Animation, Frame by Frame
Cels, twos, squash and stretch: the working methods behind moving drawings.
In traditional animation, what is a cel?
Video games, animation, comics, film and sport — the entertainment that shaped how most of us spend our free time.
The industries in this collection are younger than almost everything else on QuizKite, and larger than most of it. Video games out-earn film. Animation studios on two continents developed entirely separate visual grammars. Sport codified rules in the nineteenth century that hundreds of millions still follow to the letter. These quizzes cover the games and consoles that built the biggest entertainment business on earth, comics and animation from America, Europe and Japan, film and television, the logic behind classic puzzles, and the rules, records and moments that turned sport into a shared language.
Cels, twos, squash and stretch: the working methods behind moving drawings.
In traditional animation, what is a cel?
Comics and animation across America, Europe and Japan.
Superman first appeared in which comic publication?
Panels, gutters, balloons and splash pages: how comics tell a story on a flat page.
In a comic, what is the gutter?
Ten directors and the films that made their names recognisable.
Which director made Vertigo, Rear Window and North by Northwest?
The jobs, the jargon and the order of work behind the credits that scroll past at the end.
What is the director of photography responsible for?
Pilots, showrunners, syndication — the vocabulary behind what reaches the screen.
A television "pilot" is best described as what?
How television was invented, paid for and scheduled, from spinning discs to the shape of the screen.
Which Scottish engineer publicly demonstrated a working television system in London in 1926?
Landmark films, famous lines and the series people planned their week around.
Who directed Jaws and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial?
Ten questions on the silent era, the arrival of sound and the studios that ran Hollywood.
Which 1941 film was Orson Welles's first feature as a director?
The craft, structure and rules behind a published story.
The "five Ws" of reporting are who, what, when, where and what else?
Ten investigations that ended careers, rewrote laws or forced institutions to open their files.
Which newspaper's reporting on the Watergate break-in led to President Nixon's resignation?
Embargoes, attribution, corrections and the difference between on the record and on background.
If a source speaks "on background", what has usually been agreed?
Ten pieces of classical music matched to the people who wrote them, from Vivaldi to Ravel.
Who wrote the set of four violin concertos known as The Four Seasons?
Ten musical genres and the places that produced them.
Reggae developed in which country?
Ten questions on how the instruments of an orchestra are grouped and how they actually make their sound.
Which section of a symphony orchestra normally contains the most players?
Instruments, composers and the words written on every score.
How many strings does a standard violin have?
Notation, intervals, key signatures and time signatures, explained through ten questions with no jargon left unexplained.
How many semitones make up an octave in standard Western tuning?
Who sits where, what each family does, and why the oboe gets to tune everyone.
Which section contains the violin, viola, cello and double bass?
From tinfoil cylinders to the compact disc, with the genres that grew up alongside each new format.
Who demonstrated the first machine that could both record sound and play it back, in 1877?
Coincidences, false positives and the places where reasoning about probability reliably fails.
The gambler's fallacy is the belief that what?
Hanoi, Konigsberg, magic squares and the structures hiding underneath famous puzzles.
In the Tower of Hanoi, which rule must never be broken?
Classic puzzles and the logic that makes them work.
A standard sudoku grid is what size?
The flame, the motto, the records and the events that came and went.
Which city hosted the first Winter Olympics, in 1924?
The rules, records and moments the world actually watched.
How often are the modern Summer Olympic Games normally held?
Scoring, team sizes and the basic laws of ten different sports.
In basketball, a shot made from beyond the arc is worth how many points?
The machines themselves — who made them, what they changed, and in what order.
Which company released the Nintendo Entertainment System?
The games and machines that built the biggest entertainment industry.
Which company created the character Mario?
Engines, sprites, patches and the words studios actually use.
In game development, an "engine" provides what?