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Showing posts from 2021

The Fascinating Medium of ARG's

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 How The Most Immersive Stories Are Told     One of the greatest aspects of a good story is immersing the viewer in the world presented. Making sure that the total story being presented feels real and believable. Some entertainment mediums are better than others than immersing the viewer and in different ways. Stories that make us feel like we have an impact are best presented in video games, allowing the viewer to directly impact the world created. Meanwhile, stories that put us in the shoes of others are great in books and text, created vivid imagery to make the viewer feel a certain way. A great middle ground between different styles of entertainment that provides a unique sense of immersion is the ARG. An ARG or Alternate Reality Game is a very specific kind of storytelling, typically using social media, real-life locations, and viewer engagement to progress a given story. ARG's span a decent range between things such as Twitter accounts that uses posts to tell a stor...

The Effect Of Near Unlimited Corporations On Cinema - Investigation Blogpost

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 The Major Success of Disney Plus     As a shock to no one, the new Disney+ shows set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been a major success for the company. With record-breaking viewership and constant presence on the front page of Twitter, these shows have changed the weekly formula. These shows present stories in a classic plot structure with typical Marvel tropes of mysterious villains, using post-credit scenes to reveal information that would normally be hard to introduce into the story and obscure references to the source material to gauge fan interest. The most impressive part about these shows is the budget, making shows that visually aren't AS impressive as mainline Marvel movies, but are considerably higher quality compared to the Netflix Marvel shows, and the DC Comics shows on the CW. Large corporations such as Disney now have almost an inexhaustible supply of money to create projects as they see fit, and this might negatively affect the rest of commercial...

Pre Production Blogpost

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 What is done so far     This film is my personal take and parody of the grittier characters presented in the Zack Snyder cut of the movie Justice Leauge, I love the film very much but I wanted to take the character of the flash and make him as gritty as everyone else. As completed so far I have locations figured out and a script completed.

Investigation Post

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 Resolution As A Tool For Filmmaking     The quality of a digital image has always been it's resolution, how many pixels make up the image. The larger the resolution, the more detail can be expressed. Though physical film does not have a pixel resolution, it has a functional resolution of the colored salts on the surface of the film, which causes each "pixel" of the film to vary from one to another. Right now most peoples monitors and displays are either 1440 or 4k, these two resolutions allow for a large quantity of detail, but they do have their limits. These limits are pushed by expensive digital cameras that can record in resolutions of 8k or above. At such levels of detail, there are no displays that could properly display them. But these cameras are not made for displaying 8000 pixels across, they are made for editors and directors, to give them room to mess up their shots and still make it work. With resolutions of this size, the frame can be zoomed in, moved, mani...

Investigation Blogpost

Copyright Law And It's Affects on Cinema     Copyright is undeniably a good thing for the artistic world, it makes sure that creators are able to profit off their works for considerable amounts of time, but also eventually lets these works fade into public domain and enter the large collection of free and open works. That's how its supposed to work at least, but now we are entering an era of corporate owned works and creative expression, where the there's no singular person who owns the copyright, so how does this affect movies and other creative industries. Copyright was initially meant to be 28 years, so right now, if the original law was still in place, almost every Marvel hero, Superman, Star Wars, and much more would be public domain and anyone with a camera could make their own films with these characters. Over the years the copyright length has been expanded to the life of the creator plus 70 years. One thing to remember about this is that these expansions have bee...

Investigation Blogpost

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 Remake After Remake     If Disney has one talent, it is most certainly making their fans feel nostalgic, but how could we not, the stories Disney has told go back to everyone's childhood, and everyone remembers the movies they grew up with. Unfortunately for Disney, they've told so many stories, it's hard not to feel repetitive with each new film, so instead of trying to make new and original content, they're doing what they do best, beating the dead horse even more with their new trend, live-action remakes of old animated movies. Disney has been remaking movies in live-action since the '90s but it really became successful for them with the remake of Alice In Wonderland. This remake really pushed the definition of the remake, more like a reimagination of the original story, but keeping what's important the same. This style of remake became more interesting to Disney so the follow-up film was Maleficent, the story of sleeping beauty but told from the story of th...

Investigation Blogpost

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 The Technology Replacing Greenscreen     Taking something from one shot and putting it on another, a problem as old as time in the film industry. Over the years 2 main techniques have developed, chroma-keying and rotoscoping, to chroma-key something you take the shot in question, and replace a single color present, all of that color, so you must be safe in not putting the color on anything you're trying to remove. To rotoscope, you have to manually cut out whatever is being removed, this works wonders in costume design and specific detail, but the detail is what makes the technique not favorable in a lot of situations, presuming the footage is at 24 frames per second, that is 24 pictures that have to be manually traced and cut, and don't forget they have to be cute well if you want them to be better than green screening. Brough to prominence during the production of the Disney original series The Mandolorian, LED display walls are giant curved screens with high fidelity ...

Investigation Blogpost

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Newest Trend In Cinema     For as long as film and cinema have been around, there have been trends filmmakers tend to follow because at the moment they are popular and successful, whether it be the rise of computer-generated characters in the late 90's or the annoying pop-out 3d effects in the 2010s. These trends when used by the ones who originated them or understand them can be great for allowing new viewers of a film to understand at least some of the new content. The trend that is currently taking the cinema world by storm is that of the Cinematic Universe , a franchise of films that not only just contains sequels to the first entry in the story, but branching paths of stories and characters who may have their own solo movie or story, but it still connects to the grander story. The undeniable king of this medium at the moment is Marvel Studios  and their Marvel Cinematic Universe. Starting in 2008 with the breakout success of Iron Man , the MCU has been expanding the ...

Pre-Production Blog Post

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Pre-Production  So far all that is done is the scripts and storyboard, but so far the film is looking funny and fun to make.

Investigation Post - Languages Effect on Storytelling

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 What Makes Lord of The Rings Feel Real?     J. R. R. Tolkien's groundbreaking fictional series Lord Of The Rings , and its related books The Hobbit , and The Silmarillion set the modern standard for how a fictional universe should be established, with some semblance of order, history, and consistency. The thing that sells the story to the reader is something that subconsciously everyone expects from foreign environments, a new language. Tolkien originally started with creating fictional languages, creating their structure, form, and pronunciation, then creating a fictional race of peoples that culture reflects the language they speak. Now everyone today is tired of the tropes of Elves living in places with "-ia" in the end, or the villains living somewhere with "mal-" in the name, but one must keep in mind that Tolkien is the originator of the tropes. It is very possible for a viewer to believe the world presented when the world presented feels genuine, fantast...

Is The Spirit Realm Any Better?

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Us Being Wrong     The history of humans as a collective of the history of us being wrong. From civilizations that believed they were the original and superior group, to a society that believed the earth was the center of the universe, time and time again, we have been so very wrong on almost everything. Now this is not to say that everything we have ever done was wrong, throughout history we have been slowly getting more and more right, we now know that earth is one of many rocks floating around the cosmos, and that the complexity of the human race is far too complex to simply call one group better than another for such arbitrary reasons. One assumption that has consistently been in the human consciousness for as long as communities can remember is that somewhere, outside of our earthly experience, there is somewhere better. This better place has gone by a litany of names throughout different regions, cults, and stories, this is the Spirit Realm , I chose to focus my films on...

The Age Of Film in Comparison to Other Artistic Mediums

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 Ancient Artforms      Having some way for people to express themselves in not direct forms has been around for as long as humans have existed. The recorded earliest form of art has been painting, with the oldest cave painting being over 44,000 years old, the medium has had very long to develop. Though with all things human, this development was very slow for a long section of our existence, with only the past two thousand years holding a majority of the artforms change. A relatively more recent medium of art is that of song, though it is impossible to say how old songs are as a whole, the oldest example known to us now is the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal , an ancient song dating to around 1400 BCE. Due to the nature of songs, it is very likely that songs are as old if not older than paintings, for when a painting is created, there is a physical object that in theory could survive thousands of years, meanwhile with songs, it is very possible for a song to be created and th...