The Technology Trail

- Introduction
- The Role of the Railroad
- The Three Billies
   Six Decades of Change
INTRODUCTION

A big, cheery dragonfly flits in and out of the opening credits for the film Men 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 through 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 Thomas 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 Mexico 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 human 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.