The transgression from Video game to Film.

I finished my english work an hour earlier than expected, so i thought i'd contemplate over the whole concept of Video games that have been turned into movies.
Overall i think this post will just be a rambling of things i appreciate and don't appreciate, i'm feeling critical >=]

Firstly im gonna look at "Final Fantasy" franchise and how digitally animated movies have been produced because of the popularity of these games. Just to note that Final Fantasy is the fourth biggest video-gaming franchise in the world, extremely extremely popular and to only be beaten by Mario, Pokemon and The Sims.

The Spirits Within:



Made by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the man who created the whole Final Fantasy gaming franchise; this movie was the first movie to attempt to create a realistic photorendered 3d film. The animation or rendering of the people (whatever the process is i dont know LOL) reminded me of Final fantasy 8 sequences in terms of graphics. And in terms of style and similarity i believe that it somewhat does pay a good homage to it's predacessing games. BUT. and thats a big but.
I thought that the film and the concept of it was completely and utterly: shit.

I felt almost no similarity to the original game in terms of characterisation, battle style or emotional attatchment from the protagonist to another person. ME NO LIKEY. I did like the subtle similarites to Final Fantasy 7 in terms of the planets life force and a evil big baddy threatening to potentially destroy the earth, but it didn't feel authentic. -sad face-

Maybe my expectations of this film were too high, but i was expecting something that would keep me glued to my seat and wanting to sit there for hours waiting for the plot to unfold. (as i have done with most of the games) but nah, it was all futuristic and sci-fi like and them silly "phantoms".
Abit of a single-minded and ignorant review, but i'm just a fan that was let down.


ahhh i just found something on wikipedia that made me happy :)

"The film received mixed reviews and despite aggressive promotion by Sony, it became a huge box office bomb. With a budget of $137 million (including marketing costs) the film made $85 million worldwide, meaning total losses were approximately $94 million (the studio typically receives half the box office gross). The domestic box office loss was, at the time, the largest in film history."

^_^ it failed. and that's what you get when you try and rip off an amazing piece of gaming history and besmirch its name with a tacky typical cliche sci-fi movie.

But i think i'll progress onto the positive side of this post, video game movies which progress on an already made plot which was established in the game. and elaborate and enlighten the audience as to "what could have happened next"


Advent Children:



When i had heard that this film was being released i think it made me the happiest id been in ages. And after looking through alot of internet forums and talking to alot of other gaming geeks at the time, i knew i wasn't alone. Due the the huge popularity of FF7 the release of this film was to be sought out by gaming geeks all over the world ;D

Yeah once i watched the film i was extremely please with everything i saw, the progression in graphics since number seven was outstanding. I thought that the voices for each of the characters were good and the english actors voiced the parts well, everything in it ticked my boxes.
But thinking in retrospect, had i not been a big fan of the game then i probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much, because well; i wouldn't have had a clue what was going on. All the re-introductions of characters and references to the old game just made it one of the most fun movies for me to watch.
I could go on for ages about this particular film but i should stop innit before i sound like even more of a nerd.

But that draws me to my conclusion. I think that Movie producers who try and re-create an already defined and well known game into something completely new will FAIL

Whereas a movie-based prequel or sequel to a game which has an already established background and workable storyline, will do well. (particularly if the original game was met with large success)

The whole starting point of this post was when i was reading some reviews of the new "Max Payne" movie which is a remake of the game. And all the reveiws were mostly bad bad bad, which made me laugh because i actually loved the max payne game LOL.

But will more classic video games be brought to life on the big screen because hollywood is running out of ideas? Only time will tell!

HAHAHAHAHA

100 movie spoilers in 5 minutes.

Made me laugh alot =|

School life in film

I'm feeling kind of bored so i thought id take the time just to write about two movies which somewhat represent life as a teenager in school nowadays :)
Two very different films in many rights, "Get real" being a British independant movie which focuses upon not only the struggle of growing up as a teenager, but as a gay teenager. "Mean Girls" being the funny American comedy which focuses upon the bitchy/slutty side of high school and the different cliques/stereotypes that all of us as teeenagers can identify with to a certain extent.

I think that more-or-less every person i know has seen Mean Girls and most people seem to love it. The way in which the "popular" girls seem to be at the top of the student body heirachy and every other clique is somewhere beneath. Us teenagers (mainly girls for this film) who go to a typical school full of typical kids can see it as abit of a relity show; just looking into another school and somehow identifying ourselves with the characters on screen. It also tackles the evil malicious bitchyness that goes on in more-or-less every school i know of, and having had many of my girl mates cussin down the "skets" to me i know that bitchyness is rife in mainstream school society :D Also i gotta say i love how naive Lindsay Lohans character was at the start; coming from a home schooled environment in Africa into a mainstream school and progressing to become one of the "plastics" just because of her looks. Which i do think could happen in any school because everyone is extremely judgemental in their own ways, especially teenagers >:3

Whereas "Get Real" almost every person ive asked if they've seen it has been like "whaaa? no". Which i didn't find too surprising because i don't think that it's an amazing film in terms of entertainment and comedy, but more of a tender romance story between two boys who are constricted by majority of their school and societies homophobic views. Having looked on IMDB about it i found a comment from a user which said this:

"Could a more realistic demonstration of what it is like to be young exist than this film? Don't think so.

A lot of talk centers around how hard growing up is for teenagers. Yet seldom is it mentioned that however hard it is for straight kids to grow up, it is a million times harder for gay kids, who have no one to turn to for help - not friends, not teachers, not parents, not the church, not books, not counselors, not ANYONE. This film shows what it is like. And it further shows the horrid situation that a young gay athlete finds himself in, torn between being able to do what he enjoys (sports) and being able to be himself. When you're gay, you can't have both, thanks to the homophobia which still rules athletics with an iron fist.

The two main characters of this film struggle to maintain a relationship, because they are in love - yet ultimately the homophobic attitudes of the world force them to part. Tragic, yet it is a tale that plays itself out in every little town on the globe. In spite of this, it is a tale never before told on film. It's about time. This should be required viewing for all high school students."

Which i thought summed up the film entirely and saved me from going on.

I think both films are both good in their own right, and show the bigotry and single-minded judgemental views that are held by alot of kids nowadays. Albeit Get Real was produced nearly ten years ago, i still think that it communicates its message very well because yeah, society has become more accepting towards people who were once discriminated against: Such as the recentintroduction of gay marriage and the new-found presidency of a black man. But in all honesty if what happened in this film was to happen at Welling in the lower school then the kids would most likely be cussed and ridiculed.

But yeah, out of the two i believe that Mean Girls is the one thats the most entertaining. Thats because it's made more to provide humour for everyone of all ages because its just a well scripted jokes film :D abit overplayed and everyones seen it but nontheless its well good, and the whole concept of scopophilia and the male gaze could be brought in because of the four "Sexy" and "Desireable" plastics.

And even in the posters we can see the differences in the messages that each film is trying to put across, the whole "what if you cant avoid....etc" line in the Get Real poster lets us all think about our own place in the world whilst/when we were growing up. Which is different to the mean girls one which places Cady in a dominant position and having the three slutty looking ones in the background being smaller, paired with her evil glare shows us her contempt for them and shows that the film will be what the film title is. A film completely about "Mean Girls"

But there we go: a long typing session for me donw and out the way. I'm gonna start on my case-study thing for film later on and i still need to decide what film to do it on. So yeah :D Have a good weekend everyone

xxx

Documenting our progress.

Here we are, most of the photos taken on Tara's camera documenting our filming progress. At the end of the year we'll be able to look back on all this and remember how our film came together :D






i'm not doing anything today as its tooo cold and i have an ear infection, so i might just do all my homework and blog all day o.0

Work Tara Work

Once our group had decided upon the OCD/compulsive subject for our short film, we got down to planning.

Honestly alot of it was spur of the moment, for over a week we'd been discussing and half planning our previous idea and now that was out of the window we was actually getting down and doing stuff!

We looked at videos on youtube abit more and went on www.answers.yahoo.com and looked to see if anyone had strange compulsions or weird behaviour; and then compared one anothers strange behaviours. But overall, the sketchbook idea took form, and then Requiem For a Dream was brough up (as always is when Callum is present) and the whole notion of repition and split screen was brought to the table.  So yeah, we all agreed that split screen closeups and quick editing and repitition would do well in depicting the mindset of a harsh workaholic determined to do well in her sketchbook >=]

Subsequently, the following close-up shots and soon to be edited into split screen in final cut pro are:

• Masking tape being pulled out from the roll, making the weird tapey sticky noise that tape makes
  
• The tip of pencil lead snapping against Tara's work
• Pencil bodies being snapped in frustration because of the snapping lead, showing Tara's anger and crazy obsession to not let anything stand in the way of getting her work done.
• Masking tape being ripped by Tara's teeth. hehe
• Tara drinking sprite!

But yeah back to planning. We briefly sketeched out a rough storyboard and decided on different shot types we could use and booked the broadcast camera out for after school on wednesday, and Tara arranged for us to film in Mr Ward's room! THE FILMING DATE WAS SET!

We met afterskool in the media department and unleashed the broadcast camera from Gerry's office aswell as it's big tripod and made our way over to art~ but before leaving i grabbed a pencil sharpener and some coloured pins from Ms Moore's room. I dunno why LOL i just thought it could add to the mise-en-scene in which we would be filming our crazy work obsessed Tara. 
Once there we arranged the tables and set up our mise-en-scene. Placed alot of cut up magazines and paper about the big table, aswell as a big guillotine on the end of it. Tara's camera was slightly off centre on the table, pencil sharpenings were thrown around abit to emphasize her messiness, and a metal ruler was chucked in there to look nice. Tara's sketchbook was placed infront of her and two of her big note pads were also on the table, and a few pens, pencils, pins, pencil sharpener, Tara's phone and drink and other various objects were placed around the setting. Now we were ready to film D= but but but we didn't have a title for it, and i think it was at this point or earlier on that "Work Tara Work" was suggested as a joke but we thought it'd be funny, and we could add it in with the repition and such. So our short film was to be christened: WORK TARA WORK.

But yeah lol. We got down t it and filmed, placing the title of our film in blue upon a piece of masking tape on the front of Tara's sketchbooks, and we got down to filming! Lots of shots of the same thing were donw but from various angles blah blah blah. A few Point Of View shots whilst tara worked frantically, a pan of her and her surroundings on the desk from different directions and angles, a low angle shot of tara using the guillotine whilst a post-it note saying "DO NOT STOP" was in the shot, and various others but i can't really remember all the way back to wednesday? Oh yeah and we did some shot with tara's phone going off and callum found out some freaky shit on the broadcast camera and could change the focus/depth of field and we fiddled around with that and the filters a bit ^__^

That was it! our first bit of filming done as it got to half six and Mr Ward needed to lock up so we cleared up our mess and went home. Then the next day we uploaded it onto the macs and attempted to do some editing on final cut pro, but was confusing; so Callum uploaded it onto I-Movie (i think?) and nothing more was to be done that day! because thursdays are everyones full day and they SUCK, and the alturnertive prize was on that day so we just wanted to relax in school until it was time for that.

So on friday (today) me, Tara and George decided to go back and get some more shots and stuff, Callum needed to go home so we allowed him to be exempt from the filming as George hadn't had a go at filming yet and callum just lurvesss to edit so we could just leave him to that. We tried to re-create the messiness on the table as much as we could but we were mainly going back to film the close-up shots that were mentioned way back up there ^^^^^^^

We filmed those, which was funny and tara laughed whilst we filmed her drinking sprite, and Jamie was in the room doing photography work so he put stuff on youtube to amuse us, fun fun fun. Filming was fun today! We Messed around yet still got work done so WE R HAPPEH. We took some shots of us filming with Tara's camera and if she uploads them onto her blog then i shall steal them and place them here ;D

Overall i think we have the majority of our footage filmed and uploaded, all the different clips have been named and we just need to get underway with the editing process and stuff. But anyway, i'm actually well getting into this blogging thing and it's more fun that i thought it would be so im happy =D.  I've come to the conclusion that im pretty indecisive about my layouts/template so at the moment theres a JUNO one? if there isn't one there and you're reading this then it just proves the point that i just mentioned.  As i've done with my past two blogs im gonna leave you with some youtube video's, and i have to say if you've read all of this then thanks :D this is way better to document our process of making our short film than sketchbooks and stuff we did in media last year.

RUN LOLA RUN:
Seeing as the title of our film is somewhat a rip-off of "Run Lola Run" i thought it fair to post a video or the trailer from it.




REQUIEM FOR A DREAM:
Our fast editing that we hope to have and also the split-screen that we wanna add in is inspired by the editing in Requiem For a Dream. Something kind of like this:




So there we are, all filmed and ready to go! Anything else that goes into what we do i'll probably post it on here. This week's been so so long and i'm lookin forward to going to bed :)
ciao xx

Our Short Film (Planning)

Firstly i'll just try and sum up what has happened to lead our group to where we are at this present moment in time.

Originally i think everyone kind of decided to not trust eachother and let one anothers preconcieved judgements on who would and wouldnt pull their weight get the better of them. But after a few lessons and discussions and an input from Mr Fairnie about how he would love us all to do a film we all finally decided upon creating our own short film!

So yeah, in our group its:
Me (Jake Saunders)
Tara Costello
Calum Jackson
and George Wolfwood.

Firstly we brainstormed ideas that we randomly came up with whilst reading through a newspaper, but no mutual agreement was ever made upon a secure idea =
So next lesson we all went into the mac room and watched some odd short films, one of which was about a crazy man who abducted a prostitue and put his dead wifes aborted foetus inside the prostitute? was really freaky for something that was less than ten minutes long...

but then (being the silly bookworm i am >:3) i brought the notion of a crazy lady in an attic into discussion and the group all agreed that this could possibly work if we could make it obscure and somewhat delve into the lifestyle/mindset of a crazy woman in an attic.

Then after some of us watched the film "Eraserhead" we tried to discuss upon maybe changing our initial idea into one of a crazy man in an attic, and perhaps obtaining a pigs brain from a butchers and using callums smoke machine to create a crazy non-linear short film about some next crazy guy. the idea was well recieved mutually by the group but we were still deliberating as to where we would film and who would act. Tara and Georges houses/attics were to be our filming locations, but we didnt know who we could have act out the part and if we could make it effective.

We discussed this whole idea for a while and eventually in Ms Moore's lesson after discussing it with her we decided that we had put too much weight on our shoulders (metaphorically speaking) and setting ourselves a hard and dubious task when it needent be, SO! new concept. we discussed the whole concept of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and how we could create a short film about one persons specific compulsion or addiction to a particular object/way of acting.

The jokily someone suggested we use Tara and her sketchbook for our idea! (as she's always doing work in it and lurvessss her booky wook). But then we decided that it would be pretty easy! so yeh WOOOO. Our final idea was on the table and we all agreed that we could make it work and film using the broadcast camera and do our best to make it fast paced and lively. Also try to communicate the somewhat mundane and dubious task of schoolwork is an addiction and compulsion for some people. I'll continue this in my next post because i just wanna put some extra bits here at the bottom:


For our original idea (mad woman in the attic) i would've loved to have a song or potential music/background noise added in over the top like this song ;D i think the opening and screamy bit and gradual build up and then beating down piano would've worked well in depicting someones madness. (ignore the shabby video it sucks just listen to the song)




Also here is the monster baby death scene from Eraserhead. (freaky black and white film that Callum gets a boner over) we originally thought of perhaps adapting the mad woman in the attic storyline to fit this crazy obscure style with black and white, but we didnt lol. but watch anyway!



but hey, we didn't go ahead with that idea so forget about that.

OCD IDEA:

we youtubed about in lesson time and watched a sequence on OCD from Grey's Anatomy (i loveeeee greys anatomy >.<) and from it we saw that some cases of OCD are uncontrollable and it's almost as if an innate drive is pushing the man in it to have these compulsions and to count to a certain number. in conclusion OCD = WEIRD: try and interpret it in more of a "workaholic" sense. (this is the video i just spoke about)

hahahahahahahaha makes me laugh if im honest, 33 siren woops. cleancleanclean. poor guy :(

I'm gonna continue our following ideas of our short film and details of our first day of filming/uploading and editingin the next post i do!

and well done to Joe Smith for winning the Alturnative prize tonight!
:D

xoxoxo

i can haz blog?

Hello ^.^ well this is my first post on my A/S film studies blog. We've been told to create this to sum-up our case study of a hollywood film but i'll probably get down to that in a week or two. Firstly i'll just start off with film clips i like, suggestions of movies which i love and it may sound self-righteous to a certain degree but hey, its just a blog. also as this is online and has a kind of social networking feel to it (in my opinion anyway) I'll probably be pretty informal in the way i speak in my posts, but we'll see as the year progresses aye, you never know what could happen. I've only had this for an hour and i've got the hang of it, wicked wicked wicked.

Sympathy For Lady Vengeance



Well to start off i'm gonna waffle on about one of my favourite films! I'll post three sequences of it here when i find them on youtube for you to watch and marvel at it's brilliance. It's a south Korean film directed by Park Chan-wook, and it's the third in a trilogy of films that he made about revenge. It's predecessors being "Sympathy For Mr Vengeance" and "Oldboy". I haven't seen either of those yet but i'll get round to it one day. The film opens with the seemingly kind hearted Ms Geum Ja being released after a long prison sentence for the kidnapping and murder of a six year old boy. In the subsequent story we learn of how she came to be imprisoned for a crime which she did not commit, and how she made a name for herself during her lengthy prison stay. Overall i think that this film is absolutely beautiful because of it's style. Brilliant re-mastered vivaldi tracks played over scenes which are shot and edited in a way that just makes me go WOW =| having watched this film over six times and still not getting bored somewhat speaks for itself as i am not easy to please. I do find it weird though as alot of this movie has nice quick editing in it, yet in some parts such as when Geum-ja searches through Me Baeks house, and when she's interviewed during herflashback. the camera just sits there far away from it watching with no interaction, but that was probably to break up the fast pace in certain bits, or maybe im just abit over-enthusiatic.



I think that an element of confusion this movie is the similarity in the asian actresses in the first half of the film; having watched it the first time i was confused as to who was who i have to admit =[ which makes me sound ignorant but im really really not. Also the fact that it's subtitled made it harder to identify who was who, but maybe that was just me.

but i'm going to leave you with three videos :D which i hope you enjoy, firstly the opening title sequence:






beautiful isnt it ;D


and here is just a scene which i hope will make you LOL
it's abit ermm graphic so viewer discretion is advised, but imagine of you was in that poor girls position!





and thirdly, my favourite scene of the movie in which Geum-Ja attempts to reconcile with her daughter, i did an essay on this sequence so i'll re-edit this soon and add abit of an analysis on here, enjoy:





tomorrow or later on tonight  im gonna write some stuff about our short film and what we've done so far/ our influences and i'll write about a  film called "get real"
LATERZ

thats my first post done! woooo