My review on 'Colraline' 3D on DVD

When I saw 'Coraline' in the cinema I fell in love with it, the 3D technology was absolutely amazing and made everything look real. The stop-motion animation was unbelievable, everything looked alive and I kept wondering how big the sets and characters actually were.

I got Coraline in 3D on DVD, I was disappointed with the 3D technology, it was not the same as the technology in the cinema. It was like the old red and blue glasses, but instead is was green and purple. It said it would take 5 minutes for your eyes to adjust and me and my family couldn't cope, our eyes hurt and we had to turn it off and put the 2D version on. The film was still great in 2D but there was no depth and it didn't have the same effect.

I watched the making of Coraline and It was really overwhelming how much they had to do. They had multiple sets, people and costumes. They had over a hundred pairs of hands and clothes that were all identical. Everything that moved had wires in them so they weren't flimsy, were easy to animate and so big character were held up securely. There was one animator per scene, to make a fast progress of the film. I saw a clip of someone animating the scene of the other father playing on the piano and the movement was so small for every scene, they did this to get a smooth, realistic movement. The heads where in two parts and there were many differen't expressions for both the top half and the bottom. The top half has the eyes and eyebrows and the bottom has the mouth. To make the character look even more realistic their hair was real, but they had glued each strand and added coloured wire so it could be easerly animated.

To make the film 3D they explained that you see everything different from your right eye to your left eye and that's what they did, they took every frame twice from two different very slightly perspectives. To save the animators from making mistakes on where the camera is positioned they had a machine that when they took the first frame the camera would move slightly to the side and take the second frame, then move back ready for the next frame.

I have done animations with my friends outside of lessons, obviously they aren't as good as this. Most of our animations are Lego music videos, we have started on a Christmas one on the song "Merry Christmas Everyone". We do have one animation where the only character, Bubble, is made out of blue tack. One of our recent Bubble episodes has a sheep, Sketch, that was inspired by Shaun from 'Wallace and Gromit'. Sketch's body is made of a toilet roll tube covered in white cotton from an old jumper, his head and legs are made out of plasticine with wire inside to hold him up and to move his head.

Post Modern Madonna

Our film so far seems to be quite post modern because of the parodying and outrageousness of it, so I've done some research into post modern and for my example I've used Madonna "Queen of pop".

Madonna is fake on the surface and that is one of the reasons why she is so postmodern. Madonna always puts on a show acting as someone else, this is shown in many of her music videos. For example in ‘Material Girl’ you see a curtain open, she then dances and at the end the curtain closes. This makes the music video look like a performance, that it was not real, and the audience understood. But she breaks her own boundaries in ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ where there was no hint or symbol to show that this was just a show. This confused a lot of the audience because it made them think whether she was telling us about an emotional event that happened in her life.

Madonna made a documentary of her self to show the public what her life is like backstage. In the video she is obviously not being her self, she shows off in a flirty way to lure the male audience to like her and watch more. She is nice to her father, but a vast amount of the public know that she doesn’t like her father, one of the reasons is because he married their house keeper who Madonna didn’t get along with "I didn't accept my stepmother when I was growing up... In retrospect, I think I was really hard on her." This shows that she is postmodern because she is showing the public what her life is like yet she is not showing the real truth about her, then the public is left to believe that this documentary is real. She shows off in a flirty way by revealing her breasts to the camera after a show, for no reason at all.

What is also postmodern about Madonna is her representation of gender. She breaks the tradition of women wearing women clothes and men wearing men clothes by dressing up as both. Like in her music video ‘Express Yourself’ she is seen wearing a suit and a monocle, she then opens her jacket and reveals her bra. This represents that if you are a woman wearing men’s clothes it doesn’t stop you from being a woman underneath. Also in one of her live shows she has men dressed as women and women dressed as men.

As well as her representation of gender that is postmodern, her sexuality is merged into it too. In one of her live shows she has a lot of lesbians and gays dancing and kissing. In one of her recent publicity stunts she was in a music video with Brittany Spears, ‘Me Against The Music’ in 2003 and they shared a full on kiss. Once again she had shocked the public. This shows that she is postmodern because even though she is straight she can kiss women too.

Madonna’s entire postmodernism put together makes her even more postmodern. Madonna knows how to push people’s buttons and will do anything to surprise, shock, get attention and insult the public. She’ll bundle different sensitive subjects together and splash them out for everyone to see and make the audience question whether it is real, that’s why Madonna is so postmodern.

My review on Disneys new film 'Up'

Here is my review on the Disney Pixar film 'Up'. The text in blue relates back to my work.

Today I saw 'Up' in 3D at the cinema. I thought this film was too sensitive to be classed as a U. It touched very sensitive areas that I believe young children may not understand or may end up being distraught. The film started with the main character, Carl Fredricksen, as a young boy. You see him befriend a young girl, Ellie, and you watch them grow up together, getting married and growing old. What I think the younger audience may not understand is when the couple find out they can’t have a baby, all you see is Ellie and Carl upset in a hospital where there is a poster of a baby on the wall. This made me and I believe a lot of the older audience quite moved. There’s one part that made me very upset, when the couple were quite old, Carl buys tickets for them to go on holiday but Ellie gets ill and unfortunately dies. This made my partner very distraught because it had brought back bad memories of his grandparents and he couldn’t enjoy the rest of the film. It kept coming back up during the film and I could see my partner was unhappy about it. If this film could make a couple of young adults cry then how will those who are younger than us react? I believe they would either not understand or care, or get very upset. That’s why I think this film should be a PG so parents can see this before their children and decide whether it’s ok for their children to watch. This made me think about the rating of our film, we'll need to put alot of thought into who should be our target audience and then once it's finished think again if our audience we have chosen it the right one. Our film may not have any sad moments, but it's still important to get the target audience right

After the very sad beginning the film tries to balance out the emotions throughout the film by bringing in the comedy with a little boy, Russell, a snipe (bird) called Kevin, who ends up being a girl, and a talking dog called Doug.



But before the film started we were softened up by a Pixar short, 'Partly Cloudy'. It looks like the story was based on the tale of stalks delivering babies, I guess no one thought of where the stalk gets the baby from so Pixar jumped in there and thought this out. Bassically all of the stalks go to seperate clouds, these clouds make babies, not just humans but animals too but there's this one cloud that creates not very nice animals, like crocodiles, that the stalk gets hurt by. Eventually the stalk goes to another cloud and his original cloud gets upset and starts raining, but the stalk come back wearing a helmet and knee pads, his cloud his happy again and hands him the next baby, it's an eel and the stalk gets electricuted. I loved it, it was short but sweet. This shows how such a simple short story can be succesful, maybe if we made ours this simple it would be easier for people to like it, but I think they did this for the younger audience since there is no speach in it. Our film is going to be more complex so the audience will be older and more likely to laugh at the parts we are parodying, this is another reason why we should think about the target audience.



This was the 6th film I've seen with the new 3D technology and It still amazes me. The picture is in such depth as well as things stretching out at you. I liked that the makers didn't deliberately have things coming at you like in the old 3D films such as Spy Kids 3D. I could really believe that this film was a real world because of the depth, I believe the makers a very pleased with how it's turned out. I think it would be great to have our film in 3D, so the audience can feel like they are part of the story.

Changing Powers

I've giving one of Kyles ideas some thought. I've decided, and Kyle agrees, that having someone who goes the opposite way to where he wants is a bad idea because it will get no where in the film. We've been talking about what to replace it with and have come up with someone who can teleport, he can teleport with a magic 8 ball and if it says "yes" as he is thinking of a place to teleport to. We could parody Ghost Busters, when they all had to think of nothing but one of them thought of Mr Stay puft and a giant one appears. We can't have a giant Mr Stay puft but we could do something similar. I have a toy of Mr Stay Puft that we could use, we could have a scene where they teleport to a place where he is, or we could have one appear to where they are.

Clever Idea from me!

We have talked about mind reading powers, but the mind reader hears things differently, with words missing/changed. Then I thought instead of a mind reader, someones thoughts could be heard by everyone. We could really make this funny, we could introduce his power first easily and have him think of something out of the ordinary. We can make him inappropriate, insulting or just in his random little world. Although this may be difficult to work it in to the script, with having to constantly have his thoughts being heard.

Clever Ideas from Kyle

We need pointless super hero powers so we've been thinking of what powers would work, in a humorous way, in the film. So Kyle came up with some brilliant ideas. We've previously discussed that there would be a killer plushie (teddy) in the film that chases and eats someone running past filming their own version of 'The Blair Witch Project', so Kyle said we could have one person who can talk to plushies and try and reason with the killer plushie, but the plushie attacks them anyway. I thought this would be really funny, we just discussed whether to have the plushie talk as well but we thought that might be a bit too much and take the humour out of it. Kyle also suggested that someone could have the ability to travel the exact opposite way to where he/she wants to go, I think this is a funny idea as well because it would make the film even more insane with all the time skipping as well. And his last idea was some one who has flash backs but in advert form, this would be great because we could parody many well known adverts on television today.

Deciding

Me and Kyle thought that the best thing to parody is a drama/action film. The first film that came to mind was comic books/marvel films because we could really exaggerate the style and make it funny by the characters having pointless powers. We then thought of Lord of the Rings because it is an epic adventure and we can really use the story and turn it into something funny and stupid. After a while we started thinking about television programmes because people are more likely to recognise what we are parodying. Immediately we thought of Lost and Heroes. Lost because we can have a group of people lost in a woodland where time keeps skipping and within it random things happen, such as someone suddenly sitting on the floor playing monopoly. And Heroes because we like the pointless super hero idea.