It's all about Sensation

Crash is a 1996 British-Canadian psychological thriller film written and directed by David Cronenberg based on J. G. Ballard's 1973 novel of the same name. It tells the story of a group of people who take sexual pleasure from car crashes, a notable form of paraphilia.

The film generated considerable controversy upon its release and opened to mixed and highly divergent reactions from critics. While some praised the film for its daring premise and originality, others criticized its combination of graphic sexuality and violence. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize, considered the third-most prestigious prize of the festival.
As a photographic print is the positive made from its negative, so also the positive of self-crashing is arranging for a disaster to occur on the highway, and then watching the carnage from a preselected observation post. Disasters other than on the highway may be arranged — catastrophic fires, for example. For those members of the general public who have a touch of sadomasochism in them, disaster as an unrehearsed event is often a large part of the appeal of entertainment stunts and sports, from the circus to stock-car racing.

Garden of Earthly Delights

Here’s how the Dutch animators behind this project explain what’s unfolding before your eyes:

[We] cleared the original landscape of the middle panel of Bosch’s painting and reconstructed it into a hallucinatory 4K animation. The creatures that populate this indoor playground embody the excesses and desires of 21st century Western civilization. Consumerism, selfishness, escapism, the lure of eroticism, vanity and decadence. All characters are metaphors for our society where loners swarm their digital dream world. They are symbolic reflections of egos and an imagination of people as they see themselves – unlike Bosch’s version, where all individuals more or less look the same. From a horny Hello Kitty to a coke hunting penis snake. From an incarnate spybot to headless fried chickens. These characters, once precisely painted dream figures, are now digitally created 3D models. All of them have been given their own animation loop to wander through the landscape. By placing them altogether in this synthetic fresco, the picture is never the same. What the animation and Bosch’s triptych have in common is that you’ll hardly be able to take it all in, you can watch it for hours.

Moving Image Research Collections

In support of the mission of the University of South Carolina, Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC) preserves films and videos produced outside the American feature film industry, making them available to present and future audiences.

For more information about MIRC's history and holdings, visit our Collections page. Search for individual items in our Reference Catalog, or browse the collections in our finding aid repository.

Watch thousands of videos online on MIRC's Digital Video Repository.

Flying saucers

Science fiction film (or sci-fi) is a genre that uses speculative, fictional science-based depictions of phenomena that are not fully accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial lifeforms, alien worlds, extrasensory perception and time travel, along with futuristic elements such as spacecraft, robots, cyborgs, interstellar travel or other technologies. Science fiction films have often been used to focus on political or social issues, and to explore philosophical issues like the human condition. In many cases, tropes derived from written science fiction may be used by filmmakers ignorant of or at best indifferent to the standards of scientific plausibility and plot logic to which written science fiction is traditionally held.

The Women Of Nollywood

Film-making in Nigeria is divided largely along regional, and marginally ethnic and religious lines. Thus, there are distinct film industries – each seeking to portray the concern of the particular section and ethnicity it represents. However, there's the English-language film industry which is a melting pot for filmmaking and filmmakers from most of the regional industries.

Funkel Berlin

LED stands for light emitting diode and is a solid-state semiconductor device. Only recently, LED’s of sufficient power have become available to make practical LED film lighting possible. LED’s are extremely efficient but are still limited in overall light output when compared to any of the other light sources.
LED’s are by nature monochromatic, producing only a single wavelength of light. So the challenge of LED lighting has been in creating a full spectrum white light. This can be done in two ways, either by combining the light of red, green and blue emitting LED’s, or with white LED’s whereby the visible white light is actually created by phosphors that are excited by an ultra-violet emitting LED.

Ootmarsum

In 1932, Kodak introduced another new format, 8 mm, now called "Standard 8" or "Regular 8", which put four frames into the area occupied by one standard 16 mm frame. The film usually came in 16 mm wide "Double 8" form, which ran through the camera in two passes (one in each direction) and was slit in half after processing. The "Straight 8" variant came already cut to 8 mm width. In either case, the amount of film stock used per frame was again reduced by 75%. This finally brought home movies within the reach of the average family. The smaller format also made possible smaller and more portable cameras and projectors.

The introduction of Kodachrome color reversal film for 16 mm in 1935, and for 8 mm in 1936, facilitated home color cinematography. The availability of reversal film, both black-and-white and Kodachrome, was very important to the economics of home movie-making because it avoided the expense of separate negatives and positive prints.

Peterhof St Petersburg

The historical period drama is a film genre in which stories are based upon historical events and famous people. Some historical dramas are docudramas, which attempt an accurate portrayal of a historical event or biography, to the degree that the available historical research will allow.

Cinemakers:Stopmotion

Stop motion (hyphenated stop-motion when used as an adjective) is an animation technique that physically manipulates an object so that it appears to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a fast sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Stop motion animation using plasticine is called clay animation or "clay-mation". Not all stop motion requires figures or models; many stop motion films can involve using humans, household appliances and other things for comedic effect. Stop motion can also use sequential drawing in a similar manner to traditional animation, such as a flip book. Stop motion using objects is sometimes referred to as pixilation or object animation.

Jutland

 

 

  

Image stabilization (IS) is a family of techniques that reduce blurring associated with the motion of a camera or other imaging device during exposure. Generally, it compensates for pan and tilt (angular movement, equivalent to yaw and pitch) of the imaging device, though electronic image stabilization can also compensate for rotation. It is used in image-stabilized binoculars, still and video cameras, astronomical telescopes, and also smartphones, mainly the high-end. With still cameras, camera shake is a particular problem at slow shutter speeds or with long focal length (telephoto or zoom) lenses. With video cameras, camera shake causes visible frame-to-frame jitter in the recorded video. In astronomy, the problem of lens-shake is amplified by variation in the atmosphere, which changes the apparent positions of objects over time.