Ident sound scape

On the creative side of this brief i am going to start with the sound. I believe the sound is a good place to start because it creates the atmsophere. The sound makes a visual scary, Freddy Kruger would have looked shit in a silent movie, but with the right music and sound effects he takes a complete different form. Thats how important sound is to film, if they would have put clown music to the ghost face "Scream" killer...well you would have Scary Movie (which with out going of subject are the worst types of film), but i think i make my point.

With the sound i can make an instant impact, which i don't think i could do with a visual. Also if i have the sound to work off i believe the visual will come naturally, as for if i create the visuals i'll have to make music to fit.

New YEAR, New BRIEF. IDENT

Ah, the start to a new year, a further step into my career.

The new brief title is "IDENT" a 20 second trailer for a programme on a TV channel.
The stand out programme, or in this case season is "FEAR" an ident for a series of horror/thriller films on channel 4.
My first step of research is to view other idents form previous horror seasons.


This is bbc's 2 ident.

My firsts thoughts are the eerie location, which is a graveyard. I think this is a bit cheesy, however you instantly know it is a advert for something scary. Then there are the clips of classic horrors, which confirm it is an advert for a horror programme. The music is also key, loud and dark, creating an atmosphere. And, finally the deep voice over. A film trailer classic. I believe BBC 2 have gone for the B-Movie look, with the mummified "2" at the end. This isn't really my thing, looks a bit "Buffy the vampire" really tacky

This is ITV's

This, personally, is poop. It's just a montage of horror clips with a cheesy song about the boogyman. Not good what-so-ever, the guys at ITV obviously couldn't be bothered that day. This is an example of what not to do.


This is TV3's

I'm not totally sure what TV3 is, but this is a good attempt at something original. If i'm honest i'm not sure if it is for a horror series. But, I like how its unexpected, it seems like a advert for a music programme and then BAM! there is blood everywhere.



This would be the trailer for the american re-make of The Grudge, sorry for the Sarah M. Gellar intro.

What i like about this is the invert hair, for the titles/credits. It's a nice colour scheme, not one you would label with horror, but it as a soft uneasy feel. The font also flows with the hair and there is something unsettling about the distorted/larger letters in the font. The music helps with this though.

This is 2 trailers from The Blair Witch Project.

The second trailer is better than the first one, but neither of them are that great. What i do like about them is that in parts your not quite sure what you are looking at, and that unsurity is scary. The bit with the hand prints on the wall. When you think about it they could be any old hand prints, but with the right music your head automatically goes to blood. Also, the bit with the girl running, again she could be running away from anything, but we think it is something terrible.
I also like how the short text at the beginning sets the tone for the whole trailer.

What i have learn't from these few idents and trailers is that you have to identify your audience quickly. I wasn't a fan of the BBC2 ident, but it captured the horror feel instantly. However, i feel they did it in the wrong way, i previously said that i think they went for a B-Movie look, but it was too polished, they could have added film grain. It also mixed gernres, It was set in a graveyard, which we normally associate with zombies, but a mummy jumped out of the grave.
The TV3 ident did not indentify the horror audience at first, and if i'd have seen that when surfing through the channels looking for something about horror then i would have gone straight past it.
The horror trailers are good examples, because they get to the point. The music is right, the visuals fit and you know exactly what your watching.

I think with this ident being only 20 seconds long you have indentify the genre within 3 seconds and keep the pace going.

THE DARK KNIGHT

WOW, I went to see The Dark Knight twice in it's first weekend. It is really good. The medium is just right, not too dark, but not too commercial. Chris Nolan was the perfect director for this series, he has some how taken the comic book cheese genre and turned it into a serious thriller. Which is F*****G brilliant. The film has been a massive success so far in the USA and its been the first film this year that i've seen fill a cinema, every seat was sold. I even saw one person sat on the steps! Both nights i went to see it...PACKED. I couldn't believe it.

Heath Ledger as Joker was such a good choice. When i first heard he was taking the role i was a bit unsure, but he did it better than i could ever imagine. And, it's a real shame, i knew he was a talented actor, but this performance will go down in history. Even if he hadn't have died it would have still been a historical performance.

There wasn't enough of the Joker, when he was on screen it was really exciting and you didn't know what he'd do next. Ledgers performance brought so much energy to the film.

It seemed like an introduction to his manic personality and the next film would have shown you the real Joker.

There as been talk on the net that the Joker was written to be in the third film, but rumours have it they've scrapped the script. They don't want to re-cast him, but i think they should. Ledger has brought to life a great character and there must be more than one person who can do character acting well.

On the movie forums Johnny Depp's name is being thrown around, and yeah, i think he'd be good. But, there must be more than Depp around. His name is up for every role.

The SFX were outstanding too. I'm not going to in to them too much. But, it's been awhile since i've seen some real nice big explosions. It's all CGI these days, i'm sure there were CGI in there to make it look bigger. But i remember the days when if you have written that a helicopter gets blown up, then you blow up an helicopter. I understand that its quicker and cheaper to do it CGI, but never looks the same.

All in all, it was a fantastic film, the best this year and it'll be very hard to beat it.

HD not for me.

My step dad has recently bought an HD TV and a blu-ray player (he has taken back the player because blu-rays are a little over priced).

I can't stand watching films or even programs on this new technology. It seems to make everything look tacky. I believe there is TOO much detail.

I watched a seminar With Robert Rodriguez not so long back, it was just after he finished filming Once Upon A Time In Mexico. It was the first film he shot in digital HD and he said you can't get enough detail. RR is one of my all time favs, but i have to disagree with him. I watched 10,000 BC a couple of nights ago, really bad film and not a good choice to test HD out, but i knew that before i put it on. Just wanted to see how bad. HD made it look unbelievably crap, it was like watching a film in layers, like a pop-up-book. The real layer with the actors and a set, then a layer of CGI mammoths and a green screen background. I'm not over-reacting it was that bad.

I thought it might just be 10,000 BC, so i checked the sky movie channels and saw Spider-Man 3 was on. I was blown away by Spider-Man 3 at the cinema and HD even made that look poo. I watched Frankenstein (the Rob De Niro one), which was made a while back, but i wanted to see what it did. And that looked really bad, you could clearly see that they were on a set and using stage lights. I dread to think what 300 looks like.

I think the film industry hasn't caught up to the TV technology yet. Old films will never look right on HD, but hopefully the future ones will.

Off To See THE DARK KNIGHT to night.

Had my tickets for awhile now, and i'm honestly unbelievably excited, like when it was christmas as a child.
And, what got me more excited was this remarkable website.

I will give my full review on the Dark Knight tomorrow.

Wall-e

Wall-e Website, check it out it's cool.

So, went to see Wall-e last night.
What can i say, which hasn't been said already?...WOW.

Last year Pixar brought us Ratatouille and i didn't think they'd top that animation for a couple of years. How wrong was I? Wall-e has taken this beautiful art to the next steps already. The detail on Wall-e for a start is incredible. You can see all the mechanism's working in his eyes, the rust and most of all the emotion. The film doesn't have dialogue for 75% of it, but you know exactly what he's thinking. Also getting back to detail, Earth looks brilliant, well it looks like a mess. But, that mess looks brilliant.
The sound design was very clever, reminded me of R2-D2 (Star Wars). You can clearly tell what the certain sounds mean. The use of camera angles were good, No, they were outstanding. The was a scene where it started as a long shot of earth and then zoomed right in to show wall-e at work. I picked up on the good use of camera angles on Ratatouille, focus pulling, quick editing, it makes it feel more like live action feature.

When i first saw Eva i didn't think she looked that great. I know she is suppose to look modern, Ipod-ish, next generation sort of thing. But, next to Wall-e it looked plain.
However, towards the end of the film there is a super close up of her face and you can see all the little lights under the plastic that make up her eyes. It's his sort of detail that makes you want to stand up and applaud the Pixar gang for there work.

If i had to pick fault, i mean really had to dig deep to find fault. I would say there wasn't enough of Wall-e and the bug by them self. Within 15 minutes Eva is on the seen and i really liked watching Wall-e explore the world and his reaction to the items he found.

Stan Winston RIP

This last month one the great visual effects and make up wizards Stan Winston died.
He had done some great creatures, including the Terminator, the Queen Alien, the Preditor, Edward Scissorhands, the T-rex in Jurassic Park and the none CGI Iron Man suit.
He worked with Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton and James Cameron many times.

There aren't many still in the model making business and he was the go too guy if you needed one. He Won 4 of the 9 Oscar's he was nominated for. He was a true legend.

This made me think that there are many people in the film business that get under thrown. You always hear about the Actors and Directors and they get the big awards, but films would be nothing without SFX, editing, music score, camera men, etc

So here are some amazing people (off the top of my head)
Danny Elfman (music)
Ray Harryhausen (SFX)
Ray Winston (SFX)
John Williams (music)
Frank and Ollie (animators)