Film & Quality Exploitation Cinema | "Mad Max: Fury Road" (2015)

Fig. 1 "Mad Max: Fury Road" Poster

Nowadays many films make usage of exploitation to attract a larger target audience and therefore gain as much money as possible. In general there are many exploitable subjects in the movie making industry such as violence, sex, monsters, natural disasters and horror. Not only genre based exploits exist, but also nationality based ones such as Ozploitation which has its origin in Australia during the New Wave Movement in the 1970s. One of the most successful Ozploitation movies is the series of Mad Max, especially the recent “Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)” directed by George Miller.

Commonly people assume exploitation movies are low quality films due to their cheap methods of luring in viewers and due to their low production quality. However, in the movie “Mad Max: Fury Road” nothing of this is true.  Already from the start of the film one can notice the workload put into it. The imbalance between CGI and actual real life effects is noticeable through the director’s preference of practical effects over CGI. The audience will notice that the fire spitting guitar, flaming gas pipes of the vehicles and explosions are not CGI but actual real life effects. However, not only the application of real life effects reveal the immense difficulty of creating the film, but also certain cuts in those enthralling action scenes for example the car chase at the start of the movie.

Fig. 2 The Chase

Apart from the exploitation of nice sound and visual effects, cars action and also violence, George Miller also abuses the appeal of women, sex and nudity, but surprisingly it manages to appeal to feminism as well. George Miller’s initial exploitation of Imortan Joe’s wives’ beauty and sex appeal quickly turns into appeal to feminism by showing the bravery, commitment, personal strength and intelligence of the wives. Not only are the wives portrayed that way, but also the Vuvalini, a folk of the former green land where Imperator Furiosa has her origin. During the first encounter with the Vuvalini the audience would instantly assume that the riders appearing in the horizon are males, but instead they are shown as females and the only ones who survived the catastrophe in the green land symbolizing their strength over the males and endurance.

Fig. 3 Final Scene

The movie is called “Mad Max: Fury Road” named after Max Rockatansky who everyone assumes to be the protagonist. However, the protagonist of this movie is Imperator Furiosa who makes the journey to find the green land (utopia) in the desert (dystopia) where Max is only a side character helping her on her journey. Max in contrary to Furiosa does not have a clear goal in mind. This is how the film was able to not only exploit the sex appeal of the female characters, but as well as exploiting the feminist ideals to attract a larger audience.

Overall, “Mad Max: Fury Road” manages to surprise the audience by its several exploitations and the intelligent use of sound and music, excellent CGI and chaotic editing. Instead of being recognized as a B-Movie it manages to become an Oscar winning film which appeals to several groups of people.

Illustration List:
Fig. 1  "Mad Max: Fury Road" Poster At: https://img1.etsystatic.com/068/0/10888623/il_570xN.788163855_n90n.jpg (Accessed on 09/11/2017)
Fig. 2 The Chase At: http://www.trbimg.com/img-56a7ffb3/turbine/la-en-craft-mad-max-20160128 (Accessed on 09/11/2017)
Fig. 3 Final Scene (Screenshot taken from the actual film) (Accessed on 09/11/2017)

Perspectives | Why Is "Dancer in the Dark" Postmodern

"Dancer in the Dark" Poster

Dancer in the Dark is a melodrama musical written and directed by the Danish director Lars von Trier in 2000. The movie narrates the story of a Slovakian woman named Selma Jezkova who suffers from poor eyesight and eventually becomes blind. Throughout the narration she experiences unfairness and cruelty of the reality which eventually even leads her to her death. But why is “Dancer in the Dark” postmodern?

1. Meta fiction - “Dancer in the Dark” deals with the conflict between fantasy and reality. Most obviously, this is highlighted by Selma’s musical daydreams, whenever they kick in the colors would appear very bright and exaggerated symbolizing her fantasy as opposed to the reality which is painted in brown and grey colors. According to Selma she loves musicals because there are no dramatic events in contrary to the real world. With this she highlights the fiction within the movie making it clear to the audience that the film is pure fiction.

2. Fragmented - Throughout the whole movie scenes are cut out or skipped. For example when she was practicing dancing in her house and suddenly the audience is presented Kathy her neighbor coming through the door asking how the dance went.

3. Hyper-reality - During Selma’s daydreaming unrealistic things happen as we can see in the scene when she killed Bill. Bill was shot several times in his body and his face was brutally damaged, but when the musical part started he stood up and danced with Selma. In addition in that scene the audience knew that Kathy, Bill’s wife, was gone to call for help she appeared in Selma’s dance.

4. Pastiche - Some music used in “Dancer in the Dark” comes from the movie “The Sound of Music (1965)” such as “My Favourite Things”, “So Long, Farewell” and “Climb Every Mountain” all three written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.

5. Deconstruction - Unlike the typical Hollywood musicals “Dancer in the Dark” has a dark ending. It breaks the expectations of the audience. Usually in musicals the choreography are built in smoothly and without any major “trigger”. In “Dancer in the Dark”  the musical part would kick in whenever Selma would experience a dramatic event such as: going to court, the 107 steps or the murder of Bill.

Perspectives | Key Words #7

• Metafiction - form of fiction wherein the work constantly highlights the fact that it is imaginary. The application of irony and self-reflection is usually used to pose the critical question of the relation between fiction and reality. 
• Intertextuality - mostly related to literature “Intertextuality” is a technique that is used to reshape the meaning of a text by another (mostly popular) one. Intertextuality can be seen as a form of pastiche or plagiarism since an already existing and well known text is used as a “reference” to the new text.
• Mise-en-abyme - is a French term derived from heraldry which means “placed into abyss”. Commonly a picture which contains itself in it is imagined for example a pair of mirrors reflecting each other’s images into infinity/abyss (the image becomes infinitesimal small symbolizing the great distance as if the image is far away for example in the abyss). 
• The 4th Wall - next to the three room dimensions in a movie there is this so called “Fourth Wall” which refers to the wall between the act/play and the audience. Usually fictional characters within a play do not refer to the audience, but when they do for example asking it questions (“Funny Games”) people call it “Breaking the 4th Wall”.

Character Design Class #5

In the character design classes we were split into groups of two people. Our task was to draw each other facial expression. This is the result of it:

As later on in the class we got another task to explore and draw randomly picked character. As for me, I got Popeye. It was a challenging character as for his chin to move accordingly to the facial expression.

Referance Pic

Collaboration Project | Character & Props Design

Collaboration Project | Character Design Silhouettes

I drew these couple of weeks ago. Analysing the posture and shapes of the various characters used in the collaborative project. Understanding their personalities though visual appearance.

Planet Cuckoo | Studio Intro

After our group has set the blog, I felt that to make it more professional for our final animation, we need an intro of our logo, shooting out the planets. This intro will be used for our animatic and also  the final animation of this project.

Film & Quality B-Movies | "Rope" (1948)

Fig. 1 "Rope" Poster

“B-Movie“ also known as “B-Picture“ is a category of films published since the economic crisis in the 1930s until its upswing in the mid to late 1950s. During the crisis it was hard possible to maintain first class (A-class) entertainment and therefore people adapted to the low budget entertainment, especially in the movie industry, the so called B-Movies. The main strategy behind the B-Movie is to have so called “Stock Characters” whose main purpose is to bridge the time gap else the movie would be too short and therefore they try to entertain the audience with a side story/cheap chit chat. Various other characteristics for a “B-Movie” are such as: Cheesy Dialogue, Spectacles/Effects Driven, Cheesy Effects, Action Driven, Easily Digestible Story, “Has been” Movie Stars etc. Most B-Movies have the main genre of horror, science-fiction, splatter or action. This review will analyze the movie “Rope (1948)” directed by Alfred Hitchcock discussing why it is a B-Movie.

First off the main feature that makes “Rope” a “B-Movie” is the lack of scenery change throughout the movie. All the incidents in this film occur in only one apartment making the lack of budget obvious. Even the presence of the so called “stock characters”, whose main purpose was to bridge the time gap between start of the crime and the exposure of the murders, signals a low quality entertainment. However, Hitchcock managed to implement those side characters into the plot perfectly by giving them all a connection to the crime victim. Even though they lead a lot of chitchats, they still keep the audience on track or give hints about the missing character (crime victim: David). Having one of the most famous film actors acting a main character to lure in the audience is one of the characteristics of a “B-Movie”: James Maitland Stewart (famous actor) plays the role of the intelligent Rupert Cadell who exposes the two murderers Brandon and his accomplice Philip who are Ruperts best friends back in school. Aside from those traits the cheesy dialogues and cheesy effects makes it even more obvious.

As for five positive qualities for the movie:

1. Hitchcock’s expertise makes the movie way more enjoyable as a B-Movie which is supposed to be cheap entertainment. His brilliant ideas such as implementing usually unimportant characters or building up the tension beautifully with the method of the ticking bomb etc. makes the movie very enjoyable even as a B-Movie.
2. The treatment of the topic of “good and evil” in this movie was decent. Brandon who sees himself as a superior being among all the other human beings justifies his crime of murder by saying that inferior beings have no right to live. Whereupon Rupert explains/realizes that thinking of superior-inferior was purely a mistake. He realizes that every person has its right to work and live and judges the crime Brandon has committed.
3. The characters Brandon, Philip and Rupert were brilliantly acted out by the actors making the story very authentic. After killing David, the crime victim, Philip becomes mentally unstable throughout the movie making the audience tense because of his nervousness he is giving many hints of what happened.
4. The tension ramp up is very well done especially the scene where Mrs. Wilson, apparently the maid, cleans up the remains of the party from the chest where the corpse of David is hidden inside. The audience experiences the feeling of: “Oh, she is going to find out!” throughout the scene because she intended to put the books back inside the chest.
5. Even with the low budget the entertainment of this movie is really good compared to most other B-Movies such as “The Giant Claw”.

Illustration List:
Fig. 1 "Rope" Poster. At: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNVPpKcrwjkzYdmiOu_D6tGr6IVUu9JBPgXnZTWls38KXni3zqsdWtS2hK8jufKDr1Jto83KDku_rOIMfWWzsPLFCgp_O3Rb4C5vyMf6y0c2gZZN-9eedzlaRO0IRpf6FEFa99RzMFuf0r/s1600/Jack-Durieux-Rope-Movie-Poster-Hitchcock-2017.jpg (Accessed on 29/10/2017)

Character Design Class #4

During the character design class we were told to form groups of four where we were supposed to draw one another. Each one of us had to take turns of doing a pose in front of the other remaining three who had to draw the posing person. This is the outcome of the character design class:

As for the character designing, these are some of my environment sketches and also a research showing on what I based my drawing.

 

 Some of the Elephant character sketches: