I Didn’t Know The Ice Shelves In Antartica Were Actually Styrofoam; Wonder If Al Gore Knew?
You learn something new every day!
In his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore made the decision to not use actual footage of collapsing ice shelves in Antartica, but instead to use special-effects shots created for the movie The Day After Tomorrow:
Al Gore’s “traveling global warming show,” the award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” includes a long flyover shot of majestic Antarctic ice shelves. But this shot was first seen in the 2004 blockbuster “The Day After Tomorrow.” Sculpted from Styrofoam and later scanned into a computer, the ice shelf “flyover” looks real.
Karen Goulekas, the special effects supervisor for “The Day After Tomorrow” said the shot is a digital image. She was glad Al Gore used it in the documentary since “It is one hell of a shot.” Both movies use the shot to convincingly portray global warming, but it is left to the audience to decide if this created image can both entertain and educate us about our changing planet.
Wait, what was that again? Styrofoam?
Well, it’s fake but accurate, you might say. “Just because Big Al manipulated my emotions with spectacular Hollywood fakery doesn’t mean we’re not ALL GONNA DIE FROM GLOBAL WARMING!!!†If you really believe that, there’s no point in arguing with you. But you’ll have to forgive me for laughing at the look on your face when you find out what the effects guys used to make all those “glaciersâ€:
Sculpted from Styrofoam and later scanned into a computer, the ice shelf “flyover†looks real.
That’s right, Styrofoam! You know, the evil, evil stuff that’s being banned all over the place because it’s destroying the environment. Wonder what the studio did with it when they were done with their dumb movie? Five hundred years from now, will the last few survivors of the human race stumble upon those beautifully sculpted glaciers, completely intact, in some forgotten landfill?
Uhm…mmmmkay. I ain’t sayin’, I’m just sayin’.
hattip Deceiver
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Now that pisses me off. I remember discussing this movie with a friend the conversation went something like this:
Friend: You haven’t seen An Inconvenient Truth yet!?
Me: No, I don’t want to indulge myself in that kind of sensationalism.
Friend: What?! There is actually footage of glaciers melting, big huge chunks just falling off into the Ocean!
True story. *sigh* that makes me sad.
Comment by JMBoucher — April 25, 2008 @ 11:59 am