It’s sunrise at sunset

Actor Chiranjeevi on Tuesday announced the name of his political party, Praja Rajyam, amidst thunderous cheers from lakhs of hysteric fans and vowed to change the politics of Andhra Pradesh.

Giving full play to histrionics, Chiranjeevi, the son of a police constable, recounted the difficulties he had faced as a child in an emotion-choked voice and charged up the crowd in the temple town with a few interactions before announcing the name of his party with a dramatic countdown.

In fact, Chiranjeevi waited till sundown to announce his party’s name and stretched his speech till then, so that the display on the giant screen behind him and 18 screens located at the ground would be eye catching.

As the name of the party was splashed on the huge screens to the accompaniment of music, the 53-year old actor got a handicapped person to unfurl a green and white flag with a red sun in the middle.

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Indiana Jones' fans tough crowd for effects crew

Indiana Jones' return to the big screen after 19 years underscores how much visual effects have evolved.

When the first three Indy films were made in the 1980s, the visual effects were done optically, i.e. photographically or in post-production.

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," which topped the North American box office this past weekend, marks the first time sophisticated digital techniques were used in bringing the story of the archaeologist-adventurer to life.

"There were many challenges," said visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman, a veteran of "Indiana Jones" creator George Lucas' effects house Industrial Light + Magic (ILM).

"One was working on a movie that had so many fans and coming up with work that matched the other movies. That was something (director) Steven Spielberg wanted from the beginning."

Helman, a native of Argentina, said he and his team used a wide variety of techniques to make the scenes believable.

"The idea was to be on location as much as possible and then augment (with visual effects) to finish telling the story. ... We always started with principal photography, then we had miniatures, computer-generated elements, practical elements."

The chase in the jungle is an example of how the digital tools were used.

"They shot as much in the jungle as they could," associate visual effects supervisor Marshall Krasser said, adding that the actors were filmed against a blue screen separately.

To complete the shots, ILM created what was essentially a drag-and-drop jungle.

"We had a library of plants and stuff (computer-generated and photographed elements) to drag and drop into position ... We ... dragged vehicles into environments."

The system helped the vehicles interact with the environment, for example, by digging up debris.

"We even added bugs flying around in some of the shots to sell the sense of realism," Krasser added.

The climactic sequence inside the heart of a temple was one of the most challenging.

The movement of the chamber in the scene occurs through a combination of computer-generated imargery and miniatures. For it and other scenes in the film, ILM developed a software application called Fracture that allows the user to break surface objects in a realistic manner.

Lighting was added to enhance the realism of the shots.

"We didn't want the effects to be visible, to overshadow the events that were occurring on the screen," Krasser said. "We've trained an audience of critics."

"American Idol" concludes on ratings upswing

The upset "American Idol" victory by rock singer David Cook drew nearly 32 million U.S. television viewers on Wednesday night, up 3 percent from last year's finale, Nielsen Media Research reported on Thursday.

The two-hour broadcast on News Corp's Fox network marked the second-most-watched episode of the smash hit talent contest this season, behind only the 33 million-plus viewers who tuned in for the debut of the show's seventh installment in January.

The Nielsens rally came after weeks of record low ratings. And "American Idol" finished its latest run down year-to-year for the season as a whole in both overall average audience size and in ratings for viewers aged 18 to 49, the group most prized by advertisers.

It was the second straight year of season-to-season declines though the finale's ratings could be adjusted when the final Nielsen data comes in.

"Idol," which generally airs twice weekly, averaged about 28.1 million viewers per broadcast for the current season, compared with 30.8 million at the height of show's popularity in 2006. But it remains by the far the most watched show on U.S. television.

The unexpected triumph of Cook, 25, who was tending bar and playing in a band before he auditioned for the singing competition, marked one of the more surprising outcomes of the series.

His rival, 17-year-old David Archuleta, went from being the contestant widely dubbed "The Chosen One" to runner-up after a record 97.5 million votes were cast by fans of the show on Tuesday night, final performance episode.

The show is produced by 19 Entertainment, a unit of CKX Inc, and by FremantleMedia, a division of British-based RTL Group., which is controlled by media giant Bertelsmann AG.