Week 9 Studio

Week 9's guest speak was Shilo McClean. Shilo is writer, lecturer and specialist in the field of digital visual effects in the film industry.

Shilo talked about how digital effects and digital computer graphics and film had been derived largely from computer games, and how the film industry has started to accept and appreciate the use of computer graphics. She explored how computer graphics could be used to aid the story telling process. She also went on to demonstrate how different fields that use film or video have also been adopting computer graphics to help portray their message. One example she gave was to do with a documentary on "Hurricane Katrina" by Spike Lee.

Special effects, computer animation and computer graphics and film used to be looked down on in the film industry and was assumed that it would destroy the film and take away from the story. Shilo was once told "you can't put it into the script if you can't capture it on film". This comment has been greatly proven wrong with the advance in computer graphics, specially in big budget films as transformers, harry potter etc.

She explained the differt types of effects or computer graphics that the industry uses, they are mainly:

Fantastical effects - This is where effects and computer graphics are sued to create a fantasy world or fantasy story. Heavily based on computer graphics and present here.

Hybrid-real - This is where there is a mixture between real and computer graphics to get the story across. The idea is to make the difference between real and computer invisible so the viewer can't tell which is which.

Hyperrealist - This is computer graphics that are so real and lifelike that is is difficult to tell if it is real or computer generated.

Surrealist - This is the use of computer effects and graphics to portray an almost dream out of this world feeling. It is almost impossible to achieve this effect with out computer graphics.