Gold Rush is the [3rd] episode of a series produced by the History Channel in 2006 titled Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, the documentary is 45 minutes long and features a relatively standard array of film documentary techniques in depicting its subject, including the so-called Ken Burns effect of panning across still images such as daguerrotypes and paintings. A more recent innovation employing post-production software creates a parallax effect which renders the elements of two-dimensional images such as different figures and objects as though they were the components of a paper theater. The combination of these two techniques confers a sense of depth and dynamism which is visually stimulating and adds a degree of drama to the voice-over narration.

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