When we visited the Museum of Moving Image, we were taken on a brief tour of most of the exhibits, and were given an opportunity to participate in a couple of hands-on experiences. We first visited the camera exhibit, which was divided into two parts: film cameras, and TV cameras. While I'd known there were differences in how a movie was filmed vs. how a show was filmed, there was one particular fact that stood out to me that I hadn't given much thought before: film required, well, film, while TV broadcasted electronically. While the cameras used for movies were generally a reasonable size, the cameras used for TV were huge. I imagine that's because of the massive CRTs they needed to operate. The other thing that I found interesting was how technicolor worked; two strips of black and white film (sensitive to red and blue light) were overlayed behind a red and blue color filter, while a third strip was fed into the mechanism separately (behind a green filter). It looked super complicated and intricate, but the color itself that was projected from the film and filters was quite stunning.
Another thing that should've been common sense but didn't actually click until it was explained was the necessity of life masks when creating facial prosthetics for actors to wear. Clearly, makeup art can be incredibly intricate and time-consuming, especially when doing highly detailed work. Why I had envisioned that an actor would be willing to sit in a chair for six hours every day they had to shoot a scene while the MUAs did their thing, I'll never know.
While there, I had played around with one of the zoetropes on display. We'd already learned a bit about zoetropes (and how the persistence of vision creates the illusion of motion) in class, but it was neat to actually see it in person and experience it for myself. Another thing that I enjoyed wasn't a hands-on demo, but rather part of a documentary that showed just how complicated it is/was to effectively maneuver Jim Henson's Muppets, particularly the large ones that required multiple people to move various features and parts of their body. I also watched other people participate in a few things, the coolest of all being ADR; folks trying to get their voices to line up with the mouth movements of the actor was pretty hilarious.
