Screen Arts - Week 16



27/05/2019

Best sequels
Empire Strikes Back


Age of Ultron


The Dark Knight


Deadpool 2


Rush Hour 2


Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle


Aliens


Terminator 2: Judgement Day



Worst sequels
Sione's 2



Men in Black II


Incredibles 2



We watched a video about Max Fleischer and his innovations in early cinema concerning rotoscoping, which he managed to patent. As well as an excerpt of Yellow Submarine, which I could easily tell the animation style was applied with fine art painting and not clean about like it would be achieve these days with digital technologies.

 We watched trailers of films by Ralph Balski. Rotoscoping was apparently in Balski's work, especially in Wizards. Some elements of his animation look like he just used negatives without bothering processing them. 

 Lord of the Rings quality of rotoscoping and animation was a bit more refined compared to Wizards.

 School of Rock is the film by Linklater that I have seen. His animation style in Waking Life looked pretty good, but most of it looks like it was a achieved on a dated 2000s phone camera filter.

 In the BTS video we were shown of Waking Life, it was achieved by digital technologies that multimedia use today, which is using a drawing tablet and software similar to After Effects

 The quality of A Scanner Darkly look like a low-rate Telltale Games game like The Walking Dead and the animation style looks dreamy and surreal. It would probably be more watchable in live action. However, the film is a minor improvement over Waking Life.

 Like Balski, Linklater slightly improves with film in applying rotoscoping. Unlike Balski, Linklater doesn't aim for I would rather use Balski's style over Linklater's style of rotoscoping because it's more raw and less visually distracting for audiences. I also don't like the dull colours and tones you get in most of Linklater's style of animation and rotoscoping. 

 We watched some of Balski's The Lord of the Rings and Linklater's A Scanner Darkly.
From the class' reactions to the watching Balski's The Lord of the Rings, it hasn't aged well and is laughable (especially when it comes to the voice acting and character design).
A Scanner Darkly tries to be like a graphic novel, but almost fails and looks creepy. However, the story and characters does stand out.

01/06/2019

Bacino, M., Epstein, A. S., Green, J., & O'Connor, M. (1990). It [Television mini-series]. United States: Warner Bros. Television.




The light jazz music and montage of photographs in the opening credits sequence helps support setting up the historical era of the first chapter of this mini-series/feature film. It makes it more serious than the stylistic approach made to the 2017 film.

The mini-series strengths are mostly in the second part because that is where it is more engaging and I felt that the performances from the adult characters were more compelling than the child characters. Even Finn Wolfhard did a better job as child Richie in the 2017 film than Seth Green was able to in the mini-series. 

 Overall, I believe the mini-series was overly condensed, which didn't allow much time to explore character arcs like the 2017 film, although the character of Mike is more dominating in the mini-series than the 2017 film because of the non-linear story and plot that the mini-series applied. I personally prefer the linear style in the 2017 film.

 Tim Curry's performance as Pennywise was good and gave the physical impression as an ordinary clown. Whereas in the 2017 film, Pennywise is just a terrifying clown, its appearance scaring off children rather than attracting them to come to it. Pennywise in the mini-series clearly shows more of it as a shapeshifter than it does in the 2017 film.

 The film itself as a horror is a bit 'Hitchcockian', where you don't really see the violent stuff, it just cuts to something else, you can hear it off-screen, or a close up is used. It leaves the horror and violence to the audiences' imagination. Plus, I would say that it was potentially done this way for budgetary reasons and rules and limitations for American television at the time.


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