Special Effects

The CREATURE creators at Stan Winston Studio specialize in Hollywood miracles -- they brought dinosaurs to life for "Jurassic Park" and turned metal men into movie history with "Iron Man" and "The Terminator" -- but their next trick will be their toughest. The illustrious special effects shop will try to hold onto its history even as it sheds its late founder's name and abandons his storied workshop. Stan Winston, the four-time Oscar winner, died in June in Malibu at age 62 after a seven-year battle with cancer.

MARLOES SANDS, Wales - Nearly a hundred soldiers on horseback sprinted across the beach here last fall, dodging arrows and catapulted fire balls. Despite many casualties, the charging "Snow White and the Huntsman" army was determined to storm the castle of the evil Queen Ravenna, who not only can suck the beauty out of young women but also transmogrify into a murder of crows. Assessing the battle from an all-terrain vehicle was Rupert Sanders, a commercial director making his first feature film.

Hard-core Harry Potter fans who devoured the books, camped out for the movies and trekked through the theme park now have a new way to relive the boy wizard's adventures. PHOTOS: Making of Harry Potter studio tour Debuting Saturday, the Making of Harry Potter behind-the-scenes tour at theWarner Bros.studios in England will let wizards, mudbloods and muggles pull back the curtain on the movie-making secrets of the most successful film series of all time. Located 20 miles outside of London, the three-hour self-guided tour will take visitors past sets, props, costumes, models and special effects exhibits from the eight "Harry Potter" movies.

As Hollywood's major movie studios try to trim costs every way they can - including layoffs, mergers and slashed expense accounts and producer deals - there's one budget item that heads ever upward: the movies themselves. This year's summer movie season - which kicks off May 4 with the superhero team-up film"The Avengers"and continues with 16 more "event" films through August - is the industry's most expensive ever. Five of the top titles cost more than $200 million each, a once-unthinkable ceiling that's being broken with increasing regularity.

Have you ever wanted to strangle a ghost? You may well feel the urge after seeing "A Christmas Carol," Robert Zemeckis' exasperating re-imagining of the Dickens classic as a 3-D action-thriller zooming through Victorian London and the fever dreams of that most miserly of men, Ebenezer Scrooge. The "it's better to give than receive" moral to this story is almost lost under the snowdrifts of special effects. Then there is the blizzard of Jim Carrey's theatrics to weather. The actor voices eight characters, including Scrooge at all ages as well as the three ghosts who haunt him -- you can just see him in the recording studio pingponging manically around during one of the Scrooge-ghost tête-à-têtes.

What is the most expensive special effects commercial of all time? No one seems to know. But several ad executives say one of the most costly--$1 million to create and air just once--has to be a 1984 ad for Apple Computer that aired during the Super Bowl. The spot, which showed a futuristic vision of George Orwell's 1984, featured hundreds of actors and required numerous effects. Among them was a Big Brother character illuminated on a big screen. A woman in Olympic garb, apparently competing in the hammer throw event, tossed a ball-and-chain hammer at the giant screen and destroyed it. More special effects commercials are filmed in Los Angeles each year than anywhere else in the world.

Special-effects wizards learned the latest tricks of the trade last week at the first annual Digital Content Creation conference and exposition at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The conference, sponsored by Fairfield, Conn.-based trade magazine publisher Advanstar Communications, was geared toward the decidedly Southern California combination of technology and entertainment.

The filmmakers call the sequence the Big Freeze. In director Roland Emmerich's big-budget action epic "The Day After Tomorrow," which comes out May 28, global warming sets off a chain of devastating tornadoes, floods and earthquakes. But even in a movie littered with eye-popping computer-generated special effects sequences, the most impressive one involves a gigantic frozen hurricane that sweeps into New York. Action begins at the tip of the Empire State Building.

Taster's Choice Instant Coffee's new advertising campaign won't build upon the company's serial romance campaign that ended last fall. Instead of a continuing story line that moves from commercial to commercial, the Nestle USA Beverage Division product will use special effects to create hundreds of separate vignettes that evolve into a single image of a Taster's Choice jar and a cup of coffee. The commercial that was created by McCann Erickson USA Inc.

As part of its "Hollywood Real to Reel" series, American Movie Classics tonight presents Richard Schickel's "The Harryhausen Chronicles," a delightful and informative one-hour documentary on Ray Harryhausen, whom Schickel aptly describes as having become as much a legend as the wondrous creatures, dinosaurs and mythical monsters he envisioned as one of the movies' greatest special effects geniuses.

“Ghost,” the hit movie starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, has been resculpted for Broadway. The movie-turned-musical opened Monday night at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in a special effects-heavy production that takes audiences from the streets of New York to an unsettling afterlife. The staged story doesn't stray far from the 1990 film: Molly is a love-struck artist while her boyfriend, Sam, a banker, is less inclined to return her sentiments, at least verbally. Sam is shot and killed in a robbery, but with the help of a psychic, the couple can continue their affair while Sam waits in spiritual limbo.

"2001: A Space Odyssey" Trumbull was in his early 20s when he worked as one of four special effects supervisors on Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterwork. "Silent Running" Not only did Trumbull supply the effects for this cult 1972 environmental sci-fi classic, he also made his feature directorial debut on the film. "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" Trumbull and his staff had only five months to create all of the elaborate effects shots for the 1979 feature film — the first based on the 1966-69 sci-fi TV series.

Director D.W. Griffith once said of French filmmaker Georges Méliès, "I owe him everything. " Charlie Chaplin described him as "the alchemist of light. " Méliès built the first movie studio in Europe and was the first filmmaker to use production sketches and storyboards. Film historians consider him the "father of special effects" — he created the first double exposure on screen, the split screen and the dissolve. Not to mention that he was one of the first filmmakers to have nudity in his films — he was French, after all. And thanks to Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed 3-D family film, "Hugo," contemporary audiences are being lovingly introduced to the silent film pioneer.

Yes, it has dinosaurs. But at its core Fox's new sci-fi epic "Terra Nova" is an environmental fable. And a pretty darned expensive one at that. In fact, even though it has no big-name stars raking in giant paydays, "Terra Nova" is probably the costliest TV show ever, with a two-hour pilot that reportedly ran nearly $20 million. This in a world where an hour-long network drama typically shells out about one-tenth of that sum for each episode. Part of the dough went to the labor-intensive special effects needed to create those magical prehistoric beasties, who alternately menace and beguile a family (led by Irish American actor Jason O'Mara and British actress Shelley Conn)

Pauline Betz Addie 1940s tennis champion in Hall of Fame Pauline Betz Addie, 91, a champion tennis player who won Wimbledon in 1946 without dropping a set during the entire tournament, died Tuesday at an assisted-living facility in Potomac, Md., the International Tennis Hall of Fame said. She had Parkinson's disease. She reached the finals of the U.S. National Championship (now the U.S. Open) every year from 1941 to 1946, winning the title four times (1942, '43, '44 and '46)

The movie "Soul Surfer," which opens Friday, tells the true story of Hawaiian teen surfing star Bethany Hamilton, who lost her arm in a shark attack and overcame huge odds to get back on her surfboard and compete professionally. Hamilton's inspirational tale provided filmmakers a dramatic focal point for their $18-million movie, which was in large part made possible through the visual wizardry of a small Los Angeles effects company that has also managed to beat the odds amid a tough economy.

It's the most memorable sequence in "Poltergeist": A furious supernatural flurry virtually whisks a suburban tract house into the Earth's bowels. It was all because the spirit world was a bit upset (and that's an understatement) at the fact that a housing development sat atop a graveyard of lost souls. Among those making it all happen: special-effects meister Richard Edlund.

Reporting from Edmonton, Canada ? Pity the poor Edmonton Oilers. Not only is the once-proud franchise buried deep in the Western Conference cellar, but it's on pace for its worst full-season record. And as if that wasn't enough, Wednesday they lost a game when a former teammate, Ryan Smyth, was credited with goals on two plays in which he said he never touched the puck. The result was a 3-1 victory by the Kings that kept them in the thick of the conference playoff chase. Which is why no one in the Kings' dressing room seemed to care how the puck got into the net, as long it got there.

You can pump up your vacation photos with special effects using this smart-phone app. Name: 100 Cameras in 1 Available for: iPhone, iPod touch and iPad; Android is in the works. What it does: Turns an ordinary iPhone photo into a creative image worthy of framing. First, take a photo or use an existing one. Then choose from 10 mood types to alter the look of the photo. Next, pick another effect with a poetic title. Finally, keep adjusting your creation by using the slider to further enhance the effects.