Monsters
How did monsters and Bronson think outside the box in
terms of marketing and new technology
In the weeks
leading up to the UK release date of 3 December 2010 a marketing campaign using
social network Foursquare was announced. Vue Entertainment and Cineworld
Cinemas set up 'infected locations' which gave users access to exclusive Monsters
content and the chance to win random on-the-spot prizes.
Where once the
point of CGI in cinema might have been to produce images of crystalline, almost
architecturally detailed clarity, now its future seems to lie in smudging,
smearing and making indistinct. This terrifically exciting sci-fi movie from
smart young British film-maker Gareth Edwards is a case in point. His digitally
created beasts, and the exotically wrecked landscape they inhabit, seem to have
been created from a kind of social-realist grime. It's strictly 2D: Edwards is
the anti-James-Cameron. The effects don't draw attention to themselves:
tentacle-waving aliens are all part of the general, grubby absence of law and
order.
Harry potter
The
magic wand, another staple of the Harry Potter series, is also within our
reach. Technolog's Helen A.S. Popkin brought our attention to the Kymera wand buttonless remote control this August -- which, as its name suggests,
lets users flip through the channels or gain power over another remote controlled
device with a flick of the wrist instead of those pesky buttons.
In
"Chamber of Secrets," Harry and Ron Weasley borrow an enchanted
car for a
quick flight to Hogwarts -- but flying cars look arguably cooler in the
non-fiction world. The Terrafugia, a car under development by the Massachusetts-based
company, is nearly street legal, and Moller
International is hard at work on its vertical takeoff and landing cars, including the
M400 Skycar.
What would a roundup of Harry Potter technology be
without mention of that oh-so-cool invisibility cloak? This August,
researchers at Tufts and Boston universities announced success in creating an invisibility cloak made from silk. For now,
the metamaterial, as it is called, works in the terahertz range -- a region of
the electromagnetic spectrum between radio and infrared light -- but the
researchers say it could work in the visible range too.
