That's helpful. I think I'll have to rent X-men 2 to see what you mean, Ms. Cat.
What I teach so far is:
Matte Paintings (bg of attached image)
Shufftan Shots
Pepper's Ghost
non-pyro bullet hits
intro to cable control
Modelling and life casting
making a corpse (legally!)
building no-budget props and set pieces
and no-budget miscellany
Nothing whatsoever involving computers and these are more geared to film than to video.
It was funny to see how blown away my students (ages 17-40) were over the Pepper's Ghost effect, when it's essentially a hunk of glass and a light on a dimmer switch.
Duke, your bullet time thing (which I thought was pretty cool) gave me a really good idea. You could totally do that with pixellation. That word was commandeered by computer geeks to mean image loss, but back in the day, it meant animating live objects. F'rinstance, your actor could jump in the air just as you snap a single frame, you move the camera slightly to the side and he does the same thing again keeping his same height off the ground and same body position - you repeat this until you've completed a full circle around him. It'd be done with one camera, all IN-camera. Kickass.
Asylunt, is your pappy a filmmaker?