Droidmaker

Droidmaker
Author: Michael Rubin
Publisher: Triad Publishing Company (FL)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006
Genre:
ISBN: 9780937404676

The inside story of George Lucas, his intensely private company, and their work to revolutionize filmmaking. In the process, they made computer history. Discover the birth of Pixar, digital video editing, videogame avatars, high definition television, THX sound, and a host of other icons of the media age. Lucas and his friend Francis Coppola were not only central to the renaissance of independent film, but they both played pivotal roles in the universe of entertainment technologies we see everyday. Book jacket.

The Cinema of George Lucas

The Cinema of George Lucas
Author: Marcus Hearn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2005-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Destined to be the classic illustrated survey of Lucas's career, the book is sure to fascinate not only die-hard fans but also general film and popular culture enthusiasts.

Lucas

Lucas
Author: Richard Ravalli
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2024-05-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1985900084

George Lucas is an innovative and talented director, producer, and screenwriter whose prolific career spans decades. While he is best known as the creative mind behind the Star Wars franchise, Lucas first gained renown with his 1973 film American Graffiti, which received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Picture. When Star Wars (1977) was released, the groundbreaking motion picture won six Academy Awards, became the highest grossing film at the time, and started a cultural revolution that continues to inspire generations of fans. Three decades and countless successes later, Lucas announced semiretirement in 2012 and sold his highly successful production company, Lucasfilm, to Disney. His achievements have earned him the Academy's Irving G. Thalberg Award, the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award, induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and the California Hall of Fame, and a National Medal of Arts presented by President Barack Obama. Lucas: His Hollywood Legacy is the first collection to bring a sustained scholarly perspective to the iconic filmmaker and his legacy beyond the Star Wars films. Edited by Richard Ravalli, this volume analyzes Lucas's overall contribution and importance to the film industry, diving deep into his use and development of modern special effects technologies, the history of his Skywalker Ranch production facilities, and more. With clearly written and enlightening critiques by experts consulting rare collections and archival materials, this book is an original and robust project that sets the standard for historical and cultural studies of Lucas.

Star Wars Coding Projects

Star Wars Coding Projects
Author: Jon Woodcock
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2017-10-03
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 146547207X

Learn to design and code games using Scratch, inspired by the Star Wars™ universe! Star Wars Coding Projects is a step-by-step visual guide to designing and coding in Scratch. The setting is as big as your imagination. Your favorite Star Wars characters will guide you through fun projects, animations, and games as you learn how to create and code. Draw your own Star Wars inspired sprites to use in the projects. You're the director as you navigate the spaceship you've designed through the asteroid belt you imagined as you go on the jetpack adventures you brought to life. Learn essential coding skills, share the sprites you drew with friends, and even challenge your pals to beat your high scores in the games you designed. Each project lists the sprites you'll have fun creating through simple, numbered steps that are fully illustrated and easy to follow. Coding games have never been so fun, with Star Wars characters to guide you. © & TM 2017 LUCASFILM LTD.

Nonlinear

Nonlinear
Author: Michael Rubin
Publisher: Triad Publishing Company (FL)
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2000
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

Nonlinear, now in its 4th edition, is an easy-to-understand handbook about the popular world of digital nonlinear editing. It's written in nontechnical language for both professionals and students, as well as for interested bystanders. Profusely illustrated. The first edition was designed for professionals in Hollywood's film and video industry, to bridge the chasm between film editors (older, non-technological, mechanical), videotape editors (younger, highly technical, electronic), and computer users (prosumers, cost-conscious, digital) in casual language. Today, Nonlinear has not only penetrated the professional industry, but has been expanded for consumer use. Widely used in colleges, universities, and professional organizations. Although nonlinear editing technology began to explode in 1991, nonlinear systems had already been around for almost 5 years. Nonlinear became the Rosetta Stone of the industry: it was a universal translator -- between film and video, video and computer, computer and film. It still covers virtually everything anyone would want to know about the new world of electronic post production, without the geeky mumbo jumbo that characterizes most professional texts. While the book is useful for anyone investigating or wishing to purchase a digital editing system, it is not meant to be a buyer's guide. It is designed not to go out of date every time a new new product is introduced or software release comes out. It is about essentials. Fundamentals. Concepts. And language. With over 25,000 copies in print, Nonlinear is the best selling textbook on nonlinear editing in the world today.

Mastering Multi-Camera Techniques

Mastering Multi-Camera Techniques
Author: Mitch Jacobson
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2012-09-10
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1136057900

From a basic two-camera interview to an elaborate 26 camera HD concert film, this comprehensive guide presents a platform-agnostic approach to the essential techniques required to set up and edit a multi-camera project. Actual case studies are used to examine specific usages of multi-camera editing and include a variety of genres including concerts, talk shows, reality programming, sit-coms, documentaries for television, event videography and feature films. Other features include: * Advanced multi-camera techniques and specialty work-flows are examined for tapeless & large scale productions with examples from network TV shows, corporate media projects, event videography, and feature films. * New techniques for 3D projects, 2k/4k media management and color correction are revealed. * Technical breakdowns analyze system requirements for monitoring, hard drives & RAIDs, RAM, codecs and computer platforms. * Apple Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro and several other software programs are detailed. * Tables, charts, screen-grabs, photos, web-links, blogs, tech school lists and other resource tools for further study. * Unique interviews with the 'Masters of Multi-Cam' including EMMY and academy award-winning directors and editors who share their project notes and give insight to award-winning techniques.

Divergent Tracks

Divergent Tracks
Author: Vanessa Theme Ament
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501359207

By examining three case studies of award-winning soundtracks from cult films-Barton Fink (1991), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and The English Patient (1996)-it becomes clear that major American film communities, when confronted with the initial technological changes of the 1990s, experienced similar challenges with the inelegant transition from analogue to digital. However, their cultural and structural labor differences governed different results. Vanessa Ament, author of The Foley Grail (2009), rather than defining the 1990s as an era of technological determinism-a superficial reading-it is best understood as one in which sound professionals became more viable as artists, collaborated in sound design authorship, and influenced this digital transition to better accommodate their needs and desires in their work.

The Empire of Effects

The Empire of Effects
Author: Julie A. Turnock
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2022-06-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1477325328

How one company created the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Just about every major film now comes to us with an assist from digital effects. The results are obvious in superhero fantasies, yet dramas like Roma also rely on computer-generated imagery to enhance the verisimilitude of scenes. But the realism of digital effects is not actually true to life. It is a realism invented by Hollywood—by one company specifically: Industrial Light & Magic. The Empire of Effects shows how the effects company known for the puppets and space battles of the original Star Wars went on to develop the dominant aesthetic of digital realism. Julie A. Turnock finds that ILM borrowed its technique from the New Hollywood of the 1970s, incorporating lens flares, wobbly camerawork, haphazard framing, and other cinematography that called attention to the person behind the camera. In the context of digital imagery, however, these aesthetic strategies had the opposite effect, heightening the sense of realism by calling on tropes suggesting the authenticity to which viewers were accustomed. ILM’s style, on display in the most successful films of the 1980s and beyond, was so convincing that other studios were forced to follow suit, and today, ILM is a victim of its own success, having fostered a cinematic monoculture in which it is but one player among many.

Creativity, Inc. (The Expanded Edition)

Creativity, Inc. (The Expanded Edition)
Author: Ed Catmull
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0679644504

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.

George Lucas

George Lucas
Author: Brian Jay Jones
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2016-12-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0316257451

The essential biography of the influential and beloved filmmaker George Lucas. On May 25, 1977, a problem-plagued, budget-straining independent science-fiction film opened in a mere thirty-two American movie theaters. Conceived, written, and directed by a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas, the movie originally called The Star Wars quickly drew blocks-long lines, bursting box-office records and ushering in a new way for movies to be made, marketed, and merchandised. It is now one of the most adored-and successful-movie franchises of all time. Now, the author of the bestselling biography Jim Henson delivers a long-awaited, revelatory look into the life and times of the man who created Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Indiana Jones. If Star Wars wasn't game-changing enough, Lucas went on to create another blockbuster series with Indiana Jones, and he completely transformed the world of special effects and the way movies sound. His innovation and ambition forged Pixar and Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and THX sound. Lucas's colleagues and competitors offer tantalizing glimpses into his life. His entire career has been stimulated by innovators including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, actors such as Harrison Ford, and the very technologies that enabled the creation of his films-and allowed him to keep tinkering with them long after their original releases. Like his unforgettable characters and stories, his influence is unmatched.