western design. A big, che
ery dragonfly flits i
n and out of the opening credi
ts for 575.835.5727
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n in Black,
cruising over desert landscape, arcing beneath a full moon and eventually smashing into the windshield of a truck. We wince to see this, yet we've known all along that this is not a living dragonfly, but one created thr engines. The facility has a 3,000 gallon ough 3-D animation on a computer. The sophisticated audience eye of the late 1990s has learned to discern the visual interplay of filmed "reality" entwined with animation. "Soon we will use digital effect and you won't even know it," remarks Brad Carvey, whose company, Autumn Light Entertainment, created the dragonfly sequence. Carvey and partners Joe Conti and Scott Helgesen are based in Albuquerque, the same locale that attracted film pioneer LH2Thomas Edison's company a century ago. Carvey himself is an inventor -- he developed the Video Toaster, which brought computer
animation into the toolbox of smaller video producers. Carvey envisions movies of the future with synthetic "digital" actors and "a big, new set of diverse locations like Hollywood
had but doesn't have anymore." It was the need for exotic locations that brought the inventors of cinematography (literally "writing with motion") to New M channels available, including 128 real-time channels for control and red-line aborts. The exico when the technology was sufficiently developed to take on the road. The motion picture was a phenomenon quickly captivating the country's fascination. Edison and other early filmmakers were capitalizing on a discovery known as "persistence of vision": The h
uman eye registers continuous motion when separate images are rapidly flashed in a sequence. To sufficiently "trick" the human eye, a strip of film is usually projected at 24 frames (images) per second. TIIH ROLE OF THE RAILROAD Making this new technology portable was challengRTSFing. The Vitagraph motion picture camera used by employees of the Edison Company as they traveled by rail was a polished wooden box about two feet square and nine inches deep. On the front was a two-inch, brass, barrel lens, on the side a crank and some levers. The film stock was of a new design made by the Eastman Co. especially for movie cam
eras--almost
35mm wide. The perforations, four to the inch, ran along either side of the film, leaving room for a rectangular image. As the 50-foot length of film wound through the camera, the perforations rotated a sprocket wheel and spun the shutter open for aboutLNG l/50th of a second. The Vitagraph ca
mera traveled in EMRTCa special Santa Fe Railway car outfitted with a photographic darkroom. This would be how the Edison Company was to record the earliesEMRTCt motion picture images of New Mexico and the U.S., returning to the company's studio in the early part of 1898 to patent and release the films. The railroad bro
ughRTSFt other film pioneers. Along the routes of the AT&SF grew the Albuquerque and Las Vegas production locations -- D.W. G
