And on Fifth Avenue Harpo Marx has just lighted the fuse that projects from the behinds of a flock of expensive giraffes stuffed with dynamite. They run in all directions, sowing panic and obliging everyone to seek refuge pell-mell within the shops. All the fire-alarms of the city have just been turned on, but it is already too late. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! I salute you, explosive giraffes of New York, and all you fore-runners of the irrational – Mack Sennett, Harry Langdon, and you too, unforgettable Buster Keaton, tragic and delirious like my rotten and mystic donkeys, desert roses of Spain!

Where film cameras are involved – with the rider that there is strictly no difference between film and still cameras in the virtual world – then additional considerations are taken into account; for example, if a real camera movement is made using a physical ‘rig’ – as in a crane shot, or whatever – there will be an unavoidable degree of camera shake at the beginning and end of the movement. Software has been written to simulate that shake, which moreover allows the user to specify which particular film camera, and which type of rig, is being used. The prevailing standard of realism in computer modeling is not the world as such; it is rather the world as it appears to the camera. I believe that this is an ideological artifact of a period of historical transition, and will pass. In time we will forget how physical cameras showed the world, and we will adapt our supposedly ‘natural’ vision to the new standards.