For the people to people project in our group we decided to focus on my chosen individual who was Neil Kulkarni who was my old college tutor and also a great musical journalist who has traveled the world and met some of the most famous people on the globe from Jackie Chan to Ozzy Osbourne. I thought this would make an interesting narrative to focus the people to people project on as it revolves around our chosen subject of career path and strongly involves the Media aspect.
After having various meetings amongst our group, we finally had a list of questions we wanted to ask to create our narrative for the people to people project. We also had a list of shots we wanted to use and play around with as we wanted our documentary to look different from the normal, same old shot of subject talking cut to filler or photo. We wanted to think outside the box on our production. I feel we accomplished this with the filming of Neil playing the Piano and filming the documentary in a music studio worked very well to cut down background noise.
I thoroughly enjoyed this project once we started filming and setting up, i felt it went really well and I’m extremely happy with the footage we have of Neil and i would like to thank him massively for giving such great answers and being so understanding, one question we wanted to ask Neil to create a strong narrative was if his ethnicity was frowned upon when he started in the Media industry but we had to be careful around the subject and execute it so that it doesn’t offend.
Some of the shots are great, for the documentary i love the shadows of the drum kit in the background, it adds depth to the documentary and creates a sweet effect. All in all so far i feel the documentary will turn out great and we will have a strong narrative of Neil’s ups and downs in the Media journalism world and for some of our peers i feel it will drag them in and they will enjoy the narrative.
Uncharted 3 is by far the best single player games I have experienced on a gaming console bar none, Uncharted 3 takes us on another one of Nathan Drakes dramatic and awe inspiring adventures searching for some sort of lost treasure. Nathan Drake is young hell bent treasure hunter is fuelled by his love of discovery and money along with his mentor and close friend Victor Sullivan, In the past two games we have seen Drake & Sully go up against some nasty villains and get themselves out of a lot difficult situations. But Uncharted 3 test’s Drakes and Sully’s friendship to new levels take them on a lot of highs and lows. The Story of Uncharted 3 starts with Nathan drake and Victor Sullivan in a typical traditional English pub seemingly happy to part with Drakes valuable ring he wears around his neck; Drake received the ring from his ancestor Sir Francis Drake who was an explorer from history.
But as things quickly swirl out of control and our two main characters end up in a bar brawl out numbered portably about 30-2, of course they manage to escape the bar end enter the back alley where it cuts to a cinematic, in this cinematic we are introduced to the main villain who is a cold hearted women named Katherine Marlowe, I found this quite a surprise as most media products build up some sort of suspense to a big reveal of the main villain. But Naughty Dog the creators have thrown them right in at the deep end, I feel this worked in Naughty Dogs favor as I allowed the gamer to experience the rivalry between the hero and villain from a very early stage.
As you play through the game you realize the amount of attention to detail that has gone into this game, some of the settings and visuals are just amazing to look at, there are a lot of vibrant colours and settings. The camera work in all of the uncharted games has been phenomenal I love the way they emphasize how big an area is by the perspective they give the player. They use the wide angle panning shots a lot of the time to show the gamer where there and create an atmosphere, my favorite camera angles in all the Uncharted games are the backward facing running shots that they use, so you are running towards the camera and you see everything falling down right behind your heels.
One of the best chapters in Uncharted 3 is the cruise ship that Drake finds himself on after being kidnapped by pirates and taken to sea, after fighting his way through the ship to reach the leader, Drake accidentally causes an explosion that cause’s the ship to capsize and end up sinking on its side. The level is so confusing with the ship being engulfed by the sea and everything turned on its side, you have to walk over doors and walls, i completely lost my bearings but its a great level and a huge step forward in level design. I watched a interview with one of the creators of the game who claims that he was given the task of creating a real time ocean that would never repeat the same waves and will react in different ways to different contact.
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The chapter in the desert started to grind on me after a while, i feel that Naughty Dog way over indulged the gamer in the desert scenes, we realised what its like in a desert with no water or food we’ve seen it all before it just got a bit tedious towards the end just my personal opinion.The ending to the game was a bit of a let down in my opinion, if you have played Uncharted 2 or Uncharted you know there is always a boss fight at the end, but at the end of the third game there isn’t really a boss level. Theres a fist fight u ave with one of Katherine Marlowes goons but thats your lot, i didn’t dislike the ending just could of done with a lot more depth to it i feel.
As were nearing the end of this Cabinet of curiosities project Grants life all seems to be slotting together, all of the materials for our presentation are coming together nicely and it should be good fun presenting the finished Grant Brockhurst’s life. Through the past weeks we as a group have worked hard on certain aspects each for the final presentation to make it the best it possibly can be. I have been working on the newspaper articles, tattoo work and possibly a conversation with Grant trough the interaction of the other groups to get them involved with Grant. We have Different members of the group working on different material for the presentation and hopefully they will work well.
The image at the top was by Joe (jeeps) in our group as he is very good at sketching tattoo designs, we used his skills to create a original and authentic tattoo for grant of his daughter lydia. I then took the sketch and applied it to one of my better body shots (joke pulled from google). I photoshopped the tattoo onto the upper arm of Grant, I did this by erasing the white paper from the background getting the size’s right and then played around with layer styles on photoshop to see which one looked more realistic.
This was one of my early attempts at creating a newspaper article for grants horrific crash involving him and his daughter whilst driving under the influence of alcohol, i used one of the group members actual photos of his crashed car overturned in some bushes. After presenting this image it took some criticism from other groups saying that the article doesn’t seem realistic to a newspaper article, so we as a group discussed this and we are currently getting an actual journalism student to write the article for us.
The past couple of weeks with us working as a group has been a good laugh and a lot of fun, getting to know different people in the group, in the best place to get inspiration “THE PUB” we have had regular meetings to discuss our final presentation and how we are going to do it at it all seems to be going to plan. This past week we have been filming and editing the POV Video of a day in the life of Grant Brockhurst. We have all helped out during the shooting process at certain points but Dale has mainly been looking after the Video, We have also been sorting out the telephone conversation between grant and the phone operator after his horrific crash with lydia trapped in the vehicle.
In our lecture this morning we went through the idea of characterisation and the methods behind creating a good character, after brainstorming and going through a lot of discussion we came to realise that a lot of the prominent characters that we could remember from the media were mostly male. After some thinking on my behalf i decided to make a blog post on The Joker from the Batman films mostly based around Heath Ledgers Representation of the troubled, sadistic villain that was created by Jerry Robison when he first appeared in the DC comics in the 1940’s.
The Joker is the arch enemy of Batman and has been responsible for various tragic times throughout there bitter rivalry, throughout the history of the joker he has been portrayed with various characteristic traits but the most prominent and recent is the sadistic, intelligent and phsycotic mastermind criminal with a diverse sense of humour. The joker in many different publications and debates is usually rank one of the most diverse and perfect villains in a media product, some people state that The Joker is the perfect villain for Batman, as they bring out the best of each other in there battles and verbal slander between each other. There rivalry has been compared the concept of Ying and Yang in the past as relative to the good vs evil battle.
So what do we really know about The Joker, well we know he was created in the 1940’s but that doesn’t mean he is 70 odd, I’m asking what age is he portrayed as throughout the Batman saga, after delving deep into Joker research which was very informal there isn’t a specific age listed for The joker. But i did find that The DC Universe and many other comic book brands have a Method called a floating timeline which means
“The present is always now, and past events are timed out based on how long ago they were in regards to the present. Because of this, comic writers have to occasionally reboot a character or even an entire universe to bring continuity up to date.”
Now on to the Jokers background and traits, as we all know the joker is usually shown with a white face and green hair, perhaps with bright red lips of some form?
There are some disputes about The Jokers passed and origin so there aren’t any solid facts, one possible route of origin which has been thrown around and portrayed in various styles and scenarios is that The joker got his distinctive looks and completion by falling into a vat of chemicals.
A definitive back story for The Jokers life has not yet been published (Maybe a future film) it seems that The joker is even confused about what happened in the past if we take a look at the Killing Joke Comic the joker states
“Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another… if I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha!”
This is some proof that even he doesn’t know his true origin or past.
In a lot of the original Batman Feature films Jack Nicholson played the role of the joker, i feel this version of the joker was a lot more toned down, in contrast to the crazy eccentric version the audience is used. Although Jack Nicholson did play the role brilliantly.
Moving on to Heath Ledgers perception of The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s feature film The Dark Knight i feel this representation of the jokers looks and history are perfect and all seem very believable and real to life which the effect i feel Nolan was going for when he created the movie. We do find out through the movie that The Joker does have at least some family that he can relate back to when talks about his father putting the blade in his mother mouth and saying “WHY SO SERIOUS?”.
We learn later on in the movie that the joker received his serve scars that are on the corners of mouth from his father ripping his skin with a blade as a young boy, in The Dark Knight The Joker has been described as “just an absolute sociopath, a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown” from actor Heath Ledger who was given pretty mouth a clean slate to create his version of Jerry Robinson’s Joker.
Ledger did this by sitting in a hotel room alone, pretty much solitary confinement for a whole month just trying to perfect his role in the movie, by practicing a certain voice and that infamous laugh we hear throughout the movie.
Even in this clip we see that Joker needs to Batman to thrive on his attempts to thwart The Jokers devious plans, they both need the others existence to live.
Hey guys, I felt the need to blog this for you immediately it is gone 11pm so there maybe some typos but il come back and edit them out, through my random everyday browsing of Youtube i rarely find any decent footage that is actually watchable for a length of time, but tonight whilst browsing i came across a video called Cardboard Warfare so i thought “oh what the hell” sounds funny probably some half ass piece of shit movie, but infact it is extremely well done, i was going to say clever but its a simple idea its just the way that the creators have put it all together and how they have expanded on the idea.
This is the video in question and i extremely enjoyed watching it, the concept of the idea is brilliant and well put together, theres a lot of attention to detail go into this project and its a real inspiration to see what such hard work and graft to do. I really enjoyed watching the short film and the way it has been put together with the cardboard weaponry, the tank was amazing and must of taken a great amount of time to create, i feel there could of been some improvements to the short film I’m afraid to say. One thing i noticed throughout the film was the lack of consistency in one shot the car will be plastered with bullet holes and blood, yet in the next shot the car seems to be untouched from the battle. Another thing i feel the movie lacked was the WOW factor, i think at the end when the actor jumps of the tank it should explode right there whilst he is in there to create a more epic escape. One thing i did like in the short film though was there wasn’t much dialogue at all throughout the whole thing just none stop action, for these guys though it seems to have payed off they’ve even gone on to make sequels to Cardboard Warfare which is around 24 minutes and that is a great watch, the lighting and special effects on that short film are amazing. The acting has gone up a huge step from the first version and it show’s a huge improvement from the first Cardboard Warfare. If they made this into a film i would pay to go and watch it.
PWNISHER is there youtube channel go and check there page out and have a look at some of there films, you will find there tremendously well done i can’t wait for another Cardboard warfare, if i was lucky i wouldn’t mind getting involved it would be a great experience for me just starting at university on a media production course this is something i would want to accumulate to making i the future and i hope some of my footage can be half as a good as this.
So finally today, better late then never we filmed our short drama/documentary, we realised after a lot of discussions and uncertainty that we just had to go with what we had and get to work with some improvisation. So we got organised, assigned roles then headed for our location with the tonnes of expensive equipment we had to take care of along the way. We decided to film our drama part of the film we would need some sort of a kitchen or front room, Charlotte decided we would use her Flat so thats where we all headed. When we got to the location we all set the equipment up and got ready to film the confrontation between the family of Emily Rose and her reason for being homeless, sort of like a reconstruction.
Whilst filming the drama scene we all took turns in working with the camera for different scenes and angles, this allowed us all to get a hands on approach of using the camera, the shooting in the flat was a lot of fun and i really enjoyed the team effort. The room was already well lit from the window that was in the room if any thing it added to the homely effect we were trying to get across. After filming in the flat we headed to some of coventry’s wonderful subway system (Sarcasm.) We were going to find an actual real life homeless person for the documentary part but we improvised and used Charlotte, i volunteered to be the interviewer of Emily Rose asking the questions and seeing how she feels, the thing i was most worried about filming in the subway was the lighting but we managed to find quite a well lit spot near the entrance.
The film should look good once its been edited and sound effects added etc, i still would of preferred to have done something different but with a group of such a vast amount this was difficult bearing the sheer size of our group in mind i feel we did well with the film. In future projects i hope we don’t have to do any more group projects with such a big group as it proved very difficult with a lot of different opinions being thrown around.
After Editing and seeing the finished film I’m reasonably pleased with the outcome, ever heard of the saying Polish a turd? well thats what i think we did with this film, i believe the footage was average and the idea was not something i was interested in but i still had input into the production, i feel you have to work with what you’ve got and come to the best outcome possible.
I think the final movie was amateurish at points and the sound was bad throughout the documentary segment as the location we were using was very noisy which made it difficult to hear the actor/actress. I liked the concept of doing part drama part documentary but I personally would of preferred a different subject that I could relate to. I think the editing on the video saved the video from being a massive flop and made the video look quite eye catching to the audience.
Matt-Media 