Special Effects

Special Effects Special Effects can be defined as a science and an art, which studies and applies the tools to fool human audio-visual sensory system, which perceive the events around us. Special effects focuses on making the unreal look alike real, or creating a non-existing event through a systematic approach. Motion film and television industry have undergone a lot of vigorous development stages during the past few decades. Out of them Special Effects and Visual effects are to name a few. But the impact of special effects in both areas is tremendous and outstanding. They played a very crucial role in making these two entertainment mediums more popular and amusing than the others. The very recent term, -Virtual Reality  was first introduced in Motion picture, when they portrayed scenes and characters which are impossible to exist in the real world. For example the Gorilla in the movie King Kong, and the robot transforming to a human being in the Terminator 1st part etc. They were very amusing at the time of these movies. Normal people could not imagine a scene where a Gorilla and a Dinosaur fighting. The first ever movement was Steven Spielberg„ ¢s Jurassic Park, in which hundreds of Dinosaurs were made artificially and animated. There are various arguments and concepts about the special effects in the motion picture and television industry. As a source for my thesis, I have studied various journals, magazines and books. The Journal called Elastic Cinema, raises few questions about the special effects and its application in the cinema and television. The recent developments in cinema show that the industry is not going to slow down in terms of special effects and virtual reality. The amount of special effects we use in the cinema today is increasing everyday and becoming more and more complex in nature. Whether these developments are economically affordable? Are they going to help the industry in a positive way? Can they still contribute to the society in a good way as how the classic films did? These are the questions raised by the movie buffs and the movie lovers. But, as the technology and the science grow bigger, their responsibility towards the society also gets bigger. After all cinema and television is an entertainment medium, the questions which are raised above become less relevant. Cinema„ ¢s primary objective is to entertain its audience. They some times amuse people in different ways. Special effects are considered to be the tool for creating this amusement. The literatures which I have gone through clearly state the different stages and the development phases of Special effects/Special Effects (VFX/SFX). They also discuss how the invention and the rapid development of Special effects changed the face of the cinema and television. The way cinema and television programs were developed and created have been changed by the invention and implementation of SFX. SFX has actually helped them to produce the -real  effect in the cinema. My study about the Special effects not only investigates the origin, development and the future of special effects, but also, its implementation in the industry and the software used in the production and development. Special effects have always helped the film and television industry to achieve what they have always desired for. They were in fact the cutting edge tool for perfection. They have helped the film makers to portray the future reality. We can now see what the future holds for the Special Effects. SFX has been through vigorous development for more than 60 years now. Its history is written in golden scripts. SFX acts as tool to bridge the present and the future reality in film making. SFX has changed the movies„ ¢ vision of making reality even more powerful. SFX has been successfully implemented in Science-Fiction cinemas. Their scope not only involves Sci-Fi movies but every areas of film production. Even the most normal and common movie or a television program we watch today involves a great deal of SFX implementation. Not every scene can be shot in real and SFX comes handy in these sorts of situations. There are two key concepts in SFX. One is Visual effect and the later one is Physical Effect. Visual effects are -any visual manipulation of motion picture frames, whether accomplished in cameras, projectors, optical printers, aerial image printers, front and rear screen systems  (Smith, 1986, p. 270). On the other hand Physical effects can be defined as -mechanical effects or practical effects that take place on the set during filming, such as explosions, wire tricks, bullet hits, etc.  (p. 264). Apart from these there is one more term which is very commonly used in order to indicate the -cinematic-illusion-of-reality , which is -reality effect  These are created by visual effects. The effect of Visual effect on the audients is different. They actually artificially produce events which are impossible in reality. The possibilities are even more. The point is that, they are very successful in convincing the audience about what they are seeing. Special effects involve more expertise and skills than the physical effects like a car explosion or a train derailment, which are actually shot in a protected physical space. On the other hand the visual effects create something that never happened in the actual world, like the auto bots transforming in to automobiles, or the massive war in the movie -Lord of the rings , which portrays more than a million artificial soldiers with out even leaving an animation feel in the audients„ ¢ mind. Visual effects in the early ages, for example, Superman (1978) has used a mixture of both physical and visual effects, they have used pre-filmed backgrounds with live action. However, in today„ ¢s world, visual effects can not only produce non existent illusions but also enhance the real-life-scenes. They help the film makers to reproduce or enhance the movie or a project with more detail. For example the latest version of Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premier Pro come with a lot of goodies in it like motion tracking and 3d layer editing etc.(www.adobe.com) Computer graphics in motion film and television is becoming more and more complex day by day. -Looking at effects films over the past few years, one could say that visual effects are following a kind of Moores Law, doubling in quality and quantity nearly every year . (Phil LoPiccolo (Editor-in-Chief), Computer Graphics World, January 2005, in the editorial note) What we see in the screen will become outdated in the next day when next movie come out. A great deal of enthusiasm and skill is required to do the special effects in the way the director and the author visualize it in their mind. As Phil LoPiccolo states, SFX is following the Moore„ ¢s law. The complexity and techniques keep doubling every day. The movie Lord of the Rings for example, casts nearly 70000 animated soldiers in a battle in the first part. The complexity and the number of effects has quadrupled by the third part in which they portrayed nearly 225000 animated characters and more than 1800 effects featur ed. Computer graphics and 3D imaging has become more common and complex and also helped the movie to become more popular. The invention and the implementation of 3D imaging have revolutionized the Special effects and the movie industry. These days, movies with out special effects are very less and are considered odd. They are fuelling mechanism for commercial cinema. As we all know, not every scene is practically possible to shoot live, even in controlled environments. Special effects come handy in such cases. After the 1980s, digital imaging and special effects have started revolving around three major area, they are digital characters, digital world and digital events. Technical experts in the early years had predicted that the technological advancement in the motion picture will replace the use of photographic techniques and the use of film eventually, but as of now, their enthusiasm seems very immature and inappropriate. History of Special Effects There are various methods to create a special effect. They can be generated through animation, miniatures or matte shots. Cartoons are a very good example of animations, they can either be computer generated or shot by a stop motion camera. The -illusions-of-reality  in the early stages were generated by using paintings, miniatures, and false back grounds. Miniatures are used everywhere. Whether it is a small scale production or a large scale one, they are a very important factor of special effects. In early ages of special effects, film makers used live action combined with a false background or another play-back-scenery, which is done by another rear-projector. This technique is called -rear projection . But as the era of colour film began, these systems showed instability in terms of the light and shadows, they were difficult to achieve in the same amount. So the system called -front projection  was implemented, where the camera is placed in the same place as the projecto r is placed. Then came the technique of fast and slow motion. These effects are achieved by adjusting the frames per second aspect of the film shot. Normally a film is shot in 24 frames per second, anything grater than this will slow down the motion in the screen and vice versa. We can clearly see that these above mentioned techniques are achieved by manual operation, in other words they are camera techniques. Computer aided film development and special effects were invented in a later stage. The combination of both computer and the film technology has given the film makers the advantage of -illusion-of-reality . They could easily manipulate and enhance the movie by using computer technology. A new era of sci-fi movie has begun with the invention of this technology. The technology brought them the ability to create physically impossible events in the silver screen and in the television. Graphics and animation can be easily created with the help of a computer. These computer generated graphics are then combined with live footage with the technique called -Analogue Image Synthesis . Film is once scanned and exported to computer graphics, they are then manipulated by graphics and motion authoring software like After effects, combustion, 3DS Max, Maya etc, also they can include more animated and non animated objects in this computer generated film. Once the editing and compositing is completed, they are then exported to film again. Another process include in the digital manipulation include -Digital Compositing . It is used to render the non-live objects into the film like dragons, fire etc. They uses miniatures and then capture its movements and converts them into actual movements in a computer software. Such innovations have fuelled the computer aided special effects in motion pictures. George MÃÆ'ƒÂ ªlÃÆ'ƒÂ ©es, a Parisian magician is known as the inventor of many techniques in special effects until the date. Many of his techniques are still use such as motion stop camera, substitution shot, double exposure etc. He has also agreed that some of these techniques are accidentally happened. For example, the substitution technique has happened when he was shooting a moving mob. He stopped the camera for some time and restarted it from the last point. When he projected the final film, he was astonished to see that people disappearing from the screen. Later he used this technique in many films. This incident is considered as the first special effect ever. During the early years, films were only few minutes long, especially in between 1890 and 1910. They were 10 to 15 minutes long. They included simple common scenes like people moving or a market place, a town centre, a train station etc. Audients only wanted to see the moving pictures at that time; they were very much satisfied with the idea. Sooner movie makers started telling stories. These stories included real characters and film sets etc. During the First World War, they started making feature length movies (90 minutes long), which is forefather of today„ ¢s motion picture. A movie called -The Great Train Robbery  which came out in 1903 directed by Edwin Porter. The movie used a matte painting effect in order to make the train passing cast through a window. They shot the train passing in the first sequence and they rewind it and recast the window matte. Everything was blacked out except the window. When the final film was projected people could see the train trough the window. This effect is said to be the first ever special effect using matte. As the time passed by special effects become more complex and they started creating more and more realistic as the audients become more sophisticated. Since the 1926, the special effects were called as trick shots. During the 1920s European Film studios have started equipping special departments for special effects. Special effects had become a very important element of any motion picture by that time. As the time passed by and the audients have become more sophisticated, it had become almost impossible for film makers to fool audients with the normal techniques therefore they had to come up with more ideas. Then they invented the technique of the travel matte. In the middle of the 20th century, with the invention of digital techniques and computer technologies, special effects have become more sophisticate and powerful. It has reached a level that even the whole movie could be produced with out any exterior exposure or shooting. This era of movies contains more than thousands of special effects and shots in a single movie. Special effects have a rich and a vast history which is dated to the early 17th century, where magicians have become a part of the society. They used to use many techniques to fool the public; they used to do optical illusions to entertain their audients. Their techniques are said to be the base of special effects. One of the earliest effects is said to be the -summoning of the dead , where the magicians used the semitransparent sheets of historic people to project a ghostly type of motion. The equipments which they used to do this optical illusion have become very famous in the late 1970s. The first motion picture ever was made in 1985, sound have become a part of the movie only after 32 years. Motion picture had to travel through a lot of revolutionary changes until it reached midst of the 20th century, only then special effects have found its way to the movies and television. In 1896, Robert W. Paul has developed a commercial film projector with Thomas Edison„ ¢s Kinetoscope. He has built Europe„ ¢s first film studio with all the necessary equipments like Dolly track and trap doors etc and produced his first motion film with few special effects in 1905. 20th century has seen many of the revolutionary developments in the special effects world. With the computers involved in the editing and the manipulation a new era has begun for the motion pictures and television. They could create virtually anything with the help of computers; let it be a building or people, or even a sequence of actions or events. Special effects have finally found its extreme heights with the help of computers. Digital Technology The computer aided designing, sound editing and authoring, special effects etc have revolutionized the motion film industry in the late 1990s. One of such movies which have implemented the extensive use of computer technology ever is Forrest Gump (1994), which cast an actor whose legs are blown off in a battle. They used the computer technology to erase his legs after the footage was shot. This movie is said to be the first movie which has successfully combined both the blue screen technique and computer graphics. Role of Software in Special Effects Software like Maya, Adobe after effects, Avid and 3DS Max etc have revolutionized the special effects galore in movies and television industry. They helped special effects creators to create, manipulate and animate the 3D models and create virtual scenes to create the virtual reality. Software like After effects and Combustion Studio have helped the creators to modify and blend the shots with the virtually created scenes, while maya and 3DS max stood for creating the backgrounds and miniature models and giving them the 3D aspect. These softwares being the industrial standard for special effects and 3D authoring, there are many more tools emerging day by day. As a successor to all these visual editing and creation tools, sound editing and authoring has also become a part of industry and also a part of the special effects. They could be both combined and used together in a successful way. Now, live-shots and editing could be done side-by-side using adobe after effects and such tools us ing the new timeline feature which they provide. Objective As an MSc student, my objectives are to narrate the history and the development of Special effects and stating its influences, motivations and advancements in different stages of its development. Also, identify the current scenarios and predict the futuristic developments and depict some of the techniques used in today„ ¢s world. The software which I mainly use to depict the techniques in this dissertation are 3DS Max and Adobe after effects. I use 3DS max for creating 3d objects and giving them movements and creating the environment. SPECIAL EFFECTS IN TELEVISION For most of the part, television is not considered as real, all that we could see fit in that tiny little box. It is a small little world what we see and the audients believe it. Televisions simulate the ideas; they do not shoot real events like the motion picture. In fact they can manipulate them to real-like events because the frame is very small. Being so unreal, television also will have to deal with the real world as well. It can be said as the combination of both real and unreal. CREATING SPECIAL EFFECTS The visual effects which we see today are mostly generated from a combination of both modern and traditional methods. Getting the right effect on the right time requires more planning and organizing. Visual effects peoples job starts right before the actual production of the movie or a TV commercial. They have to plan things and shots. They also discuss the possibilities and the credibility of the particular shot and the special effect to be used. The techniques range from reproduction of sequences to compositing multiple frames and creating miniature digital models and motion tracking the machines etc. There are certain problems though, creating special effects with the moving camera is not an easy task, it is unless we use a locked off camera, but once the camera starts moving, the special effect crew will have to track the camera movements too, and then only they could actually recreate or manipulate the specific action or the event. Such problems and obstacles should be discussed prior to the production of the film or the feature.

Mr Nobody Essay

Mr. Nobody is a 2009 science fiction drama film. It was written and directed by Jaco Van Dormael, produced by Philippe Godeau, and starred Jared Leto, Sarah Polley, Diane Kruger, Linh Dan Pham, Rhys Ifans, Natasha Little, Toby Regbo and Juno Temple. The film tells the life story of Nemo Nobody, a 118 year-old man who is the last mortal on Earth after the human race has achieved quasi-immortality. Nemo, memory fading, refers to his three main loves and to his parent’s divorce and subsequent hardships endured at three main moments in his life; him at age nine, fifteen and thirty-four. Nemo tells the story including alternate life paths, often changing course with the flick of a decision at each of those ages. The film uses nonlinear narrative and the many-worlds interpretation to tell the story of Nemo’s life. Mr. Nobody had its world premiere at the 66th Venice International Film Festival where it received the Golden Osella and the Biografilm Lancia Award. Critical response was generally strong and the film was nominated for seven Magritte Awards, winning six, including Best Film and Best Director for Van Dormael. The film was released in Belgium on January 13, 2010. Since its original release, Mr. Nobody has become a cult film, noted for its philosophy and cinematography, personal characters and Pierre Van Dormael’s soundtrack.[1][2] Plot: In the year 2092, Nemo Nobody is a 118-year-old man, the last mortal on Earth. Humanity has conquered mortality through an endless renewal of cells, and the world now watches in fascination as Mr. Nobody edges towards death. Everyone wants to know the life that he has lived. Nemo himself says that he remembers nothing about his past and a psychiatrist, Dr. Feldheim, tries to make him recall memories through hypnosis; other memories are told to a journalist. Nemo spits out contradictory pieces as he is prodded, and no one is sure what happened and what didn’t. He is less than clear, often thinking that he is only 34 years old. He tells of his life at three primary points in his life: at age nine, when his parents get divorced; at age fifteen, when he fell in love; and at age thirty-four, living his adulthood – all three unravelled into many other realities in a nonlinear narrative. At the beginning of the story it’s explained that before birth, children remember everything that will happen in their lives, but at the moment of conception, the Angels of Oblivion make them forget everything. Eventually, the Angels forget about Nemo. Now the boy first has to choose his parents. At age 9, his second choice happens when they divorce, and he has to decide with whom he will live. At a railway station, his mother leaves on a train, while his father stays. In one case he runs to reach the train and his mother manages to pull him in, in another he stays with his father. Epilogue: Before his death, Mr. Nobody tells the journalist that they both don’t exist; they are in the mind of Nemo as a boy, when he is being forced to make an impossible choice. The journalist is then seen looking out of a train window at 9 year-old Nemo as he just misses catching hold of his mother’s hand. The implication is that Nemo made use of that unknown man’s face in one of his imaginary projections into his own distant future. Back at the railway station one final time, Nemo creates a third and totally unexpected choice for himself; he abandons both parents and takes another way out of the dilemma by running away from the tracks in a perpendicular line towards an unknown future. He ends up as the adult Nemo sleeping on a bench by the lighthouse and waiting for Anna’s return. There is, eventually, an ecstatically joyful reunion between them where the two lovingly embrace. At the precise moment Mr. Nobody dies of old age, the expansion of the universe comes to a halt and time reverses itself. The imaginary 118 year-old man then cackles triumphantly as he springs back into awareness with the realization that his younger self has finally found his one true love and life.

Secret Window

Abstract This paper explores the review of the movie – Secret Window. It talks about in detail on how the movie shows the two side of a human behavior – the good and the evil and how things can go if one cannot have a control over its mind. It clearly shows the aftermath of it and sends a message to the viewer’s as well. Based on Stephen king’s novella â€Å"Secret Window, Secret Garden† (1990) , this movie inspires people to take a look at themselves and decide what is good and bad.The movie was released in 2004, and was mentioned as one of the best work of Stephen King by all the film viewer’s and the critics. In this paper, the history, thesis, story, moral and a conclusion is given about the movie. The movie is a drama thriller and it keeps audience at the edge of their seats for the entire 106 minutes. The movie explains about the life of a writer who is in a state of depression after a divorce from his wife and how this incident changes his whole life. The suspense and thrillers in this movie will definitely make this movie very enjoyable.The purpose of this paper is to review the movie and explain how this movie can become a huge factor in the lives of the people. The goal of this paper is to show what it has given to its viewers and how this can affect them. Secret Window Secret Window is a psychological thriller released in 2004 and adapted from a Stephen King novel,† Secret Window, Secret Garden†. It stars Johnny Depp as Mort Rainey, a Successful mystery writer who is suffering from a serious case of writer’s block primarily caused by an unfortunate divorce from his wife Amy.Whom he caught cheating with her new boyfriend Ted Milner. Mort retreats to a lakeside cabin trying to finish a novel despite his lack of inspiration and growing resentment for his wife. Mort’s solitary life in the woods is disturbed when a mysterious man named John Shooter appears on his doorstep accusing him of plagiarism by claiming that Mort has word-for-word had stolen a story he had written years before, and published it in the Ellery Queen Street Magazine. The identical stories were Mort’s â€Å"Secret Window† and Shooter’s â€Å"Sowing Season†.Shooter demands to Mort,† Fix it. Make it Right! † in a southern accent and proposed to re work the ending of the story. The intruder Sends increasingly persuasive signals that he means business, first putting a screwdriver through Mort’s Dog, then burning down the New York home where Amy lives with her new partner before progressing to brutal murder. The movie ends when Mort realizes that Shooter is only a figment of his imagination, reveals this to his wife, and later kills her and her lover with a shovel and buries them in a garden where he later plants a crop of corn.By nature writers are quirky people. While they may pay attention to the mundane details of life in a painful manner, they are of ten unaware of their own behavior. While in the pursuit of a story they may pace around as the rough idea of pages come to them, or sit for hours staring at the screen thinking of the next precise word. They have a tendency to snack constantly rather than break for a meal and to remain in the same dirty clothes rather than break for a shower. I know this behavior because as a writer I’ve done all of it at some point or another.That’s the first part of the psychological thriller â€Å"Secret Window† that made me sits up and takes notice – a writer named Mort Rainey. In the film â€Å"Secret Window†, directed by David Koepp, the theme of the double is used to represent the protagonist’s â€Å"dark side†. This was realized through the portrayal of Shooter as Stalker and the use of two different kinds of hats, Mort’s depression from the divorce, and the ending in Mort’s story â€Å"Secret Window†. Rooney claimed that â€Å"the story is a chronicle of a man becoming steadily disturbed, engaged in a bickering dialogue with himself and increasingly ruled by the demons in his head†.Mort’s emotional trauma from the divorce robbed him off his inspiration and put him in a state of worst writer’s block. His negative feeling’s formed an evil-like alter-ego, in the person of Shooter, which overshadowed his real persona. Shooter was part of himself as displayed by his behaviors in the movie. First, Shooter seemed to appear at bad times, to know everything about Mort’s life and to make his quest for the magazine harder. Shooter accused that Mort copied a story he has written a few years back and demanded that Mort fixed it. Mort promised to get a copy of the magazine where the story was published to know his innocence.However, Shooter was a violent, impatient man, stalking Mort and making increasingly worse things happen as the magazine failed to arrive. Mort eventually lo cated the magazine that would have proven he published â€Å"Secret Window† before Shooter wrote â€Å"Sowing Season† but the story had been cut out. Second, there were two hats used in the film. One was Mort’s Knit hat and the other was Shooter’s tall brimmed hat. The hat represented two different personas. Whenever Mort got up from his couch of depression to do something he put on his going-out knit hat.Shooter’s hat was kept at a distance at first but began to close in on Mort as the story progressed. When he actually placed the hat on his own head, the dark inner workings of his soul were revealed. The use of Shooter also demonstrated the high cost of marital infidelity and the kind of evil that can be unleashed when one person chooses to follow his sinful desires. It presented the aftermath of divorce and the kind of nightmare that it brings. Mort’s fascination with unending naps and liquors, as well as his tendency to walk around in hi s wife’s tattered bathrobe and sport a weird hairdo revealed longing for his wife.Also, Mort’s work â€Å"Secret Window† which Shooter claimed as plagiarized narrated the experience of a man who is betrayed by his wife, and decides to kill her and bury her in her beloved garden. When Mort finally realized that Shooter was only a fabrication of his imagination brought so vividly to life through undetected dissociative identity disorder to commit acts that Mort himself felt he could not commit, his concerned ex-wife tried to help him out but Mort was already overpowered by Shooter. He killed his wife and lover with a shovel and buried them in a garden where he later planted with corn.The movie’s ending was highlighted with Mort’s line â€Å"The Only thing that matters is the ending†¦and this one’s perfect†. The finale showed that the evil has won. The local sheriff told Mort that he knew about the murder and as soon as the bodies w ere found, Mort would pay for the crime. Mort nonchalantly ignored the threat because he knew that the ending of his story would be an impeccable culmination. His decision to plant, grow and consume corn from the garden where his ex-wife and her lover were buried meant that he was actually destroying all the evidence needed to implicate him with the crime.In my opinion, Depp is definitely the highlight of the movie, which is good since he’s the character the movie revolves around. In interacting with his ex-wife (Maria Bello) we can see the pain and the love he still holds for her. Rainey’s spats with her boyfriend Ted (Timothy Hutton) show his anger. Yet none of that holds a candle to his conversations with himself. Rainey spends at least a third of the film alone, but we never feel that he’s isolated. Out-of-nowhere quips and commentary about the situations Rainey finds himself in provide real depth to Rainey as a struggling writer.That is where the real geniu s of Depp’s work on this character comes from. I think the director David Koepp does an excellent job of bringing â€Å"Secret Window† to the screen. On the writing side he has taken a short story by Stephen King and created a strong and suspenseful plot, highlighted by complete and memorable characters as a solid base for his actors to work with. On the directorial side, he understands how a psychological thriller should work and makes his movie follow those rules. The movie builds just as a story of this type should and the audience is never ahead of the movie.But Perhaps, I think that the biggest problem with the movie is Turturro's awful turn as Mississippi hick John Shooter. There is nothing menacing or threatening about this guy, even after he starts taking revenge on Rainey. He is simply annoying. The scenes between Shooter and Rainey are excruciating because the novelist is so obviously unimpressed by the threats that there is no tension built between the two. The rest of the cast, including Charles S. Dutton, as a private investigator, and Timothy Hutton as Amy's lover, are completely wasted and seem to be just going through the motions of this flat thriller.The biggest problem, however, is that because there is no menace or tension built up throughout the picture, the ending, for all its obviousness, seems rather abrupt and wholly unmotivated and without cause. All in all, this movie is a great movie to watch and is sure to have the audiences at the edge of their seats. There’s always something going on in the movie which will have the audience glued at their screens. The Movie was a creation that aspired to arouse psychological enquiry as well as portray the dilemma within human nature which is the battle between good and evil.The plot of the movie was a subtle journey from the lead character’s emotional and psychological stresses caused by the two most common traumas in human experience – infidelity and betrayal. Mort’s hatred towards his wife’s cheating consumed his creativity and left him in a state of severe incapability to even come up with a single line for a story. These negative emotional factors brought into life a dark alter-ego Shooter, who became his companion in a sinister of events that led him to realizing that his stalker was actually a fiction of his mind.Koepp’s movie was helpful in portraying that a person’s self can actually be his greatest enemy. As human’s experience life and it’s varying degrees of complexities and stresses, a person has to deal with letting go off the past and moving on with the present to have a renewed view of the future. It is narration of how a person writes his personal story by making important decisions. Mort had a hard time doing this. The book of his life started with chaos and he ended it by choosing evil, which was basically more chaotic. Hence, this movie is sure to have the audience interested and I personally enjoyed watching this movie.

Applying And Choosing A Place Of Higher Education Essay

As childhood comfort slowly slips away when children transition from elementary, middle, to high school, the idea that seemed so fantastical in toddlers’ daydreams becomes concrete and frightening: the future. High school students are presented with a short four year period to decide what they want to pursue, and the junior year of high school is where most students are hit hardest. As a junior, the daunting task of preparing for one’s future is suddenly presented, and everything one has accomplished in life, in combination with many standardized tests, will be assembled to do one task: applying and choosing a place of higher education. Three important criteria in college searching are admission standards, location, and athletic programs, and two post-high school institutions, Rice University and the University of California- Berkeley, will be compared based on these aspects. As a primary benchmark, the admission standards for a university will need to be evaluated in o rder to decide if a college is suitable for one’s academic rigor. Admission standards for Rice University consist of â€Å"either the SAT and two SAT Subject Tests in fields related to their proposed area of study, or the ACT Plus Writing test† (â€Å"Standardized Testing†) in addition to: a high school transcript, the Common Application with Rice Writing Supplement, $75 dollar application fee, a counselor recommendation, one teacher recommendation, and midyear grades from senior year; the office of admissions willShow MoreRelatedAffirmative Action : An Unfair Advantage For Minorities1198 Words   |  5 Pagesorder to ensure that government contractors hire and treat employees without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin. This executive order was issued so that all would have equal opportunities when qualified especially in regard to higher education and employment. 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The future of higher education is continuing to evolve and I believe that college is affordable to anyone who truly wants to go. The future of traditional college i s in jeopardy. Sometimes going to college and spending the money is not always the best option. To begin with, I believe that college is affordable. I believe that if a person really wants to go to college than that person will achieve that goal by any means. A person who is determined to achieve higher education will exhaust all resourcesRead MoreBenefits Of Getting A College Education1303 Words   |  6 Pageseconomy. The price tag may be the most common concern about getting a college education but another important factor that many students consider when applying for college is how much time they will need to devote to school. Many prospective students think that the time spent in a college math class is a waste when they are majoring in the arts. This results in many students deciding against getting a college education in favor for finding a source of income to support themselves and due to the lackRead MoreGraduation Speech : African American Women991 Words   |  4 PagesWhen choosing what college to attend I knew I had to go to Spelman. I choose to attend Spelman bec ause of its high scholastic standards for its students and also because of the foundation Spelman bestows among young African-American women. Spelman empowers young women to be the change you want to see in the world. Spelman nourishes students ensuring that they have equal opportunity to be successful. Spelman demonstrates how African American women can not only achieve successful but also gain a sisterhoodRead MoreSchool Schools Vs. Public Schools1311 Words   |  6 Pagesdebate among parents in choosing where to send their children to school. People want to give their child the best education. The two major style of schooling is public and private schools. Public schools are schools that are set up and run by the government. Private schools are schools that are privately owned and are not controlled by the government. Both schools have positive and negative aspects. There are many factors to look at when choosing the best school. When choosing a school one must lookRead MoreColl ege Admissions : Financial Planning1438 Words   |  6 Pagesapplication classes, and research of different budgets you will have to plan once you move out of the house are all things that can be huge advantages to a student going off to college. Before you even think about actually paying for your college education, you must come up with money to get you to college, and to keep yourself alive while in college. There are many factors that young adults do not think about when they are transitioning from living with their parents to living on their own and havingRead MoreHoward Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences1558 Words   |  6 Pagesskills: comprehending information, organizing ideas, analyzing and synthesizing data, applying knowledge, choosing among alternatives problemsolving, and evaluating ideas or actions.2 By challenging students and building upon basic knowledge, students will be able to learn at higher levels, and as Gardner reinforces, each individual child possesses a blend of learning styles and intelligences. Unfortunately, in education we talk a big game. Since our system is still based on the industrial model of AndrewRead MoreAdmissions Should Be Academically Based And Colorblind942 Words   |  4 Pages If a private school wants to discriminate based on factors beyond academics then they should have that right and if people wish to attend that type of school they too have that right. But alongside of that should exist impartial options for higher education where applicants are not judged or discriminated for or against based on arbitrary traits that they have no control over, except the only one that should matter at a college or university, academics. Schools will also be required to be extremelyRead MoreQuestions On Online Research Skills1613 Words   |  7 Pages Online Research Skills Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Online Research Skills Introduction Technology has revolutionized the realm of education through increasing the number of sources and methods of research (Cottrell, 2013). The accessibility of online-based research platforms has created an avenue for students to have ultimate desire to learn and eventually become qualified scholars. Research and more especially educational research open the heart and minds of students