How was the Universal Pictures 1936 opening logo created?

The Prestige says that (in as many words) in 2006. Someone probably said it before then.

See #2 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-reveals-h...

That theme certainly appears in The Prestige, but those words don't to the best of my recollection. I guess I'll leave it to you whether that merits a finger cut.

And then in Prometheus that scene is used to emphasize the behavior of an android becoming mis-aligned with the crew and not minding the consequences of subsequent actions.

The trick is that he has thick callouses and/or has burned the nerves in his fingers.

Lying about how tricks are done also is part of magic.

I would not rule out that he wetted his fingers before doing this trick, and, possibly, timed things correctly to rapidly transfer some water to the wick before his fingers got too hot.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leidenfrost_effect may be relevant)

Do New Yorker articles older than a certain amount of time have no paywall? I never noticed.

I have a paywall there :(

I had to get a new TV and did upgrade to 4K because it seemed to make sense. But hadn't had an urge to do so previously.

I do think a lot of people get obsessed with incremental resolution/sound/network improvements that, in practice, don't really affect the experience.

Thank you for posting that video. The wikipedia description doesn't quite capture the visual interestingness of the globe with concave mirror.

Think about the logistics of suddenly having to put up a fault slide during an emergency, especially when the best you can ask for is a camera and possibly a chroma-keyer! A camera on a swivel must've been a luxury.

It does, third picture on the right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BBC_One_colour_1969.jpg

It's quite a hybrid would count this a in-camera, not pure practical. not to this discount this but to encourage mixing media. Lots of projection mapping going on which is pretty much capturing a digital screen on other surfaces.

Still my overall favorite Windows desktop background.

Fair enough, "used to" is probably not the right qualifier. Still, those guys back in the 30's had to be pretty inventive to make some of the stuff they did with very limited technology. Not to disparage people working with practical effects today.

Here's an anecdote:

I've read that the original Fraggle Rock was the last major puppet TV production that didn't use computers to supplement the puppetry by hiding the strings.

I'm sure the newer Fraggle rock and other newer Muppet shows have impressive puppetry but the viewer is further removed from the actual craft since the image is computer enhanced.

There is also a misconception that digital vfx are necessarily easier, faster and don't take as much skill etc.

My wife and I moonlight as performing magicians. We both love horror movies and when I was a child in the 80s / early 90s I wanted to do sfx makeup and practical fx for a living.

Around the late 90s / early 00s, the movie industry went through this phase where digital vfx / cgi was extremely trendy and hype-driven. Kind of like the LLM hype train in tech today. Movie studios embraced digital vfx to the exclusion of practical for a variety of reasons and with mixed results as far as public reception went. Just like with LLMs, there was this attitude amongst studios and fx shops that digital was "the future." It was driven partly by cost but also by the impression that you can do things digitally that you can't do practically, or can't do as safely or for the same budget.

So during this period we saw a hell of a lot more digital CGI and a hell of a lot less practical.

The state of vfx has matured quite a bit since then, and there has been a modern embrace of practical fx but not for the reasons that people think.

The idea that practical is better than digital is horse shit. But so is the idea that digital is better than practical. Just like with anything, it depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve.

Digital vfx artists are magicians. What they do is not easy. Neither are practical fx artists. Both are highly skilled crafts and disciplines and most movies today use hybrid approaches because it's all about finding the right tool for the job at hand.

What gives a lot of us vfx enthusiasts a laugh, is when studios boast about doing everything practically because of just how much of a bad image the general public has gotten about digital fx.

First, they're almost always lying to you. They undoubtedly do a lot with practical, but there is still a lot of digital vfx going on. But they play fast and loose with what they mean by "digital vfx." Is compositing the same thing as CGI? Not in a strict sense, but it's still an example of a digital effect unless you're filming on film and doing it the old fashioned way.

People have it in their mind that digital is always going to look artificial, and practical is going to "feel" real. Go look at some budget practical fx from the 80s. Some of it is brilliant and has aged well, while others looks absolutely garbage. That's true for digital as well.

The techniques needed to mature, the computers needed to mature and the industry needed to mature. Now a days most people would be surprised how much is done with digital vfx that they wouldn't have realized, because good CGI is invisible CGI. You believe it and don't question it. And amazing results are had when practical and digital are combined. Which, if I can play loose with the term "digital" has actually always been the case since Georges Méliès, a 19th century magician and early film and vfx pioneer, who accomplished a lot of his sfx using a combination of "on camera" practical methods and film compositing (what, pre-CGI, people would call "camera tricks"). A lot of what is done digitally today, takes tricks and concepts that were done by hand with film and lets people do it faster and easier with software.

You're saying there's YouTube channels that produce making of/BTS content as the same caliber we'd get as bonus materials on shiny round discs? I just don't see a YouTuber doing something for free over the course of principle photography just on the hopes they'd get enough ad revenue when they could be churning out other content on a more frequent cycle.

While I agree that it would be great if artists had more freedom to create whatever they wanted, I think it is overly cynical to dismiss commercial art as somehow lesser. I think this specifically is a great example of that. It isn't really an ad for anything else beyond other art. It doesn't need to be as intricate, involved, and for a lack of a better word, artistic as it is. The only reason it ended up that way is because artists had personal pride in making it. This is true for countless pieces of art. Nearly all the music or movies people listen to and watch today are commercial art. That doesn't make them any less noble than art created by someone who has no financial incentive to create art.