Saturday 30 March 2013

Toolkit Maya: Leg Piston



Toolkit Maya: Fur Presets & Attributes



















Unit 3: Film Review - Rope


Poster

  • Title                     Rope
  • Directed by           
    Alfred Hitchcock 
  • Release date          1948
  • Running time        80 Minutes

        Rope is a 1948 thriller film based on a play also titled Rope (1929) by Patrick Hamilton. The Play was adapted to a be feature film by Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents which then went on to be directed by Alfred Hitchcock and was to be the first of Hitchcock’s Technicolor films. Rope is famous for being filmed and edited together so it seems like one long continuous take rather than multiple shots edited together.






Figure one: Rope
         
The plot revolves around two friends Brandon and Phillip, played by John Dall and Farley Granger. the pair kill a third friend called David, played by Dick Hogan, to prove their cultural supremacy. They then go onto hide David’s body in an antique chest in the middle of their apartment and then arrange to hold a dinner party around the chest, inviting the his family, friends and fiancée, as well as their former housemaster Rupert Cadell, played by James Stewart. As the guests enjoy there meal around the chest containing David’s body, they are blissfully unaware of its contents which pleases the two killers, so much so they begin to make vague comments about their deed but never go so far as to reveal their crime.

        “Rope is not merely a stunt that is justified by the extraordinary career that contains it, but one of the movies that makes that career extraordinary.” (Vincent Canby, June 3, 1984) Rope has often been considered one of Hitchcock's most experimental movies because of his choice to ignore many of the standard film techniques available in 1948. This allowed him to have the long unbroken scenes in the film giving the viewer the sense of it being one long take. Each shot ran continuously for up to ten minutes without any interruption. It was filmed on a single set aside from the opening street scene shown during the credits.


Figure  two: The Arrogant

The ingenious design of the set helped greatly in the filming process allowing the long unbroken shots to happen. The walls of the building were on rollers and could silently be moved out of the way to make way for the camera and then be replaced when they were to come back into the cameras view. A team of sound men and camera operators kept the camera and microphones in constant motion as the actors kept to a carefully choreographed set of cues. Prop men had to constantly move the furniture and other props out of the way to allow the large Technicolor camera to move in around the room for a more seamless experience, they then had to ensure they were replaced in the correct location when the camera had made way. “The novelty of the picture is not in the drama itself, it being a plainly deliberate and rather thin exercise in suspense, but merely in the method which Mr. Hitchcock has used to stretch the intended tension for the length of the little stunt.” (Bosley Crowther, August 17, 1948)


Figure three: The Guilty
         Rope has many suggestions revolving around the subject of homosexuality, for instance, Brandon, who dominates his homosexual lover, Philip, strangles David with an ordinary piece of Rope. David's only crime seems to be that he is ordinary, for being engaged to his fiancée, and is about to be married. It is OK to be “normal” but not “ordinary,” because to be ordinary means to be boring and average in the two friends eyes. Constrained by the enforced morality of the decency codes of the time, the film cannot come out and say explicitly what is obvious to anyone watching the film.” ( Paul McElligott, 18 October 2005) Rope was created in a time when any suggestions of homosexuality were strictly forbidden, but the filming and script was done in such a way that it didn’t actually commit any offence that could get Hitchcock into trouble with the Production team.  

Bibliography

Quotes
Quote 2: Bosley Crowther, August 17, 1948 - http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/081748hitch-rope-review.html
Quote 3: Paul McElligott 18 October 2005 -  http://www.celluloidheroreviews.com/2005/10/18/rope-1948/

Images

Unit 3: Film Review - La Jetee


·         Title         La Jetee
·         Directed by          Chris Marker
·         Release date          1962
·         Running time          28 minutes

La Jetee, is a French science fiction film from 1962, directed by Chris Marker.

It tells the story of a prisoner in the aftermath of the Third World War, living in a destroyed, post-apocalyptic Paris where survivors live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. Scientists hope to use time travel, to call past and future to the rescue of the present. They have difficulty finding subjects who can mentally withstand the shock of time travel, but eventually settle upon the prisoner, whose key to the past is a vague but obsessive memory, from his pre-war childhood, of a woman he had seen on the observation platform 'the jetty' at Orly Airport shortly before witnessing a startling incident there. He had not understood exactly what happened, but knew he had seen a man die.

After multiple attempts, he meets the woman from his memory, and they develop a relationship. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the far future. He meets the advanced people of the future, and they give him a source of power strong enough to regenerate his own time.

With his mission accomplished, he learns that he is to now be executed. The people of the future contact him and offer to help him escape to their time, but he requests instead to be returned to the time of his childhood, hoping to find the woman again. He is returned and does find her, on the jetty at the airport. However, as he rushes to her, he notices one of the jailers who has followed him and realises the jailer is about to kill him. In his final moments, he comes to understand that the man’s death he witnessed as a small child, at the start of the film was in fact his own.


Figure 2: The Pier

This 27miniute film is composed entirely of still frames, this adds to the narration and storytelling of the movie as the viewer is completely focused on the image and the voice of the narrator during the movie, unlike modern day Hollywood films that try to give you a ‘visual overload’. ”La jetee is a remarkable and unique experimental short that consists solely of still frames, narration, music andsound effects”  (Phil Hall, April 29, 2011)

Figure 3: The time travler

The scene’s show casing the post-apocalyptic world are very dark and don’t really show too much, “as a result of us being emotionally imprisoned by the atmosphere of the film. This touches on an almost gothic level of horror by rendering historical linearity meaningless” (Dan Jardine, September 8, 2006) you get such a good sense of desperation and despair from just the images alone that it adds a great deal to the story narration and helps to keep viewers immersed in the narration. “La Jetée belongs to a genre that breeds opportunity for elaborate vision and little thought; the film is responsibly contrary to both assessments. Its strength is its simplification” (Rumsey Taylor, 11 July 2004) La Jetee has been a very influential science fiction film over the years, having been the key influence behind Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995) from which it takes several concepts directly from, La jetée.

Figure 4: Death of a traveller



Bibliography

Wednesday 27 March 2013

Sunday 24 March 2013

Saturday 23 March 2013

Friday 15 March 2013

Friday 8 March 2013

Wednesday 6 March 2013

Unit 4: The Fantastic Voyage - Art Direction

Takashi Murakami

For my commission i would like to use an art style known as "Superflat" that composes of using a mixture of 2d and 3d images or models to create a unique and interesting art style. This art style was created by Takashi Murakami and is a known art movement in Japanese culture.

Superflat Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superflat

The reason I am going with this style is because i want my animation to be visually stunning to intise viewers to look at the screen and keep them fixated on the animation, while also telling the story of the cell cycle.

I can already imagine all of the cells actually being characters and having faces and being generally a happy place to be.

I imagine the inner world of the cell cycle being a bit like Beauty and the beast when all of the items n the castle are a live and magical.










Images taken from:

murakami-versailles-5039192957_26ee6c83a3_b.jpg (768×1024)
Takashi-Murakami-Portrait-c-Guillaume-Ziccarelli.jpg (3744×5616)
google-doodle-4.jpg (520×319)
takashi-murakami-artwork-large-88399.jpg (581×600)
takashi-murakami-16860_1.jpg (800×565)
manga-takashi-murakami-versailles1.jpg (1024×683)
Screen-Shot-2012-12-19-at-12.01.39-AM.jpg (637×553)

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