A beautiful day on November 23, 2016 in Astoria Queens. Astoria is your typical neighborhood except for one special place, the Museum Of Moving Image (MOMI). A museum for inspiring filmmakers or just fans of entertainment like movies, TV shows or video games. Everybody was breaking into groups for the tour of museum and were accompany by a tour guide person. The groups went their separate ways and the tour guide started to talk and give information about particular area of entertainment.
The tour for me started on the second floor , where we see a lot of movie props and costumes. The area was very low lighting and dark and the tour guide was giving background information about a certain costume or movie prop. They had masks like from alien movies, Freddy Kruger 's mask, his green and red stripe shirt, his hat and yes his iconic glove with metal claws. I also notice a mask of Chewbacca from Star Wars. They had miniature set pieces like a house from the movie A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and lockers from the movie The Muppets Take Manhattan which was shot and use in these movies. Around the area they had movie scripts on looseleaf paper and TV scripts of a first draft like from the show Seinfeld written by Larry David. Walking around watching all this stuff was like your in different universe or maybe at the Planet Hollywood restaurant. They had movie posters from 60's 70' and 80's which had more creativity and better artwork compare to today's movie posters which are done by computers and its computer graphics or cgi.
The group was taken into the video games section. Video games is one of my favorite hobbies. I remember getting a Nintendo Entertainment System or NES for christmas when i was like 5 years old. The tour guide was explaining the history of video games from its origin starting out as board games to the invention of the Magnavox Odyssey and electronic pong basically two lines and a square bouncing back and forth hitting each line like playing tennis. Pong lead to the booming period or golden age era of arcade machines from the late 70's to the 80's in America. Arcade machines was everywhere in your favorite pizza restaurants , bowling alleys, video stores or your favorite hang out after school where teenagers completed against each other. Even though the arcade machines and craze died down in America do to the rise of home video game consoles its still pretty popular in Japan. Japan has arcade hang outs and popular arcade games like Dance Dance Revolution. I notice they had small living room set up with a white bear rug and television playing one of my favorite cartoon, Spider- man and his Amazing Friends from the 80's.
The next exhibit the tour guide showed us was a demonstration of computers from the 1960's and how computer graphics look like. The graphics look like a light show of 2 - D or two dimensional space of lines in different colors and geometric patterns. Interesting though from 1960's to 1980's we had pretty much the same computer 2-D graphics. In the 1980's 2-D graphics was pretty popular in movies , TV shows , video games, music and all sort of entertainment that made 1980's iconic in pop culture . In 1990's computer graphics went full blown to 3 -D graphics. The exhibit after that was about Stanley Kurbrick 2001: A Space Odyssey with pictures and information about the moon landing scenes. After that the tour guide took us to the optical toys exhibit where we see early forms of film making tools and equipment. Later on as part of the exhibit we were taken to a dark room to see a spinning cinder that gives the illusion of motion by the rate of thirteen frames per second called the Feral Fount. It was developed in 1996 while spinning you see the illusion of 3-D images like rain drops, fishes going up and down and hands coming at you at fast rate of speed. The tour guide took us to an exhibit called the video flip book. Basically a futuristic photo booth you take pictures and then like a flip book in animation you or group of people can do a series of action and movement in almost the same rate of speed in movies or video.
The group then went to the sound editing and effects exhibits. The first sound exhibit was the ADR or automatic dialogue replacement where you could replace dialogue during a few scenes from the movie The Wizard of Oz. Right next to it was the sound and foley effects exhibit. The tour guide was replacing audio sound effects for the movie Jurassic Park. In the kitchen scene a dinosaur roar was replace by a cat's meow or a spoon fell on ground and replace by a whip sound. Another example a scene from The Simpsons where Lisa was taking a test and she is nervous . In the scene the clock ticking was replace by a heart beat sound, Lisa filling in the answer key with her pencil but, the pencil sketching was replace with a donkey screaming and my favorite the lights flickering sounds was replace with burping sounds. The last exhibit that was shown in my group was the special effects. In the movie Blade Runner a miniature sculpture of a building in front with lights was use in the movie to give the illusion it was a 30 foot story building in the city. Another example from the movie Black Swan a wooden box with Natalie Portman puppet head made out of clay and the operator underneath the puppet head can use his/her hand to give the illusion in the movie that Natalie Portman was choking herself to death.
Finally when exiting the museum I came across an exhibit of a Sony color television set with a built in record player and stereo made of wood and was reminded they don't make television sets like those anymore . Its all flat screen high definition TV today. I had a wonderful time at MOMI museum you learn a lot of stuff and the history of movies , TV shows, music, video games etc... that blows your imagination away. After experiencing this museum, I am going back to it for many more years to come. I highly recommend going to MOMI and it gets my stamp of approval .
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