Will and I began class talking about special effects in movies and how they are almost entirely produced by computer. We then looked at old movies, starting with the silents, and discussed how their creators relied on manual techniques for special effects. We finished class with a video from Filmmaking IQ on the evolution of special effects from black mattes to the green screen.

Will has been studying film's evolution through the 1930s, and he has also expressed an interest in Alfred Hitchcock. We watched video today on Hitchcock and we were able to make connections from some of his earlier films to the changes in the film industry, such as from silent to talking and from black and white to color, among other things.

Will finished watching a video about the evolution of sound in movies. We talked about how sound was a big part of ensuring that the movie experience remained distinct from television. We also began a discussion of color in movies, beginning with hand-tinting in the earliest movies of the late 1890s and progressing to early technicolor in the 1930s.

Will started class by looking up and writing down the definitions of some new vocabulary words. Then, we discussed the transition of silent movies to movies with sound. We watched a video, stopping it now and again to discuss, on the history of sound in the movies.

The first part of the class, Will watched a couple of videos that surveyed the history of animation and cartoons, from the 1800s to present. We talked about how animation evolved from spinning wheels and mirrors to complex computer-generated full-length movies. We watched what is considered the first animated cartoon, followed by the first animated cartoon that also included live action.

Will and I talked about how The Great Train Robbery movie was made and the techniques the filmmakers used. We then watched the 12-minute movie, noting, where we could, the techniques we had discussed, such as jump cuts and ellipsis.

Today, we started talking about another very old and short movie. The Great Train Robbery is a silent movie that is credited with being one of the first narratives and one of the first westerns. Will looked up terminology associated with the movie, including cross-cutting, jump cut, and double exposure. He wrote definitions for those terms in his own words.

Will began class by looking up and writing down the definitions of typical terminology used in filmmaking. He also watched a TED talk given by Danielle Feinberg, Pixar's director of photography, on how science, coding, and math merge with storytelling and art in animation.

We reviewed several steps involved in taking a short story and converting it to film.

Cal and I reviewed what he already knew about essay writing, and then we used Keat's poem about a Grecian Urn to learn about getting beyond the surface images of photography, film, or any other art form.