Week 5 Video clip recaps

Just briefly, Lecture notes will go up on Learning @ GU shortly, in the meantime, here's the clips we watched:

We started the class with this: A nice, brief overview of storyboarding by the Emmy Award winning Warner Brothers production team, behind animated shows such as 'Batman: The Animated Series', 'Superman: The Animated series, and 'Justice League'. James Tucker, featured in this, began as a board artist on 'Tiny Toon Adventures", before applying thru Bruce Timm to land a role boarding on "Superman: TAS" before eventually moving onto bigger roles with Warner animation, recently an Executive Producer of the series "Batman: the Brave and the Bold".


METRO from Jacob Wyatt on Vimeo.

This beautiful cartoon that Andi found is a wonderful example of a filmmaker not limiting themselves to the confines of the 16 x 9 ratio viewing screen. Rather, using comic book theory of panels, Wyatt is able to further lead the eye through his film using compositional changes, more precise focal points, and emphasis on certain parts of the story. A full screen environment really has impact in relation to the smaller "panels" of shots preceding it. Taking advantage of camera angles, diagonals in the compositions, and moving his characters through a 3D space (from B/G to F/G), and always adhering to the 180 degree rule, this is a nice example of film language at work.



We watched the opening sequence right up until the Captain America scene. It is interesting at this point to contrast the storytelling with what was taken directly from the Hudlin/Romita Jr. comic (the tribe scene, the White House Scene) with the storytelling approach to the Captain America meets Black Panther scene, as this wasn't part of the original comic. To me, the storytelling in this seems rather flat and unimaginative, during the conversation. Anyways, you decide :)




We watched the first scene or two of 'Samurai Jack', and as a example of character design, mise en scene, reference, and storytelling approaches, we will definitely watch more examples from this in the coming weeks. The short action scene in the Night Club uses many conventions from Comic book storytelling, particularly the example of the Batman page from Frank Miller's 'The Dark Knight Returns', which highlights a critical moment in the battle with a stark white background.

Finally, we had a quick look at some polished storyboards from Ridley Scott's 'Gladiator'. As these weren't part of a movie clip, I found some links you may want to peruse, which also includes some fantastic concept drawings, and examples of "light as a shape".

http://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1001-Spring-2010/Drawing-Board-Tiger-Tale.aspx

http://www.toutlecine.com/images/film/0028/00284361-gladiator.html

And thumbnailing, straight onto the script, like we worked on last week/this week:
http://miseenscene101.blogspot.com.au/2010/10/ridleygrams.html

Gotta run, will touch on images from the lecture notes from last week in the next day or so for those that we absent from that lecture. As usual, any questions, email me.