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Coming Soon to a Theater near You!{{/B}} What are special effects? Do you enjoy movies that use a lot of special effects? Dinosaurs (恐龙) from the distant past! Space battles from the distant future! There has been a revolution in special effects, and it has transformed the movies we see. The revolution began in the mid-1970s with George Lucas's Star Wars, a film that stunned (使震惊) audiences. That revolution continues to the present with dramatic changes in special effects technology. The company behind these changes is Lucas's Industrial Light Magic (ILM). And the man behind the company is Dennis Muren, who has worked with Lucas since Star Wars. Muren's interest in special effects began very early. At the age of 6, he was photographing toy dinosaurs and spaceships. At 10, he had an 8-millimeter movie camera and was making these things move through stop-motion. (Stop-motion is a process in which objects are shot with a camera, moved slightly, Shot again, and so on. When the shots are put together, the objects appear to move.) Talk to Muren and you'll understand what ILM is all about; taking on new challenges. By 1989, Muren decided he had pushed the old technology as far as it would go. He saw computer graphics(图像)(CG)technology as the wave of the future and took a year off the master it. With CG technology, images can be scanned into a computer for processing, for example, and many separate shots can be combined into a single image. CG technology has now reached the point, Muren says, where special effects can be used to do just about anything so that movies can tell stories better than ever before. The huge success of Jurassic Park and its sequel (续集), The Lost World, the stars of which were computer-generated dinosaurs, suggests that this may very well be true. |