animation The animation anthology show Will Martin referred to is "International Animation" hosted by Jean Marsh on PBS stations. [ Thanks also to Andrew Tannenbaum (TRB@MIT-MC) for identifying this series. -- Jim ] It is a must-see for any animation fans out there. Many (most?) of the classic animated shorts can be seen on this show. A very wide selection of styles, periods, and countries of origin are presented. A lot of material from eastern Europe was shown, especially the Zagreb (?) studio's work. I also like the theme animation of the show. Pickiness: "cartoon" is a style of drawing (eg "a political cartoon"), "animation" is something that moves, or seems to (eg "clay animation", "computer graphic animation") ------------------------------ End of SF-LOVERS Digest *********************** ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.