Sunday 19 November 2017

Collaboration: The Blind Man - Textured & Modelled


The Blind man is textured and Modelled, although I'm not sure why his pants are rendering brown when I textured them black. I'll see if I can make the glasses work with template handles as they wrap around Mooms head really strangely because of how abnormal his head is.

Film Review | Exploitation In Cinema | Mad Max Fury Road

Fig 1: Mad Max Fury Road Poster


Exploitation in cinema has many different forms. Films that are generally made to exploit the viewer with pastiche popular elements and genres which include but are not limited to,  sex, violence,  horror and romance. Exploitation in films are used to draw the audience in and captivate them with flashy trailers usually resulting in the films being low quality B movies. Exploitation films were extremely popular in the 1960's and 1970's especially around the time when drive in movies became popular as they would please the masses with the over excessive genres that B movies are known for. If the films did not pass the Hays code which was a code of conducts put in place to make sure that no overly offending scenes made it into films such as gore, sex, slavery and using any religious profanity, The movies were shown in grindhouses.  

Exploitation films can also revolve around exploiting the culture of different nationalities one of which is Ozploitation which is the exploitation of Australian culture and one film that exploits this is Mad Max Fury Road (2015) directed by George Miller 

Usually exploitation films have cheap cheesy special effects and props however Fury Road defers from the norm with the explosions of steampunk vehicles and barrage of fire, crashes and mammoth fight scenes on top of post apocalyptic vehicles is done with impressive stunts coupled with the orange haziness of the dystopian dessert is an adrenaline junkies dream. The use of CGI is limited as the majority of the stunts were real it is a nice change from the CGI ingested action films that are rampant today and shows that manufactured CGI cannot win against the real. 
"The first Mad Max film was made on a budget of $350,000 and became the most financially successful film for decades until CGI came along. Fury Road, shot over a 3-year period, done almost entirely with stunts and without graphics and with $150 million in the bank, eclipses any Marvel film and inspires a feeling of wonder that little art can muster." (Bunker, 2015)


Fig 2: Coma - Doof warte with a flame throwing guitar

Woman are presented in a different and admirable fashion in the film as they redress the usual damsel in distress that is excessively oversaturated in action films. The main female protagonist is Furiosa (Charlize Theron) - a buzz cut haired badass with a titanium arm who feels more like the hero and puts up more of a fight as her male counterpart Max (Tom Hardy) while trying to protect the five wives of the cults leader Immortal Joe. Furiosa along with the five wives of joe are all heroines in their own right as they can fend for themselves and fight for each other without needing the help of a man. "Fury Road’s alpha male is, in fact, a woman: the rogue soldier Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, who masterminds the escape while Max rides shotgun. Furiosa is one of the toughest, most resilient action heroes in years, with a metal prosthetic arm that hints at past trauma and a steely gaze that sees more on the way, Theron superbly embodies her stoicism, nerve and resolve."  R. (2015). 


Fig 3: Furiosa and Max

Miller has managed to pull off a 21st century masterpiece that is an adrenaline fuelled frenzy of fast paced steampunk car chases, skilful stunts and  beatufill backdrops of the derelict desert that puts the pedal to the medal and goes against the grain of exploitation films and is understandably hailed by critics and viewers. “Mad Max: Fury Road” is an action film about redemption and revolution. Never content to merely repeat what he’s done before (even the first three “Mad Max” have very distinct personalities), Miller has redefined his vision of the future yet again, vibrantly imagining a world in which men have become the pawns of insane leaders and women hold fiercely onto the last vestiges of hope."


Bibliography 

Bunker, C. (2015). Out in Theaters: MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. [online] Silver Screen Riot. Available at: http://silverscreenriot.com/903-out-in-theaters-mad-max-fury-road/ 
[Accessed 17 Nov. 2017].

R. (2015). Mad Max: Fury Road review: 'a Krakatoan eruption of craziness'. [online] The Telegraph. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/mad-max-fury-road/review/ 
[Accessed 17 Nov. 2017].

Tallerico, B. (2017). Mad Max: Fury Road Movie Review (2015) | Roger Ebert. [online] Rogerebert.com. Available at: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mad-max-fury-road-2015 
[Accessed 17 Nov. 2017].

Illustration list

Figure 1: "Mad Max Fury Road Poster". [image] Available at: https://cdn.empireonline.com/jpg/80/0/0/1000/563/0/north/0/0/0/0/0/t/films/76341/images/tbhdm8UJAb4ViCTsulYFL3lxMCd.jpg [Accessed 17 Nov. 2017].

Figure 2: "Coma - Doof warte with a flame throwing guitar" Available at: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UtjGTrVwRr4/maxresdefault.jpg 
[Accessed 17 Nov. 2017].

Figure 3: "Furiosa and Max"  Available at: http://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/2017/07/mad-max-fury-road.jpg 
[Accessed 17 Nov. 2017].




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Sunday 12 November 2017

Toolkit 2 // Pipeline 1: Head Modelling Part 7 - The Brow


Perspectives: 5 Reasons Why The Truman Show Is Postmodern




1)  The Truman Show makes it known that it is metafiction, showing the fabrication of the world that         
Truman resides, He is living in a mammoth dome that is controlled and manipulated with his every move filmed for the outside world to view.  Cameras show his every move as he lives inside a tv show with the world literally revolving around him. As the film progress the shackles of the world begin to rear its manipulating head as a studio light fixture falls from the dome and fraudulent rain begins to fall only on Truman.

2)  Truman is living inside a simulation with every resident apart from him having roles to play and scripts to follow, he is living not in life but the creators vision of a hyperrealism manufacture which is a blend of the real which is Truman and the fiction which is everyone else. Truman starts to question everything, he cannot tell what is real anymore as the constraints of the dome start to become apparent, he notices patterns about the residents and strange occurrences that hinder him trying to leave which start to make him paranoid that he is a in a simulacrum where his meaning is becoming destabilised. 

3)  The Truman Show is a pastiche and parody of the American Dream where every  house looks the same and every resident resides in this idyllic picturesque bubble. Celebration town in Florida, California comes to mind as this town is seen as the perfect place to live when in reality the town like The Truman show has strict rules that the residents must abide by which include embargoes stating why they left. Truman's wife is parodied with a satirical view on America as she constantly talks about consumerism, showing the viewer many different types of product placement to seemingly enrich their lives. 

4)  The Truman Show is a representation of the media in American, where Truman is completely controlled and manipulated by the media as the viewers completely devour everything that is shown to them as they are stuck to their television sets like glue. Fake news can be instilled into the whole plot of the truman show as he is controlled by the creators and the actors that revolve around putting on a show for the audience are fed through an ear piece all the scripted lines to say around Truman to fill the watching sheeple with their predetermined expectations. 

5)  The ending is up to the viewers own interpretation as Truman leaves the controlling but safe Dome to be thrust into real life, we don't know how he actually gets on. Does he have a serious case of culture shock? Is his better off living in the confines of the Dome, Does he ever make it to Fiji to make be with the one he loves, The viewer can only imagine. 
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Saturday 11 November 2017

Collaboration: The Driving Instructor - Modelling, Texture & Prop Progress


A few more details need to be tweaked and polished until the driving instructor is complete.

Perspectives: Lecture 8 - Key Words

• Hyperrealism:
is the blend of real and fiction forming a simulation of reality especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies such as the one in which we live, As example is social media in which everyone projects the best version of themselves online to validate their credibility to their peers.

•  Simulation:
 Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time  

•  Simulacra
copies that depict things that either had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an original

•  ‘Fake news’
 is not just a public figure’s spinning of half-truths. It is mainly a media-driven, and deliberate attempt to spread a false narrative of propaganda to advance a political agenda that otherwise would be rejected by a common-sense public. The methodology is to manufacture a narrative attractive to a mass audience through media that will then devour and brand it as fact—and even lobby for government redress.

Perspectives: 5 Reasons Why Dancer In The Dark Is Postmodern



Pastiche
In the musical numbers Dancer in the dark is a pastiche of the musical genre albeit a less opulent and more grittier version as Selma played by Bjork manifests her visions of musicals into her mundane life.

Deconstructed:
The film deconstructs the musical genre and flips the viewers expectation, juxtapositioning it with the harsh truth of Selma's reality.

Parody:
The film is also a parody of of the musical genre as the majority of musicals are full of vitality that enrich your eyes with glamourise set designs and costumes that feel otherworldly and too good to be true. Dancer in the dark capsizes this oversaturated genre into a storyline that is extremely melancholy as Selma is progressively getting more blind with her son being diagnosed with the same condition. Only in Selma's day dreams of musicals can she feel free and vivacious feeling the rhythm of music in the dark and dreary warehouse where she works as "nothing dreadful ever happens in musicals" and "someone is always there to catch you in musicals" only in Selma's actual reality, those people to catch her are the police to whisk her away for the trial of manslaughter. 

Fragmented:
The film is fragmented and broken up into parts that question what is the viewer actually watching, a musical? or a indie film? shot on a cheap hand held camera. As the film is shot on a motion sickness inducing hand held camera such as The Blair Witch Project it feels as though the viewer is watching a day in the life of Selma, but then the musical numbers are implemented late into the first arc with Selma telling the viewer "In musicals why do they start to sing and dance all of a sudden" it is more of a slow burn into the musical element as Selma starts to hear patterns and rhythms all around her.

Mise-en-abyme:  
Dancer in the dark is littered with Mise-en-abyme as Selma's day dreams of hearing the hum of factory machinery and having them merge into an orchestra of sounds that translate into a musical number in which all the characters on screen join in is tapping into Selma's unconscious.

 


Perspectives: Lecture 7 - Key Words




•  Metafiction 
Metafiction is an example of the self-awarewareness which is often found in postmodernism. Rather than trying to pass itself off as a window on the world and disguise its structure and techniques, metafiction tells the viewer that it is artificial.  story-within-a-story, making obvious references to storytelling conventions and breaking the 4th wall are examples of Metafiction


•  Intertextuality
Refers to the relationship between literary text in which that text reflects and influences other texts.  Intertextuality is an important stage in understanding a piece of literature, as it is necessary to see how other works have influenced the author and how different texts are employed in the piece to convey certain meanings.

•  Mise-en-abyme
is the a form of self reflection in which ones image is seen more than once. A film within a film or a dream within a dream is an example of Mise-en-abyme.

•  The 4th Wall
The fourth wall is the imaginative space that separates the performer or actor between the audience or the viewer. In film breaking the 4th wall is when the actors look at the camera denoting to the audience of their fictional nature such as when Peter looks directly at the camera in Funny Games.

Tuesday 7 November 2017

Perspectives: Judith Butler



Judith Butler, (born February 24, 1956, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.) is anAmerican academic whose theories of the performative nature of gender and sex were influential with French philosophy, cultural theory, queer theory, and some schools of philosophical feminism from the late 20th century.

In her books, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), and its sequel, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993), Butler expressed the familiar cultural-theoretic presumption that gender is socially constructed (the result of socialization, broadly conceived) rather than innate and that conventional notions of gender and sexuality serve to preserve the traditional domination of women by men and to justify the oppression of homosexuals and transgender persons.

One of her revolutions was to show that gender is constituted by behaviour such as action and speech in which gendered traits and dispositions are exhibited or acted out. gender is not an underlying essence or nature of which gendered behaviour is the product, it is a series of acts whose constant repetition creates the illusion that an underlying nature exists.

"Gender is not biological, but rather is something assumed and performed, as well as cast upon bodies by norms and conventions that are larger than any given individual. Our notions of what a human being is, problematically depend on there being two coherent genders. And if someone doesn’t comply with either the masculine norm or the feminine norm, their very humanness is called into question." (Butler, 2003) 

Toolkit 2: Character Design // Facial Expressions