Featuring hundreds of carefully hand-crafted illustrations as well as significant tuition on how to best compose and use images to create the most powerful frames, this book is potentially Hans P. Bacher's life's work encapsulated in one volume. Here, the internationally renowned production designer shares his expertise in an easy-to-follow and imaginative way – giving tips, exercises, and a depth of knowledge garnered from a lifetime in the industry. Bacher's production designs have established the look of many seminal animated films such as The Lion King, Balto, Mulan and Beauty and the Beast, so fans of his work will be delighted. While keeping the focus on storytelling, Bacher instructs readers in the art of animated cinematography with the ever-present aim of soliciting an emotional response from the audience. Vision: Color and Composition for Film represents an amazing depth of experience — and is visually arresting to boot.

Freedom to Move is an evidence informed practical resource which provides movement therapists of all disciplines with an exercise blueprint for rehabilitating spinal pain and many related 'injuries'. In essence, Freedom to Move describes what goes wrong in the spine and what to do about it. It integrates the applicable contemporary neuroscience around spinal movement and pain with the clinical evidence and understanding gained from the author's enquiring practice, and her exploration of various movement approaches and their contribution - or otherwise, to spinal well-being. It examines the relationship between healthy torso structure and functional control and describes and explains the author's model of spinal dysfunction - the remediation of which forms the basis of the author's model of care for the spine, The Key Approach(R). The book's main focus is on a practical, therapeutic exercise/movement approach which addresses the common movement faults and dysfunctions observed in people with spinal pain and stiffness. In particular, the Fundamental Patterns of control are introduced as important, innate 'key' movements which naturally provide the sound foundations necessary for a healthy spine - but which have commonly been 'lost' in the movement repertoire of people with spinal pain syndromes. These are re-established and reincorporated into various poses, movements and stretches by way of specifically directed mindful movement explorations. The client is helped to regain more optimal function and move out of pain - with more freedom. The approach is applicable within all industry models of teaching therapeutic movement: in the rehabilitation of spinal pain within physiotherapy, Pilates and Yoga; and in the fitness industry, for injury prevention, health promotion and optimising spinal health in exercise programmes in general.

In 1893 the Horsemen from Georgia, Caucasus, went to the United States where for more than 30 years they performed under the name of “Russian Cossacks� in the American circuses and shows. The Georgian riders were called “Cossacks� for different reasons, perhaps, the most important of which was the fact that Georgia was part of the Russian empire at that time and so each Georgian was referred to as Russian. This is the true story of people who arrived in America in search of financial support for their poor families back in Georgia and, at the same time without knowing it had influenced the riding technique of many participants in the most popular shows of that time. Dee Brown, the noted western historian wrote, “Trick riding came to rodeo by way of a troupe of Cossack daredevils imported by the 101 Ranch. Intrigued by the Cossacks stunts on their galloping horses, western cowboys soon introduced variations to American rodeo�. The connection between Buffalo Bill and Georgian trick riders represents one of the oldest known relationships between Georgia and the United States of America.

As a director, author, actor, and educator, Frank Galati has been a prominent American artist since the 1980s and continues to create new and innovative work for the theatre. The focus of this book is the remarkable Chicago years, between 1969 and 1996, in which Galati’s values and commitments were embraced and enhanced by the new theatre that emerged in his home town—a style he helped shape even as he was shaped by it. By 1990, the city was widely perceived as ground zero for the next generation of significant innovation in American theatre. There were a great many iterations of the Chicago style in those years, but Frank Galati’s theatrical inclinations, ensemble strategies, and brilliant showmanship touched them all. As this study explores, his reach extended well beyond the professional stage. Featuring exclusive interviews with Galati, selections from his unpublished notes and speeches, the observations of colleagues on his rehearsal process, and in-depth case studies of productions written, conceived, and directed by Galati, including The Grapes of Wrath (1988–90), The Winter’s Tale (1990), and The Glass Menagerie (1994), this work offers theatre historians, patrons, scholars, and students a unique source of primary information about a pivotal figure in a significant era of American theatre.

The Wire (2002-2008) was a searing exploration of post-9/11 America. It detailed the struggles of those living in America's disintegrating industrial heartlands and drug-ravaged neighborhoods, as well as those striving against the odds in its schools, hospitals and legal system. In the shadow of 9/11, while all eyes were turned towards Afghanistan and Iraq, The Wire was one of the few attempts to show the realities of America's dark corners. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy have been evoked in discussions of The Wire, its compelling storylines and memorable cast of characters creating a level of detail previously unseen in television series. However, while the show's scope and ambition garnered critical praise and a loyal following, a discussion of its political aspects, and in particular of the commentary it provided on Bush-era America, is overdue. The essays in this book examine The Wire in these terms, encompassing the unforseen consequences of the War on Drugs, the division of America's cities, the surveillance state, and the meaning of citizenship. In sum, this book provides new insights into how The Wire shone a light on the hidden realities of post-9/11 America.

Have you ever watched a Marx Brothers film and wondered what 'habeas Irish rose' is? What is the trial of Mary Dugan with sound? What is a college widow? When exactly did Don Ameche invent the telephone? Their films are full of such in-jokes and obscure theatrical, literary and topical references that can baffle modern audiences. In this viewer's guide to the Marx Brothers you will find the answer to such mysteries, along with an exhaustive compilation of background information, obscure trivia and even the occasional busted myth. Each of the Marx Brothers' 13 films is covered by a running commentary, with points in the film discussed as they appear. Each reference is listed by its running time, with time code given for both PAL and NTSC DVD. An introduction for neophytes and a resource for fanatics, this book is a travel guide to the rambling landscape of these remarkable comedies.

The ""Gothic"" style was a key trend in Italian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, because of its peculiar, often strikingly original approach to the horror genre. These films portrayed Gothic staples in a stylish and idiosyncratic way, and took a daring approach to the supernatural and to eroticism, with the presence of menacing yet seductive female witches, vampires and ghosts. Thanks to such filmmakers as Mario Bava (Black Sunday), Riccardo Freda (The Horrible Dr. Hichcock), and Antonio Margheriti (Castle of Blood), as well the iconic presence of actress Barbara Steele, Italian Gothic horror went overseas and reached cult status. The book examines the Italian Gothic horror of the period, with an abundance of previously unpublished production information drawn from official papers and original scripts. Entries include a complete cast and crew list, home video releases, plot summary and the author's analysis. Excerpts from interviews with filmmakers, scriptwriters and actors are included. Foreword by film director and scriptwriter Ernesto Gastaldi.

Imagine four hundred actresses attending a London hotel luncheon in 1908 determined to effect change for women. A resolution emerged that very day to begin the Actresses Franchise League, which produced original suffrage plays, orchestrated mass demonstrations, and collaborated with ordinary women. The roles many of these actresses had played during the previous few seasons also spurred their activism, particularly in plays written by Bernard Shaw. The hot topics--conflation of public and private controversies over sexuality, income distribution, full citizenship across gender and class--are chillingly pertinent now. In the early twentieth-century, non-commercial theatres became sites of social transformation on both sides of the Atlantic. A galvanizing force were the Vedrenne-Barker seasons at the Royal Court Theatre from 1904-1907. Eleven Shaw plays, alongside works by Granville Barker, John Galsworthy, and Elizabeth Robins, challenged conventions; many productions came to American stages. The interplay among Shaw and his contemporaries, and the impact of their dialogic connection, are the unique focal points here. Featuring more conversation than plot points, their new drama collectively urged audiences to recognize themselves in the characters, and inspired many to change themselves. Admiring performers at a distance, as their Victorian counterparts had done, no longer sufficed.

Beginning in the mid-1940s, the bleak, brooding mood of film noir began seeping into that most optimistic of film genres, the western. Story lines took on a darker tone and western films adopted classic noir elements of moral ambiguity, complex anti-heroes and explicit violence. The noir western helped set the standard for the darker action and science fiction and superhero films of today, as well as for acclaimed TV series such as HBO's Deadwood and AMC's Breaking Bad. This book cover the stylistic shift in westerns in mid-20th century Hollywood, offering close readings of the first noir westerns, along with revealing portraits of the eccentric and talented directors who brought the films to life.

Harry Alan Towers' reputation rests upon a corpus of 95 low budget productions shot post-haste in every corner of the globe. He took an integral part, however, in the development of the protocols that now underpin much transnational film production; he must thus be regarded as a pioneer. Towers' slash and burn strategy focussed upon parasitic, back-to-back productions, funded by rights bundles that were pre-sold globally. This strategy was substantially derived from his early days in broadcasting wherein he acted as a go-between in the American and the British Commonwealth markets. Though he became adept at procuring funds from pariah regimes and black market economies, primarily he continued to act as a broker bringing together American equity investment and European finance under the auspices of EC co-production agreements. He was also quick to exploit the burgeoning niche markets becoming available in the wake of technological developments and government initiatives.

In recent years, puppetry has enjoyed a huge revival on the stages of our theatres, dance venues and opera houses. Large-scale productions such as War Horse and The Lion King have revitalized age-old techniques to attract new audiences and develop the power of storytelling. Puppetry is now seen not only as a specialist art form that exists on its own, but also as a vital tool in the armoury of theatrical storytellers. A Practical Guide to Puppetry offers a comprehensive overview to this versatile art form, exploring established techniques and offering expert instruction on styles from shadow puppetry to group puppetry. Each method is illustrated with practical and accessible exercises, achievable either individually or in a group workshop or rehearsal. With over eighty exercises for improvising, training, designing and directing puppetry, accompanied by 400 illustrations, this new book gives a complete approach to puppeteering with objects, simple puppets and puppets with mechanisms.

This book describes the evolution of the Western cowboy hero as a mythic person created and propagated by dime novels, pulp fiction, television and Hollywood movies. The expectations and demands of readers, viewers, and movie makers have all influenced the public perception of the Western hero. As a result, business interests have commercialized the Western past as publishers and studios have tried to make their image of the West be the most compelling to ensure the largest audience. Because many of our contemporary perceptions of the Western hero have come to us from Hollywood, much of the book discusses his changing image in the movies. The first chapter presents an overview of the Western hero. The rest of the chapters trace the image of the hero and his place in the fictional West from early novels and movies to the present, and discuss how his image has evolved due to changing audience expectations and economic pressures on various media to create a profitable product.

Throughout the course of film history, artists have used matte painting, stop-motion animation, model photography, process cinematography, in-camera effects, travelling mattes, optical printing and physical and floor effects to entertain audiences. These are the special effects artists in this book. The biographical entries provide career synopses and movie credits, spanning the early years of cinematography through the end of the mechanical age of filmmaking, marked by Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park and its combination of conventional effects and computer-generated images. An extensive filmography is then presented. The book contains numerous stills, a glossary, bibliography and index.

This is an analysis of all the folkloric genres that comprise the repertoire of the marionette theatre in Sicily. Here, epic, farce, saints' lives, bandits' lives, fairytales, Christian myth and city legend offer the vehicles by which puppeteers comment upon, inform about - perhaps even negotiate - the relationships among the major classes of Sicilian society: the aristocracy, the people, the clerics and the Mafia. The lynchpin of the repertoire is the Carolingian Cycle and, in particular, a contemporary version of The Song of Roland known in Sicily as The Death of the Paladins, a text which illustrates the means by which the Carolingian heroes - Charlemagne, Roland, Renaud, Ganelon and Angelica - augment saints, bandits, Biblical figures and Sicilian folk heroes to provide the marionette theatre its rhetorical function: the provision and dissemination of the tools of Sicilian identity.

Modern Romanian filmmaking has received wide international recognition. In only a decade (2001 to 2011), a group of promising young film makers have been embraced as important members of European cinema. The country developed a new fervour for filmmaking and a dozen new movies have received international awards and recognition from some of the most important film critics in the world. This development, sometimes called ""New Wave cinema,"" is fully explored in this book. By using a comparative approach and searching for similarities among some of the most important cinematic styles and trends, the study reveals that the Romanian young directors working after 2000 are part of a larger, European, way of filmmaking. Looking for elements of cohesion in this new school of filmmaking, the discussion moves from the specific themes, motifs and narratives to the philosophy of a whole generation of filmmakers, such as Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Radu Muntean, Corneliu Porumboiu, Tudor Giurgiu and others.

The Science of Writing Characters is a comprehensive handbook to help writers create compelling and psychologically-credible characters that come to life on the page. Drawing on the latest psychological theory and research, ranging from personality theory to evolutionary science, the book equips screenwriters and novelists with all the techniques they need to build complex, dimensional characters from the bottom up. Writers learn how to create rounded characters using the 'Big Five' dimensions of personality and then are shown how these personality traits shape action, relationships and dialogue. Throughout The Science of Writing Characters, psychological theories and research are translated into handy practical tips, which are illustrated through examples of characters in action in well-known films, television series and novels, ranging from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri and Game of Thrones to The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Goldfinch. This very practical approach makes the book an engaging and accessible companion guide for all writers who want to better understand how they can make memorable characters with the potential for global appeal.

As the horror subgenre du jour, found footage horror's amateur filmmaking look has made it available to a range of budgets, allowing both major studios and independent productions to participate in the popular phenomenon. Surviving by adapting to technological and cultural shifts and popular trends, found footage horror is a successful and surprisingly complex experiment in blurring the lines between quotidian reality and horror's dark and tantalizing fantasies. Found Footage Horror Films explores the subgenre's stylistic, historical and thematic development. It examines the diverse prehistory beyond Man Bites Dog (1992) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), paying attention to the safety films of the 1960s, the snuff-fictions of the 1970s, and to television reality horror hoaxes and mockumentaries during the 1980s and 1990s in particular. It underscores the importance of The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007), and considers YouTube's popular rise in sparking the subgenre's recent renaissance. This book also explores a number of other movies including [Rec] (2007), Home Movie (2007), Exhibit A (2007), Cloverfield (2008), The Tunnel (2010), The Last Exorcism (2010), The Devil Inside (2012), V/H/S (2012) and the popular web series Marble Hornets.

This work offers a critical, colorful and informative examination of different types of monster movies, spanning the silent period to today. Chapter One focuses on dragons, dinosaurs, and other scaly giants from films like 1953's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, an impressive stop-motion production that ushered in a new era of atomic-spawned monster films. Chapter Two examines "big bug" flicks, beginning with 1954's giant ant-infested Them. Chapter Three focuses on ordinary animals grown to improbable proportions through scientific or sinister experimentation, such as the huge octopus in 1955's It Came from Beneath the Sea. Chapters Four, Five, and Six look at films in which nature goes berserk, and otherwise innocuous animals flock, swarm, hop or run about on a menacingly massive scale, including 1963's The Birds and 1972's Frogs. Finally, Chapter Seven focuses on films featuring beasts that defy easy definition, such as 1958's The Blob and Fiend Without a Face.

An inspiring collection of quotes from The Talks, a much-loved online magazine featuring candid interviews with visionaries Over the last decade, The Talks has conducted more than 500 interviews with cultural visionaries - illuminating conversations with artists, actors, directors, chefs, fashion designers, architects, authors, musicians, and athletes. For this book, The Talks' founders Sven Schumann and Johannes Bonke have selected the finest quotes from those conversations and arranged them by category - including acting, advice, age, beauty, creativity, inspiration, love, money, nature, rebellion, and more. The result: a fast-paced, insightful look into the lives and minds of the creative voices of our time.

Animation has been part of television since the start of the medium but it has rarely received unbiased recognition from media scholars. More often, it has been ridiculed for supposedly poor technical quality, accused of trafficking in violence aimed at children and neglected for indulging in vulgar behaviour. These accusations are often made categorically, out of prejudice or ignorance, with little attempt to understand the importance of each programme on its own terms. This book is a serious look at the whole genre of television animation, from the early themes and practises through the evolution of the art to the present day. Examining the productions of individual studios and producers, the author establishes a means of understanding their work in new ways, at the same time discussing the ways in which the genre has often been unfairly marginalised by critics, and how, especially in recent years, producers have both challenged and embraced this ""marginally"" as a vital part of their work. By taking seriously something often thought to be frivolous, the book provides a framework for understanding the persistent presence of television animation in the American media - and how surprisingly influential it has been.

The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo is one of the greatest shows on earth. Around 220,000 people attend each year. It is seen on TV by a further 100 million. Alasdair Hutton is the Voice of the Tattoo. This book is the story of the Tattoo, told by the Narrator and prefaced by a short history of tattoos pre-Edinburgh and a history of the Tattoo pre-Alasdair. With an ever-changing cast of over 1,000 performers, each year’s show is unique. Some elements remain unchanged – the spine-tingling Lone Piper playing on the Castle ramparts, the cacophony of sound that is the closing massed pipes and drums, the welcoming voice of Alasdair Hutton as you arrive. Ladies and gentlemen, take your seats, the Greatest Show on Earth is about to begin. For the last 25 years, Alasdair Hutton has told our story to each of our audiences since he started in 1992 – a total live audience of over 5 million people. Not only has he been behind the microphone without fail, in Edinburgh and when we have taken the show abroad, but he has also researched and written the script. Alasdair’s most precious talents are his voice, his sense of timing and his feel for occasion. Alasdair Hutton is above all one of life’s great gentlemen. Not only is he impeccably polite but he has great charisma, values and a wonderful sense of purpose. This book, which is Alasdair’s own story – only a small part of it! – gives a sense of the huge contribution he has made to the remarkable institution of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. From the foreword by brigadier David Allfrey

The winner of four Academy Awards for directing, John Ford is considered by many to be America’s greatest native-born director. Ford helmed some of the most memorable films in American cinema, including The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and The Quiet Man, as well as such iconic westerns as Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In The John Ford Encyclopedia, Sue Matheson provides readers with detailed information about the acclaimed director’s films, from the silent era to the 1960s. In more than 400 entries, this volume covers not only the films Ford directed and produced, but the studios for which he worked; his preferred shooting sites; his WWII documentaries; and the men and women with whom he collaborated including actors, screenwriters, technicians, and stuntmen. Encompassing the entire range of the director’s career—from his start in early cinema to his frequent work with national treasure John Wayne—this is a comprehensive overview of one of the most highly regarded filmmakers in history. The John Ford Encyclopedia will be of interest to professors, students, and the many fans of the director’s work.

Rather than limiting the cinema, as certain French New Wave critics feared, adaptation has encouraged new inspiration to explore the possibilities of the intersection of text and film. This collection of essays covers various aspects of adaptation studies--questions of genre and myth, race and gender, readaptation, and pedagogical and practical approaches.