LotR, X2, Potc and Firefly own you!

So today I met with my friend Cathy to study for my Communications exam tomorrow. One of the first things we covered was Visual Deception, a small category of which was Prof Messaris's "Top 5 Special Effects." For some reason, Cathy wasn't really up on the special effects scene, so the overwhelming majority of the two hours we had together was spent explaining to her stop-motion animation, the "Vertigo" effect, bullet time, the psychology behind a choice to use a "morph" in an ad, and the process and pros and cons of key-framing versus motion capture versus virtual world construction. At length. Three times.

I love Cathy and she is usually quite brilliant, but gah. At least I got to gush a bit about LotR and Massive and Andy Serkis, as Prof Messaris used Gollum as his example for motion capture and the Ride of the Rohirrim for virtual world construction. So I guess it evens out. And I got really good Italian food afterwards, so life is good. And now, back to packing! My room looks like a bomb went off.