Lecture #1 - Two TED Talks

I decided to watch two Ted Talks for this lecture.

The first was a TED Talk by Don Levy on A Cinematic Journey through Visual Effects.
In it Don Levy talked about how visual effects in cinema can be thought as essentially what magicians do. They create illusions using three basic principles. They are assumption, which is that people assume things in our world are the same as things in the world presented, presumption, which is people can presume things in the world presented will behave as we expect, and lastly, context in reality, which is does the items presented make sense in reality. In then becomes the obsession of the magician, or the visual effect artist, to never betray the illusion. He then showed some different clips of visual effects in cinema over the past hundred years. These showed different aspects and types of visual effects over the years. It was a very interesting TED Talk.

Link to the video: http://www.ted.com/talks/don_levy_a_cinematic_journey_through_visual_effects.html


The other TED Talk was Amit Sood: Building a museum of museums on the web. This was a very interesting TED Talk about the google art project. This is where google created virtual museums very similar to the new google maps. Whereas instead of walking along a street via your web browser you are walking through a museum! Then you can click on individual paintings and see them at 10 Billion pixels. This means you can zoom in to see the individual brush strokes and cracks of the paintings. People can also create their own virtual collections of their favorite art works and discuss them with their friends. These seems like an amazing project that google made and I am definitely glad I learned about it!