Word: kong
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...meeting with a movie producer - during a 1919 teahouse brawl - led to a job as a camera operator. Tsuburaya loved the work, perfecting new techniques, including the deployment of Japan's first camera crane. In 1933 he saw American special-effects pioneer Willis O'Brien's newly released King Kong. "I thought to myself, 'I will someday make a monster movie like that,'" Tsuburaya said years later. First, however, came the horror story of World War II, which he spent laboring on propaganda films. His scale-model re-enactment of the 1941 Pearl Harbor bombing was so convincing that...
...city from rooftop elevations (on one occasion, when he was overheard talking with a colleague about how exactly they planned to destroy the neighborhood, the two were detained by security guards). Instead of filming a puppet of Godzilla in stop-motion, as O'Brien had done for King Kong, Tsuburaya put an actor in a rubber suit and ran the camera at high speed, making Godzilla's movements seem appropriately ponderous when played back. The suit, however, weighed 220 lbs. (100 kg), and the actor inside it lost 20 lbs. (9 kg) in six weeks of shooting. With a budget...
...west wall of Hong Kong's City Hall is the kind of canvas graffiti artists long for. Unsullied and several stories high, its white surface can be seen from some of the city's busiest roads. It has never been "tagged" - to use graffiti parlance - but that doesn't deter local artist MC Yan, who is famous for having left his work on, of all places, the Great Wall...
...being outmoded anytime soon, however. While L.A.S.E.R. Tag technology is getting cheaper, it's not cheap. The complete setup costs $8,000 - that's $7,993 more than a can of spray paint from a typical U.S. hardware chain. Jay FC, one of the founders of the Hong Kong-based graffiti collective ST/ART, maintains that the cost is contrary to the spirit of street art. "It's supposed to just be something that anyone can pick up and do," he says...
...media lecturer Alice Arnold argues that if lighting-based expression has a real source, it's Hong Kong, because the city "has always been at the forefront of light signage." But there's just one snag: light pollution. Compared to Hong Kong's extravagantly lit skyscrapers, MC Yan's tags don't stand out as intensely as they should, no matter how big they are. "In New York we can be the brightest thing in town," says Powderly. "In Hong Kong, we've never felt like we were losing so badly." Perhaps his next project should be a system that...