Sunday 2 January 2011

On Digital Cinema, Visual Effects, and CGI Studies


Faking it? Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) in Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

Happy New Year, dear readers! A truly chilled out Film Studies For Free is back from vacation, and raring to go with a pretty impressive (if it says so itself) entry of direct links to openly accessible scholarly work on digital cinema and computer generated imagery studies.

The post was inspired by news of the availability as a free download of 'Digital Bodies' - a chapter, translated into English, from esteemed scholar Barbara Flueckiger's 2008 German-language book Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer.

Flueckiger, Associate Professor at the University of Zurich's Institute of Cinema Studies, has also just published her great database on the history of CGI, VFX, and computer animation online.  

Vielen Dank, Barbara! Thanks also to all the scholars listed below for choosing to publish their work in freely accessible venues online! 

Finally, in case you hadn't yet heard of the best website for regular, informed discussions of special and visual effects in the cinema, do check out film scholar Dan North's awe-inspiring blog Spectacular Attractions!

2 comments:

Dan North said...

Happy New Year, FSFF! What a great collection of links to kick off 2011. The Flueckiger chapter in English is a real gift - I hope she's planning to release a translation of the whole book...

Catherine Grant said...

Happy new year and thanks, Dan! yes, the chapter and database are wonderful. I look forward to reading more on these and other topics at your own website.