Review - I Am Number Four

While I am not qualified to comment on a novel I have not read, I cannot help but feel that the novel by Pittacus Lore (a pseudonym for James Frey and Jobie Hughes who collaborated on the book) must have done a better job telling the story for it to gain it's Bestseller status, then Michael Bay did while producing the on screen version.

At the core I am number 4 is a great story, however the second half is lost in all the specials effects, which are phenomenal in there own right, but take over the screen. That and some poor choices in dialogue brought down the overall experience. Still, I am number 4 is an entertaining film. Strong numbers at the box office, and a great performance by the lovely Dianna Agron of Fox's hit series Glee, make this movie worth watching.

Movie Mouse Approved

I am number 4 is the first novel in a proposed six book series

Pick up the first one today I Am Number Four Movie Tie-in Edition (Lorien Legacies)

A litte bit of film history

We take movies for granted today. We can pick up a newspaper and find advertisements for movies in practically any genre on any day of the week. The only problem we have is choosing which of the many offerings to buy tickets for. What a dilemma!

There isn't anybody alive today who remembers the world before movies. The first commercial movie even was on December 28, 1895. That was 112 years ago.

Two French brothers, Louis and Auguste Lumiere, made the film. The brothers developed a camera-projector called the cinematographe. The Lumiere brothers showed their invention to the public in March 1895 with a brief film showing workers leaving the Lumiere factory but charged no admission.

Then on December 28, the "boys" showed a film that was a series of short scenes from everyday French life (workers leaving a factory, a train arriving, a baby being fed, girls playing, etc.) and sold the first movie tickets in history. After the showing of the film, Auguste and Lumiere decided not to pursue their invention. They called it "an invention without a future."

In the early 1830s Joseph Plateau of Belgium and Simon Stampfer of Austria separately but simultaneously developed a device called the phenakistoscope. The phenokistoscope used a spinning disc with slots. A series of drawings could be viewed that created the effect of a single moving image (think animation). The phenakistoscope is considered the root of modern motion pictures. It was followed by advances over the next six decades, and in 1890 Thomas Edison and his assistant William Dickson developed the first motion-picture camera, called the kinetograph.

The next year Edison invented the kinetoscope. The kinetoscope was a machine with a peephole viewer that let one person watch a strip of film as it moved past a light.

Movies were what the public wanted. I guess the Lumiere brothers were...WRONG!

Want more? Check out - A Short History of Film

Review- Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows part 1

Does this series of films ever end? Thankfully soon... but not without an emotional goodbye by millions of loving fans across the globe I'm sure. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part one is the seventh film of the series. I found the Half Blood Prince to be a painful movie going experience, and as a fan of the books quite disappointing. Nevertheless, I found myself lining up for Deathly Hallows opening week. I happened to be in Poland at the time, and with the thought of subtitles running across the bottom of the screen I did not have high expectations. I never thought I would say this, but the idea to split up the film into two full chapters worked wonders. It allowed them to slow things down, focus on the character development, and for the first time in my opinion, truly build the story.

The film took Harry Potter and his friends outside Hogwarts and into the adult world in their search for horcruxes. I no longer felt I was an adult watching a kids film. This movie is a must see for any Harry Potter fan, and an entertaining experience for any skeptics. Part one was released on DVD & Blu-ray April 15, 2011. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part two opens July 15 2011

Movie Mouse Approved

Action Movies

The very basis of movies is, well, movement — action. Still pictures don't move. Moving pictures do move. Even when the movie industry was in its infancy, it seems that movie makers instinctively knew that those who would spend their hard-earned money on movie tickets wanted to see action. People wanted to see fist fights, gun battles, sword fights, chases, etc.

Today, "action movies" are basically the same as what are often billed as "adventure films" or "thriller films." Action films are usually based on a standard formula. There's always a hero. There's always a villain. There is always a physical conflict. The hero wins after it appears that he will lose. Action movies are made for a mostly male audience between the ages of 10 and 35. It wasn't until the 1990s that the film industry decided to add female heroines to action films. The industry also changed the basic storyline to include romance subplots and scenes that make action movies more appealing to a broader audience.

The early action movies were about cowboys or pirates and featured chases on horseback, and fights with fists, guns, or swords. As progress happened, the horse chases were replaced with automobile chases, and the fights were with all kinds of weaponry. Fist fights are, however, still a mainstay of action films, and martial art combats are now big. The heroes are rarely cowboys or pirates today with only a very few exceptions. Today's heroes are mostly affiliated with the police or the army in some way.

The old action movies were mostly low-budget films. It didn't cost much to film a horse chase. Today's actions films, though, are much more extravagant productions, and the special effects used are certainly not "cheap."

Action movies usually do very well at the box office, but the critics are very rarely impressed with them.

What is your view of the latest action movie, and are we headed in the right direction?

Over A Century Of 3D Media

by Steve N Owen

3D movies, and live and studio TV broadcasts, along with the 3D equipment used in cinemas and homes are certainly in the public eye here in 2011. But, although the current S3D (Stereo 3D) technology is new, the history of 3D moving pictures goes back over a century.

Around the turn of the 20th Century, British film pioneer William Friese-Greene filed a patent for a twin-projector 3D movie process. Frederick Eugene Ives subsequently proposed a stereo camera rig with lenses 1.75in apart.

By 1915, Edwin S Porter and William E Waddell demonstrated 3D test reels to an audience at the Astor Theater in New York City. But this proved to be a dead end. The earliest commercial 3D film seems to have been shown in September 1922 to an audience in Los Angeles, and during the ensuing two years a number of shorts, using a range of different 3D technologies were shown in movie theatres.

Stereoscopy and 3D still images

There are several basic approaches to stereoscopy, including:

Freeviewing - viewing a pair of images without a viewer, which entails the viewers to cross or diverge their eyes to get the images to coincide to give the illusion of depth.

Stereographic cards and the stereoscope - the stereoscope reduces eyestrain and through using magnifying lenses, the image appears larger and more real.

Transparency viewers - in the early 1930s, manufacturers launched viewers designed to work with stereo transparency pairs. A decade later, a refined version of the technology was brought to market, the highly successful and long-lived View-Master.

3D movie technologies

Polarization - By the early 1930s, Edwin H Land was producing his first polarizing products under the Polaroid brand, and saw the possibilities in stereoscopic applications. Two synchronized prints of the movie were projected using a special selsyn motor on to a silver screen - polarized 3D movies do not work on a regular white screen.

Between 1936 and the start of World War II, filmmakers in Europe and the US utilized Land's technologies.

Anaglyph - The familiar glasses with red and green or red and blue lenses mounted in cardboard surrounds are typical of the Anaglyph technology used in the earliest 3D films in the 1950s. Later in the decade, movies adopted polarizing technology as a better quality alternative, and the 3D revival during the 80s and 90s also chose polarizing glasses as the user's interface.

Stereo 3D (S3D) - two regular HD cameras are placed at approximately the same distance apart as human eyes - sometimes more; sometimes less, depending on the shot. Digital post-production enables the director to edit and otherwise evolve the program. S3D projectors and TVs decode the finished S3D data and display the pictures on screen. Today, the most common viewing technology uses polarizing glasses to see the stereoscopic imagery, but can use anaglyph or active glasses. Glasses-free technology is being developed.

3D movies hit the mainstream

3D movies hit the mainstream in the 1950s with the first colour features, although the earliest black and white examples date back to the late 1940s. While 3D movies were important in American cinema throughout the decade, the processes were found to be too expensive and the results too uncertain to maintain 3D in the mainstream.

Later, during the 1980s and 90s, IMAX and Disney themed venues both brought 3D back into the public eye for specialized movies and presentations, based on technology using active glasses synchronized to the 3D program.

It took until after the turn of the millennium for 3D movies to return to the mainstream, using today's Stereo 3D technology that can be equally well applied in broadcast and home cinema applications. Ten years into the new millennium, we are able to see many mainstream movies in 3D in our local cinemas, and buy 3D TVs on any high street.

3D seems here to stay at long last.

Steve Owen is Director of Marketing at Quantel The company develops innovative, world-leading content creation systems for broadcast, post and DI. Quantel products deliver at SD, HD, 2K, 4K and S3D. Learn more about 3D stereo vision. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steve_N_Owen

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