Special Effects: In Film and Television

by Jake Hamilton and Selina Hastings

Book Overview

For the first time, special effects experts allowed a photographer to go behind the scenes to reveal the fascinating secrets of their work, step-by-step. In this explosive introduction to the world of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 078942813X
• ISBN13: 9780789428134
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley)
• Length: 63 Pages
• Weight: 1.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 10.5" x 12.4"
• Age Range: 9 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 4 to 7

Customer Reviews

Brief explanations of how the most amazing movie special effects are done

While the special effects in the movies keep us astounded, learning how they were performed can be just as enthralling. In this book, you are given a brief introduction to how some of the groundbreaking special effects were made. Scenes from the classic science fiction movies such as the Star Wars sequence, "2001 A Space Odyssey", "Terminator 2" and "Alien" are described and explained. Other standard special effects such as fire scenes, battle scenes, underwater scenes, combinations of live actors and animations and explosions are all demonstrated. While none of the explanations is completely thorough, they all are lengthy enough to give you the general idea as to how the action was accomplished. In my opinion, knowing how something was done never detracts from the thrill of seeing it, therefore I enjoyed this book immensely.

Excellent introduction to special effects

Ok, so I'm not 9-12 years old (the book's target audience), I'm almost 30 and I still enjoyed this book tremendously. It has awesome illustrations to show the techniques used in various effects like robotics, miniature models, etc. The explainations are easy to understand too. This book took the mystery out of the state-of-art special fx with recent blockbuster movies as examples. For an introduction to special effects, it's excellent.