Stunt

Eugenia Ledoux wakes one morning to a note on the kitchen table: "Gone to save the world. Sorry. Yours, Sheb Woolly Ledoux. Asshole." Eugenia is nine years old, a synaesthesiac and a tightrope walker. She adores her father and his lunatic charms; she loves that he takes her fishing in the middle of the night and calls her Stunt. Sheb has always promised he'll one day take her to the moonscape of northern Ontario, where astronauts train; instead he writes a note, blows up a shoulder-pad factory, and leaves. His heartbroken daughter is left behind with her mother, the sharp-edged former ingenue Mink, and her sister, the death-obsessed and hauntingly beautiful Immaculata. After a fake funeral for Sheb, Mink vanishes too. Eugenia and Immaculata, left alone, double in age overnight. Immaculata becomes a swan-like giantess, and soon finds her calling caring for Leopold, a diseased and irresistible malcontent down the street. Eugenia, however, stays the same: dark and diminutive, and bereft. She finds herself a bicycle and sets off to track down her father, encountering an astronaut and a waitress named Cupid along the way. Stunt is the first novel by one of Canada's most acclaimed playwrights. Like synaesthetic Eugenia, your senses will be addled as Dey's words take on colours, tastes, and smells, somehow coming to mean more than you thought they did; they depict, with compassionate hilarity and luminous heartbreak, the love between a girl and her father.

Describes the history, equipment, and contemporary practice of bicycle stunt riding.

This biographical dictionary shines the spotlight on several hundred unheralded stunt performers who created some of the cinema's greatest action scenes without credit or recognition. The time period covered encompasses the silent comedy days of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, the early westerns of Tom Mix and John Wayne, the swashbucklers of Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, and Burt Lancaster, the costume epics of Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas, and the action films of Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and Charles Bronson. Without stuntmen and women working behind the scenes the films of these action superstars would not have been as successful. Now fantastic athletes and leading stunt creators such as Yakima Canutt, Richard Talmadge, Harvey Parry, Allen Pomeroy, Dave Sharpe, Jock Mahoney, Chuck Roberson, Polly Burson, Bob Morgan, Loren Janes, Dean Smith, Hal Needham, Martha Crawford, Ronnie Rondell, Terry Leonard, and Bob Minor are given their proper due. Each entry covers the performer's athletic background, military service, actors doubled, noteworthy stunts, and a rundown of his or her best known screen credits.

Describes how stunt performers, camera trickery, and computer graphics are used to create illusions of reality in movies.

Throughout film history, one of the fundamental fantasies portrayed on screen has been the kind of physical action few of us could ever experience in real life. The image of an 'every man' engaged in hand-to-hand, mortal combat, defending his family or even the world population against an overwhelming and malevolent force, speaks to our most primal instincts and thus became a mainstay of movie entertainment. In order to translate these deep-seated fantasies to the screen, filmmakers have been developing special skills and crafts for over 100 years. It is these skills that make 'movie magic' and have allowed audiences to take part in the primal hopes and fears we all possess. Movie Stunts & Special Effects: A Comprehensive Guide to Planning and Execution is designed to inform filmmakers on how to plan for and utilize these crafts by engaging and empowering filmmakers to better communicate with stunts and effects practitioners, and thereby enabling them to more fully realize their vision. Director/Producer Andrew Lane surveys fights, use of weapons, cars and vehicles, falls, the use of pyrotechnics, atmospheric effects, bullet hits, wounds and blood, among many other categories. Factors such as cost, time to implement, safety accommodations, and assessing the competence of those employed to plan and execute stunts and special effects are numerous and very specific. Each topic in Movie Stunts & Special Effects is examined using narrative explanations and extensive interviews with world-renowned experts. Various stunts and special effects are explored in the context of how they are best captured by a camera and then editorially constituted in the final product.

Stunts of Late Nineteenth- Century New York: Aestheticised Precarity, Endangered Liveness examines the emergence of stunts in the media, politics, sport and art of New York at the turn of the twentieth century. This book investigates stunts in sport, media and politics, demonstrating how these risky performances tapped into anxieties and fantasies concerning work, freedom, gendered/ raced/ classed bodies and the commodifi cation of human life. Its case studies examine bridge jumping, extreme walking contests, stunt journalists such as Nellie Bly, and cycling feats including Annie Londonderry’s round- the- world venture. Supported by extensive archival research and Performance Studies theorisations of precarity, liveness and surrogation, Smith theorises an under- examined form which is still prevalent in art, politics and commerce, to show what stunts reveal about value, risk and human life. Suitable for scholars and practitioners across a range of subjects, from Performance Studies to gender studies, to media studies, Stunts of Late Nineteenth- Century New York explores how stunts turned everyday precarity into a spectacle.

Sennett's user-friendly book outlines 101 motivational stunts, accompanied by successful case studies, that educators can employ to creatively inspire and motivate students to higher academic achievement.

Tom Cruise performed his own stunts for the film Mission Impossible: The Ghost Protocol, which included dangling 1,700 feet from the world’s tallest building! Students will explore the extreme amount of planning, equipment, training, and expertise that goes into the stunts performed in films as they dive into this action-packed title.