This week’s lecture topic was “Visualisation Conceptualisation” and in order to explore this topic more, we watched “Speedracer” which was a movie that came out earlier this year in cinemas. Our task for this week’s blog was to do some research about the movie, the cartoon it is based on and the producers of the movie, the pervious work they’ve done and see if there are any similarities with other works they have made.
“Speedracer” is another example of a cartoon being transformed to a movie concept, in this case with base in Japanese Manga. Manga is the Japanese word for cartoon and is considered to many as an own form of art. It has a characteristic look of how the characters, specially, look like. The movie is based on a “Manga” cartoon strip, called “Mach Go Go Go”, and later “Speedracer”. It was created in 1966, and in 1967 52 episodes was dubbed into English and sent on American broadcast for 20 years. The cartoon is about young Speed Racer who drives his race car, Mach in races around the world. He often gets help from his family who all have a strong interest for car-racing, and also from his girlfriend, Trixie, and the mysterious Racer X.
The feel and look of the movie is clearly inspired by the cartoon as most of the environment is animated in strong candy-coloured and fantasy looking settings that clearly lets us know it is not real. The opening scene also remind us of the cartoon foundations of the story, as Speed Racer’s little brother sits at school drawing cartoons of race cars.
In the movie, all the classic characters as earlier mentioned, are involved. Speed Racer grows up in a family crazy about motors. The tragedy hits them when Speed’s older brother, Rex, dies in a mysterious accident. 8 years later it is Speeds turn to fight for victory in the same race, but he also discovers that the biggest sponsors use dirty methods to win the race.
The story has all the five elements of a plotted story.
1. A believable lead character: Speed Racer
2. His urgent and difficult problem: Royalton Industries who threats him that he will do everything to make sure he doesn’t win the race, and other sponsors who also use dirty tricks to win the race.
3. His attempt to resolve the problem, which fails and make his situation more desperate: Together with Racer X, his girlfriend and Japanese Taejo Togokhan, he competes in Casa Cristo/the Crucible to fight against Royalton and his fellow cheating sponsors, against his father’s wishes.
4. The crisis, his last chance to win, anticlimax: the Grand Prix
5. The successful resolution: wins and becomes friends with his father again.
The story isn’t very original, but the directors make it spectacular by using an extreme use of special effects, animation and creative and spectacular clipping. The race tracks looks more like some kind of rollercoaster, with loops and tracks going up in the loose air, and the cars certainly have a lot of other abilities than normal Mazdas and Hondas, like the ability to jump over other cars, for example. The strong chewing gum looking scenes and objects, together with a sometimes very intense, fast and confusing clipping, makes the movie a bit hard to watch on the eyes sometimes. But it also looks fantastic, and makes it far more interesting by creating these spectacular effects, then it probably would have been without them.
The directors of the movie are the Wachowski-brothers who became very famous for making the action-genre more spectacular and exciting with the animation- and effect-use in the Matrix- trilogy. They’ve also directed “V for Vendetta” a movie that also was based on a cartoon. This movie is also placed in a futuristic society, but has a far less children friendly theme and story, as “Speed Racer”, since it based on dystopic future-visions, where the society is ruled by a totalitary government.
When briefly comparing these three movie-works by the Wachowski-brothers (I put all the movies of the Matrix-trilogy under the same creation-concept), there are a couple of similarities that can be traced in all of them. Especially the fact that all are set in futuristic, artificial environment, and also that they all contain a high level of data generated technique, used especially to create the environment the movie takes place in.
In the conceptualisation face of movie production it is important for the producers to create a special mark of what they are making, something that is unique for the work being made. I think one of the reasons why we watched “Speedracer” was that we could see how movie-makers can find inspiration to make movies from different sources, like books, real life stories, and other movies for example, and like in this movie, cartoons. We watched a clip from the original cartoon and saw how much the producers have transformed it in the process of making it to a movie. By studying some of the previous work of the Wachowski-brothers, we can also see that there are certain characteristics in these works that makes it possible to see that they are made by the same production team.
Sources: www.imdb.com,www.wikipedia.org ,www.speedracer.com ,www.nostalgiacentral.com/tv/kids/speedracer.htm
Monday, August 18, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Comparison of two low-budget movies: “Brick” and “Enter Zombie King”
In our first weeks of this course, Digital Video Foundations, we’ve watched two low budget movies, with purpose to compare the two and see examples of how one can make movies without a big budget, in different ways. In our first tutorial we watched “Enter Zombie King”, which is an action-movie, where most of the cast are wearing ninja-fighter-masks and the scene is set within a (ninja?) fighter environment, on some kind of fighter-arena; where the “boss” or manager’s fighters are zombies.
“Brick” is a detective-movie, inspired by the classic film noir-genre. We follow Brendan in the time before and after his love, Emily has died under strange circumstances, where he desperately seeks to find out what has happened to her. In order to do this, he has to contact people from the mysterious high school, underground environment that Emily was involved with in the time before she first disappeared and later was found dead. We don’t know what kind of environment this is, but it is clear that Brendan was also a part of it previously, and as the plot is played, the movie slowly reveals what has happened.
“Brick” is the first-time movie of the director, and compared to “Enter Zombie King” (ZK) there is a clear difference and slightly higher level of production quality in Brick, than ZK, and I would also say that it is easy to see that there has been far more time used on details of the production as in script, shooting-style, lighting techniques and so on.
When this is said, it should also be said that the film-budget for the two are slight different, as the costs of ZK was approximately 250 000 dollars, whereas Brick’s was about 400 000. This can be an important factor that explains why the quality of picture, sound, lighting and probably acting was so much better in Brick than in ZK. But this still doesn’t justify the fact that I think the story-concept of Brick works better as a film-plot than ZK.
There are positive things with ZK as well. First of all it is an important fact that I found it quite entertaining, although it was a very bad movie. To me, it reminded me a lot about some of the same storyline you can see boys make up when they are younger, role-playing with each other, as zombies and ninjas always have seemed to fascinate young them, rather than girls, who would play something slight nicer and innocent.
In Brick there is no swearing, and this probably makes it accessible for a larger audience, like younger people. ZK is x-rated, and this is probably because of the time and attention the movie uses on showing off naked women in it. This is also one of the facts that make it easy to see that it must be made of guys, living out their dream of making an action-movie with their favourite elements: zombies, ninjas, masks and naked girls. The movie also takes the focus on breasts and nudity to a new level in one of the scenes where they are talking to a guy on a boat, by first placing a woman in the background, washing the boat, naked. Then, they go a little further by “coincidently” shooting from the angle of this girl’s breast!
When watching these movies we where also to think of what makes the difference between blockbuster and other movies, and I think the clearest factors are that a blockbuster have large budget, famous actors and good production quality. Having said this, I won’t say that a blockbuster is necessarily a good movie, because I think low-budget movies are interesting, because they have to appeal and find ways to amuse and entertain by relying and other factors, like creating an original story and especially on making up a good dialogue to weigh up for the lower quality of production and cast.
“Brick” is a detective-movie, inspired by the classic film noir-genre. We follow Brendan in the time before and after his love, Emily has died under strange circumstances, where he desperately seeks to find out what has happened to her. In order to do this, he has to contact people from the mysterious high school, underground environment that Emily was involved with in the time before she first disappeared and later was found dead. We don’t know what kind of environment this is, but it is clear that Brendan was also a part of it previously, and as the plot is played, the movie slowly reveals what has happened.
“Brick” is the first-time movie of the director, and compared to “Enter Zombie King” (ZK) there is a clear difference and slightly higher level of production quality in Brick, than ZK, and I would also say that it is easy to see that there has been far more time used on details of the production as in script, shooting-style, lighting techniques and so on.
When this is said, it should also be said that the film-budget for the two are slight different, as the costs of ZK was approximately 250 000 dollars, whereas Brick’s was about 400 000. This can be an important factor that explains why the quality of picture, sound, lighting and probably acting was so much better in Brick than in ZK. But this still doesn’t justify the fact that I think the story-concept of Brick works better as a film-plot than ZK.
There are positive things with ZK as well. First of all it is an important fact that I found it quite entertaining, although it was a very bad movie. To me, it reminded me a lot about some of the same storyline you can see boys make up when they are younger, role-playing with each other, as zombies and ninjas always have seemed to fascinate young them, rather than girls, who would play something slight nicer and innocent.
In Brick there is no swearing, and this probably makes it accessible for a larger audience, like younger people. ZK is x-rated, and this is probably because of the time and attention the movie uses on showing off naked women in it. This is also one of the facts that make it easy to see that it must be made of guys, living out their dream of making an action-movie with their favourite elements: zombies, ninjas, masks and naked girls. The movie also takes the focus on breasts and nudity to a new level in one of the scenes where they are talking to a guy on a boat, by first placing a woman in the background, washing the boat, naked. Then, they go a little further by “coincidently” shooting from the angle of this girl’s breast!
When watching these movies we where also to think of what makes the difference between blockbuster and other movies, and I think the clearest factors are that a blockbuster have large budget, famous actors and good production quality. Having said this, I won’t say that a blockbuster is necessarily a good movie, because I think low-budget movies are interesting, because they have to appeal and find ways to amuse and entertain by relying and other factors, like creating an original story and especially on making up a good dialogue to weigh up for the lower quality of production and cast.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Up and running
Here is my blog for the course "Digital Video Foundations" that I have created as part of the assignment-part of the course.
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