Many believe Max Steiner's score for "King Kong" (1933) was the first important attempt at integrating background music into sound film, but a closer look at the industry's early sound era (1926--1934) reveals a more extended and fascinating story. Viewing more than two hundred films from the period, Michael Slowik launches the first comprehensive study of a long-neglected phase in Hollywood's initial development, recasting the history of film sound and its relationship to the "Golden Age" of film music (1935--1950).

Slowik follows filmmakers' shifting combinations of sound and image, recapturing the volatility of this era and the variety of film music strategies that were tested, abandoned, and kept. He explores early film music experiments and accompaniment practices in opera, melodrama, musicals, radio, and silent films and discusses the impact of the advent of synchronized dialogue. He concludes with a reassessment of "King Kong" and its groundbreaking approach to film music, challenging the film's place and importance in the timeline of sound achievement.

Add seamless, interactive, user-controlled delivery to your Flash applications. This book builds upon your understanding of basic ActionScript (AS) syntax with the foundational skills that you need to use XML in Flash applications and AS2 or AS3 to migrate your existing applications. Beginning with an introduction to XML, XML parsing methods, and a short introduction to AS2 you learn how to create a universal XML load/onload Class as well as a universal XHTML parser. Then you learn how to use Components using XML as the data source, including the menu, menubar, datagrid and tree component. Finally, a tutorial project-the design and development of a Real Estate Web site that contains an XML search engine-pulls it all together with hands-on experience. All the applications use XML as the data source and are written as class files. Select parts of the Real Estate Web site are redeveloped in AS3 for purposes of illustration. The new XML class is presented and specific code examples demonstrate techniques to apply methods and use properties. Particular attention is paid to the differences between AS2 and AS3 and how to effectively transition from one AS version to the other. The downloadable resources contain code for all of the properties and methods of the AS2, AS3, and XML class examples. Components for the Real Estate Web site project are also provided.

The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity? The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Timely and provocative, Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution.

In Building Interactive Worlds in 3D readers will find turnkey tutorials that detail all the steps required to build simulations and interactions, utilize virtual cameras, virtual actors (with self-determined behaviors), and real-time physics including gravity, collision, and topography. With the free software demos included, 3D artists and developers can learn to build a fully functioning prototype. The book is dynamic enough to give both those with a programming background as well as those who are just getting their feet wet challenging and engaging tutorials in virtual set design, using Virtools. Other software discussed is: Lightwave, and Maya. The book is constructed so that, depending on your project and design needs, you can read the text or interviews independently and/or use the book as reference for individual tutorials on a project-by-project basis. Each tutorial is followed by a short interview with a 3D graphics professional in order to provide insight and additional advice on particular interactive 3D techniques-from user, designer, artist, and producer perspectives.

How do epic tropes shape representations of the ancient world and determine contemporary understandings of historical events? What features of ancient epic persistently emerge in science fiction and fantasy narratives adapted to the screen, and why? How does the different scope of televisual versus cinematic media impact the representation of conventions derived from ancient epic? The international range of contributors to this volume respond to these questions by looking for features of epic outside the traditional realm of Greco-Roman antiquity, including historical films and series, fantasy, science fiction and documentary. By identifying epic conventions on the large and small screen, as well as within a range of speculative fictions in fantastical and futuristic settings, they consider the function of such conventions within their twenty-first-century production contexts.

Before the advent of television, cinema offered serialized films as a source of weekly entertainment. This book traces the history from the days of silent screen heroines to the sound era's daring adventure serials, unearthing a thriving film culture beyond the self-contained feature. Through extensive archival research, Ilka Brasch details the aesthetic appeals of film serials within their context of marketing and exhibition, looking at how they adapted the pleasures of a flourishing crime fiction culture to both serial visual culture and the affordances of the media-modernity of the early 20th century. The study furthermore traces the relationship of film serials to the broadcast models of radio and television and thereby shows how film serials introduced modes of storytelling that informed popular culture even beyond the serial's demise.

In On Stage, Mathilde Roman explores the resonances that fields of theatre - stage, decor, space, gaze and more - have in the practice of video arts. Using these notions of theatre both as points of reference and as a prism through which video installation can be approached, Roman concentrates on questions often overlooked by art historians, theorists and critics. These include questions of exhibition architecture, display, viewer experience, temporality and the importance of the gaze. Each chapter is articulated around analyses of video installations created by artists, from Michael Snow to Maider Fortune, and Dan Graham to Laurent Grasso. With a preface by Mieke Bal, On Stage is an important contribution to the fields of art, history and film studies.

"Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane" considers the works of two pioneers of performance art. Jonas (born 1936) and Pane (1939-1990) lived and worked in the United States and France respectively. Each artist worked multidisciplinarily, producing sculpture, drawings, installations, film and video in addition to live actions. Notably, Jonas and Pane have been lauded for their foundational work in performance, a field in which both of these artists blazed trails. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, "Parallel Practices" explores the trajectory of these artists' practices to reveal shared and complementary aspects, as well as to highlight the significant divergences and differences that characterize each artist's work. It includes texts by curator Dean Daderko, Elisabeth Lebovici and Anne Tronche and Barbara Clausen.

Behind the beloved animated films of Walt Disney Studios, which have moved and entertained millions of viewers, was an incredibly influential group of women who have slipped under the radar for decades. For the first time, bestselling author Nathalia Holt recounts their dramatic stories, showing how these women infiltrated the all-male domain of Disney's story and animation departments and used early technologies to create the rich artwork and unforgettable story lines that have become part of the American canon. Over the decades---while battling sexism, domestic abuse, and workplace intimidation---these women also fought to transform the way female characters are depicted to young audiences. Based on extensive interviews and exclusive access to archival and personal documents, The Queens of Animation reveals the vital contributions these women made to Disney's Golden Age and their continued impact on animated film making, culminating in the record-shattering Frozen, Disney's first female-directed full-length feature film.

A diverse range of leading scholars, activists, archivists and artists explore the histories, practices and concerns of women making film and video across the world, from the pioneering German animator Lotte Reiniger, to the influential African American filmmaker Julie Dash and the provocative Scottish contemporary artist Rachel Maclean. Opening with a foreword from the film theorist Laura Mulvey and a poem by the artist filmmaker Lis Rhodes, the book traces the legacies of early feminist interventions into the moving image and the ways in which these have been re-configured in the very different context of today. Reflecting and building upon the practices of recuperation that continue to play a vital role in feminist art practice and scholarship, contributors discuss topics such as how multiculturalism is linked to experimental and activist film history, the function and nature of the essay film, feminist curatorial practices and much more. This book transports readers across diverse cultural contexts and geographical contours, addressing complex narratives of subjectivity, representation and labour, while juxtaposing cultures of film, video and visual arts practice often held apart.

In this unique book the author explores the history of pioneering computer art and its contribution to art history by way of examining Ernest Edmonds' art from the late 1960s to the present day. Edmonds' inventions of new concepts, tools and forms of art, along with his close involvement with the communities of computer artists, constructive artists and computer technologists, provides the context for discussion of the origins and implications of the relationship between art and technology. Drawing on interviews with Edmonds and primary research in archives of his work, the book offers a new contribution to the history of the development of digital art and places Edmonds' work in the context of contemporary art history.

When law student Atey Ghailan realized that he was doing more sketching than note-taking in class, he decided to pursue a career in art. Atey has written a book that showcases his best and most fascinating work, with details from behind the scenes of his experiences in the art industry so far. Atey's artistic journey, from doodling in class to Senior Illustrator at Riot Games, California is central to the book. In addition, he wants readers to consider their own exciting journey, whether they have still to set off, or are on the road already. Readers will discover insight to his creative workflow alongside practical tips and techniques that can be applied to their own practice. The book shares how the artist defeats the dreaded art block, using a visual library packed with ideas and inspiration, and Atey will be debuting a new and very personal project, unveiling completely new and extremely exciting art.

The Anarchist Cinema examines the complex relationships that exist between anarchist theory and film. No longer hidden in obscure corners of cinematic culture, anarchy is a theme that has traversed arthouse, underground and popular film. James Newton explores the notion that cinema is an inherently subversive space, establishes criteria for deeming a film anarchic, and examines the place of underground and DIY filmmaking within the wider context of the category. The author identifies subversive undercurrents in cinema and uses anarchist political theory as an interpretive framework to analyse filmmakers, genres and the notion of cinema as an anarchic space.

Marking the 50th anniversary of the premiere of La Hora de Los Hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) (Getino and Solanas, 1968), A Trail of Fire for Political Cinema is an edited collection that closely analyses the film, looking to the context and the socio-political landscape of 1960s Argentina, as well as the film's legacy and contemporary relevance. Attention is paid to the corpus of political documentaries made between 1968 to 1976, including those that marked the last coup d'etat in Argentina, to emphasize how formal and thematic trends relate to their Argentinian social context. In order to highlight The Hour of the Furnaces's contemporary relevance as a form of politically engaged activism, the book will also look at Fernando Solanas's documentary output in the twenty-first century.

British artist Gillian Wearing, winner of the 1997 Turner Prize, uses photography and video to explore the intimacies and complexities of everyday life. Borrowing from popular culture, her work is disturbing and confessional. In 1992 she began the acclaimed series Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants them to say', in which random passers-by are photographed holding messages they've written, such as the mild-mannered young businessman whose sign unexpectedly reads 'I'm Desperate'. Wearing's work borrows from familiar forms of popular culture to produce direct, revealing records of deep-seated human trauma and emotion, often adopting the methods of television documentaries for her 'fly-on-the-wall' view of people's lives. Her videos can be alarming, as in Confess All ... in which masked individuals confess their darkest secrets, or humorous, as in (Slight) Reprise - a sampler of adults playing 'air guitar' in the fantasy rock stadium of their bedrooms. Her art can be disconcerting or uplifting: an honest portrait of the many sides to contemporary life. With exhibitions in Britain, the US, Europe and Japan, Wearing is among the best-known and most internationally recognized of the recent generation of British artists. This is the first publication ever to survey this remarkable young artist's gripping work in its entirety. Russell Ferguson of UCLA's Hammer Museum contextualizes Wearing's work in relation to historical precedents in painting, photography and video art. Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art Donna De Salvo discusses with the artist her collaborative approach towards her work and its subjects. London-based critic John Slyce focuses on Wearing's work 10-16, a remarkable video installation that charts our transition from childhood to adolescence. The artist has selected transcripts from director Michael Apted's acclaimed British television documentary series Seven Up, an important influence on the process Wearing uses in her own work. Published here for the first time in full are the transcripts of the artist's video works.

Though in existence for only a few decades, video games are now firmly established in mainstream culture all around the planet. Every year new games are produced, and every year new favorites emerge. But certain characters have become so iconic that they withstand both time and the shifting interests of players. Such creations permeate other elements of popular culture-from graphic novels to film-and are known not only to dedicated gamers but to the general public as well. In 100 Greatest Video Game Characters, readers can learn about some of the most popular and influential figures that have leapt from computer monitors and television screens and into the public consciousness. The entries in this volume provide general facts about the characters as well as explore their cultural significance. The entries include the following information: *Game developer *Year character was established *Video game franchise In addition, the book examines the commonalities of various video game characters to help readers better understand their popularity and how they operate within the video games and the industry itself. Whether casually looking up information on video game characters or researching what these icons says about society, readers will enjoy this entertaining and informative volume. Comprehensive and engaging, 100 Greatest Video Game Characters will appeal to fans and scholars alike.