Lesson 3, ex,3b,d

Reporter:

Many believe that Avatar, the largely computer-generated, 3-D film by James Cameron—and the top-grossing movie in history, earning nearly $3 billion worldwide—has changed the moviegoing experience. Like Avatar, Cameron’s 1984 thriller Terminator, about an indestructible human-machine cyborg, and 1997’s Titanic, with its hyper-realistic feel for the “unsinkable” ship’s disastrous end, are morality tales about technology’s risks—created with the most advanced technology. The director spoke with our reporter Lorenza Muñoz.

One

(James Cameron):

Terminator was my first real film, and you can directly contrast 1984 to 2010. No single technique we used then was used today. We shot Terminator on film, and we don’t shoot on film today. All of the visual effects are digital now. Back then we used glass paintings, foreground miniatures and stop-motion animation. We thought we were being tremendously innovative—and we were. The technology has changed but the basics of the job haven’t. It is still about storytelling, about placing images side by side, about creating a feeling with images and music. Only the technical details have changed.

Two

We always planned to make this as a series of two or three movies. The appeal of going into the second film is that we can continue with the system we created. Now we will just speed it up, refine and make it more intuitive for the artists working on the film. The next movies will be more about details but not fundamentally different.

Three

I think there will be movie theaters in 1,000 years. People want the group experience, the sense of going out and participating in a film together. People have been predicting the end of movie theaters since I started in the business.  Four

We have to wait until the technology is available in every home. I think it will be standard in 4 years, not 40. We will have a glasses-free technology in five years at home and three years for laptops. The limiting factor is going to be content. You can’t rely on a few films a year for this. It is going to have to be 3-D broadcast sports, scripted television, non-scripted television and reality television.

Five  It will always be a filmmaking center. Filmmakers from China and Japan and Germany come to Hollywood to have meetings with studio executives and to get money for their movies. It is a central switching station for global entertainment. Hollywood is also the place for filmmakers who want to make movies for a global market. China and Russia make films for their own markets, but I don’t see the likelihood of those places replacing Hollywood. India has a huge film industry that supplies hundreds of films a year, but it is very much about that market.

Six  If I’m alive. I will be 96, so I will be making films very, very slowly.

Lesson 4, ex.2b

1. Theatre tends to be more, let me say, aristocratic while cinema is aimed mostly at mass audience. I doubt that any film will be around as long as a play written in the nineteen century. 

The major difference, though it sounds strange, is in the fact that cinema, as you probably meant to say, speaks to millions at the same time whereas a theatre performance to a few hundred. Cinemas will never have a problem with bringing in big business money.

2. There is a fundamental difference when we contrast theatre to cinema (and it has nothing to do with technical differences) – it is in the relationship of the actor to the audience.

3. Theatre also has a democratic element that cinema cannot have. Something is happening on stage in front of you and the audience has the possibility of showing their reaction, communicating their feelings. That makes each performance original.

4. The performance of emotion is the most difficult aspect of film acting: while the theatre actor can use enlarged gestures and loud voice to express emotion, the cinema actor must rely on tiny facial ticks and lifts of the eyebrow to create a believable character.

5. Of course, more people go to the cinema just because it offers more visual entertainment through visual effects, whereas theatre offers more speech and real eye-contact.

6. Theatre is different from all other forms of visual presentation because it is live.