The Harry Potter films, Pride and Prejudice, Moll Flanders, Larkrise to Candleford, Cranford, Moonraker, and Emma are among the films and television historical dramas that have been filmed at the Wiltshire village of Lacock and nearby Lacock Abbey. The village is almost entirely owned by the National Trust and there has been little new building [more...]
Planning a wedding dress for a period drama is not just a question of research plus design flair. It’s true the dress must look authentic for that particular era as well as suiting the actress, her character, and the overall mood and setting. Yet at the same time, the designer has to think about the [more...]
The Blind Side, the 2009 film featuring Sandra Bullock in a dramatic role, is promoted as a true story — and, indeed, it stays closer to history than many “true” films. It tells the story of Michael Oher, a societal nobody who seemed destined to be a another grim statistic of the slums before he [more...]
Rosslyn Chapel already had 30,000 visitors a year before Dan Brown used it in his mystical adventure novel the Da Vinci Code in 2003. Numbers rose, and then escalated massively after the 2006 movie version showed Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou searching for secrets there. The church near Edinburgh, Scotland was overflowing with tourists in [more...]
Today’s movie cinema format comprises a large chunk of previews and advertisements, followed by the main feature. But it wasn’t always like that. In the past there were three common formats: “shorts plus main feature”, “double feature” and “continuous screening”. “Continuous screening” was used for “blockbusters” where the cinema was expecting to operate near full [more...]
A Foley artist makes sound effects for films and radio. The sounds required can be wide ranging: the sound of someone’s footsteps, or the more gruesome sound of someone’s head being chopped off in a guillotine, or perhaps a fire, or a fight scene. A Foley artist can be called upon to recreate any noise [more...]
The curious notion of life imitating art was expressed by Oscar Wilde as “Life imitates art, more than art imitates life“. It’s a turnaround from the usual situation in which the artist creates art inspired by the life and world around them. When life imitates art, reality reflects what had previously been expressed in art [more...]
The key to being able to project an image in three dimensions is the human capability for binocular depth perception. What this means is that when we look at something with both of our eyes, the image that the left eye sees is slightly different than the image that the right eye sees. The closer [more...]