(ABCNEWS.com)
But as the professors say, the worse the movie, the better the teaching tool. Their course includes plenty of movies with exaggerated weather events: "Twister," "Tidal Wave: No Escape" and "Volcano." Movie audiences expect Hollywood to ramp up the action by twisting fact into fiction. But what happens when Hollywood fiction is used as fact?
Al Gore's "traveling global warming show," the award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," includes a long flyover shot of majestic Antarctic ice shelves. But this shot was first seen in the 2004 blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow." Sculpted from Styrofoam and later scanned into a computer, the ice shelf "flyover" looks real.
Karen Goulekas, the special effects supervisor for "The Day After Tomorrow" said the shot is a digital image. She was glad Al Gore used it in the documentary since "It is one hell of a shot." Both movies use the shot to convincingly portray global warming, but it is left to the audience to decide if this created image can both entertain and educate us about our changing planet.
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