Avatar

The actor Sam Worthington who plays the main Jake Sully was unknown to the British audience and relatively unheard of in America, before casted in Avatar he was only in TV series and even on the television he was only in a few episodes. But looking at his profile it is clear to see that his role in the highest grossing film of all time has helped propel his career. And he now has 9 new film he's in which considering the film has been out less than a year in the UK is astonishing.

The other main star in the film Zoe Saldana had been in more productions than he co-star but still was yet undiscovered, she had been in big films as Pirates of the Caribbean but just as one of the crew. Like Sam she has a list of no less than 8 upcoming films since the release of Avatar in 2009, including a new Star Trek sequel.

The genre of the film does nothing to understand why it did so well, it is classed as an action film which does intrigue allot of people but it also has other genres such as adventure, fantasy and sci-fi. With the majority of the film being a sci-fi film a big part of the public wouldn’t be interested in going to see the film because as we know with other science fiction films such as moon and 2001: A Space Odyssey who's both gross revenue of their films is less than half of the budget of Avatar.

The production budget for the film was $237 million dollars which is considerably more than the $75 million for ‘independence day’ starring Will Smith which is also labelled a sci-fi. As I have said avatar has no huge name stars and cost over 3 times as much as one with the big names (independence day) which goes someway to suggest where all the budget went on. The special affects.

The gross takings of the film stands at $2,777,450,902 superseding the second highest grossing film, Titanic also directed by James Cameron, by $934,260,132.

Other reasons why the film did so well is that it was the first film made properly for 3D and because they released it in 2D and 3D and then re-released it just added the billions they made. Plus it was distributed by 20th Century Fox who is owned by New Corporation and is the third largest media conglomerate helped towards the marketing of the film. 

The films director James Cameron had previously worked on some major titles such as ‘The Terminator’, ‘Aliens’, ‘The Abyss’ and his last movie before his return to films in 2009 was ‘Titanic’ which was the highest grossing film of all time. Between ‘Titanic’ and ‘Avatar’ Cameron went of to do documentaries and focused on the underwater. He did also co-developed the digital 3-D Fusion Camera System which had been used on many films including ‘Spy Kids 3D’ and ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’. So when he announce his return to the film scene with a whole new film which was nothing like what was out at the moment people were eager to see the film.

What did help the marketing and was classed as below the line marketing was the controversy and the hype, as none of the movie was set on Earth or even a planet we know of and most of the scenes need to be completely computer generated it received criticisms before It even came out. And when it came out people flocked to see it because of this which created the initial hype.

But it wasn’t just the 3D experience that drew people to the cinemas because looking at the sales of the 2D DVD it was labelled ‘fastest-selling Blu-ray of all time after just four days in U.S’ and sold more copies in that four days than ‘Batman: The Dark Knight’ did in 1 1/2 years. And personally i would definitely class it as a good film and not just a 3D phenomenon.

Ethnicity: Clip

This clip of Eastenders and Coronation Street for ‘Children in Need’ is purposefully done for comedy reasons but does show us that ethnicity is very important to British TV in understanding peoples backgrounds. They do this through stereotypes, the clip above is of two what appears Asian women but in the scene one of the women ‘Zainab Masood’ claims that ‘Sunita Alahan’ isn’t what she classes as Asian because she does not speak with a typical Asian accent associated with the culture. She also takes offense of they way she has dressed, in her words she says ‘some people don’t have to dress up to prove their Asians’ Zainab reveals that to wear a sari isn’t a fancy dress that you have to wear to prove or to emphasize your ethnicity but a style choice to go with your culture. For the stereotypes is teaches us that there are some of them we need to enforce an ethnicity such as in this case their skin colour, but some that we do not necessarily need, the sari and accent.

Ethnicity

Within british TV ethnic minorities are portrayed through their stereotypes such as;

Group	Stereotypes
mexicans	Ponchos Nachos Tequila slammers
Irish	Guinness Potatoes  Leprecorns Gypsies Red hair Accent  Called paddy
Catholics	Close-minded
Indians	Curry Wear hijab Henna Arranged  Marriages Lots of children
Americans	Ignorant Heavy  Eat burgers Racists Patriotic
English	Snobs Cups of tea Chavs  Union jacks Chips Everyone owns a mini cooper
Black people	Bandannas  Violent  Athletic Criminals

 

Kidulthood

The first camera angle in the movie is an eye-level one but from a far distance or safe distance, i say this because it seems as if it could be from another child in the playground. This is also emphasised in the editing, it is very fast past and your only on one section for a few seconds which makes you think its a student because they are quickly looking around and seeing different people in the playground.

throughout this sequence it keeps cutting to another scene of a drill, the camera angle here s a close up all you can see is the drill, it doesn't let you in to who is using it or what he is drilling. this does two things it build suspense by making viewers question what he or she is doing. it also shows that there is calm even though outside is chaos.

the story-line then moves onto a scene inside the class room. its just about when a fight is going to take place. when the fight starts up the camera angle changes between each person, when is from the point of view of the girl getting beaten up the camera is low down and looking up. on the other hand when its the bully it is high looking down. this shows that the bully is in control of her victim it also goes along way to show each of their social status.

other camera angle used during the fight is one through the eyes of the bully victim, in this section it shows the bully and her friends coming right up close to the camera, this is to show how they were in her face. it also makes the watcher feel the intimidation of what the bullies have inflicted on her victim.

Kick-Ass

Find out how it was produced, what it was based on, problems in making the film. The directors views on the British film industry, how they saved money, the tech they used, how the films rating affected its performance, controversy surrounding the film, promotion and the soundtrack.

The film was produced at the same time as the book/comic was re-released, but they chose to change the film for the comic because Matthew Vaughan ‘doesn’t do happy endings’. He changed it so that the lead got the girl, unlike in the book. Another reason for why he had to do this was to gain money to make the film in the first place.

The film was based on the comic book which was first released in 2008 and the last one only six week before the film came out, as I have said the comic and the films are slightly different as they have a different ending. 

The makers of the film came across a few problems, the main being that they had cast a 12 year old girl that swears. This then slapped a certificate 15 onto the film. The problem was not only did people disagree with the swearing but as the film was marketed at 14 year old boys, they had released a film that the target audience couldn't view.

The director views on the British film industry is one that in a few years time (he suggest 3) that Britain could have the worlds largest film industry. He says that to have this we need directors to stop taking big sums of £20 million up front and only take £5 million. At the moment he thinks we have the best films but just no industry. 

To save money the team chose to shoot the film in the UK instead of Manhattan where the film is set. To do this they had to use huge green screens and high resolution pictures that of Manhattan that were edited to make it seem as if it was actually shot there. The cost saving here was that it would too expensive to get streets closed down in Manhattan. 

The tech involved with the film was state of the art ive explained why they had to go about shooting in london and how they did it but they also did something with the sound. They made sure they got the best sound recording so that the actors didn’t have to re-record the sound and try to put the same emotion into at a later stage.

I have already gone over this but having a rating of a 15 made Kick-Ass a non four quadrant film before it was even shown. In the section that couldn’t see the movie was what the film was actually made for young teenage boys. 

Controversy over this film obviously come from the fact they have 12 year olds swearing but only is it this that makes people have a controversial thought about the film. It also features the same 12 year old getting shot by her dad. The film also seems to almost glorify crime and weapons with showing a room full of guns in several of its scene. The room belongs to the ‘good guys’.

The marketing and promotion of the film was seen to be bad in the eyes of its creators. They believed it had been wrongly marketed. In the trailers they played on tv it showed all the humor of the film, which in normal circumstances would of been good, but it made movie goers to think it was another spoof such as the ones like, date movie and superhero movie. This may be because the comic was unknown to allot of people so unlike the spiderman and hulk movies people didn’t have a background for their ideas to grow from.

The soundtrack for the movie had many different and ranging artists. It has artist ranging from The Prodigy to Elvis, this does add to the dimensions of the film but like most thinks about the film it has been criticized because it isn't its own music’. The opening scene for example closely resembles the opening scene to superman with the clouds and writing. The same music a superman confirms that it is a copy of the film. This does nothing to dispel the thoughts that the movie is nothing but a spoof.

Moon - Audience

Before people even got to watch the film a large proportion of its potential audience was knocked out, this was because the film was certificated a 15 (doing this it also made the film not a 5 quadrant one). Using the genre of Sci-Fi it took out a further lot of the potential audience, these being mainly women as the Sci-Fi area is seen more of a mans cup of tea.

Sam Rockwell (Sam Bell) is not a famous person within the movie bizz, this meant that people didn't primarily go to see him, this may have been different if the films main character was someone like Brad Pitt. It does however have Kevin Spacey as the voice of Gerty and this may have brought in some of the final viewers.

The budget also let the film down in two other areas, firstly he could afford to properly advertise the film, the only way people got wind of it was him talking at Sci-Fi functions and then relying on word of mouth to spread the word. however he did do a talk at NASA about how believable the film was and this may have attracted the American viewers (he also used American Phrases such as 'God bless america'). He also couldn't afford decent special effects and the biggest cost of special effects (and the highest costing scene in the film) was when he was playing table tennis with himself and the scene lasted only about 5 seconds, all the other time he used a double.

He does use references to other films including '2001 A Space Odyssey' with the line from Gerty 'Im sorry Sam i can't let you do that'. Other references come in the song and at the start him wearing a t-shirt saying 'Wake me up when it's time to quit'.

Moon

This film was created by Duncan Jones and stars Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey (he was only as the voice for the robot "Gerty") he also was only on set for half a day and yet still got the highest pay. The actor Sam Rockwell was originally wanted by Duncan Jones but Sam felt it wasn't for him but still wanted to work on a film with/for Duncan so they went away and Duncan came back with the script for Moon.

Moon only had a budget of $5,000,000 and to cut costs Duncan had such a small cast as well as being filmed in only 33 days. including in the small price Duncan chose to use actors instead of digitised images as they were cheaper to use. Bill Pearson created a  360-degree set of the moon. Even in the editing phase he cut corners by using companies such as Cinesite which is notorious for their cheeper costs for its independent films. Finally they kept costs down by not sending any reales to the OSCAR committee (so its difficult to tell how well the professional world though of it).

All in all the film took  $9,747,108 worldwide and the UK took almost a 5th of that. Even though it seems the film made a $4.5 million profit, Jones is still trying to pay of his debts. this is because he had to borrow allot of money from different places and with interest it mounts up.

Casualty - Series 25 Episode 1

This is the first episode of the 25 series long tv hospital drama 'Casualty' this episode is entitled 'No Place Like Home'. in this episode i could see allot of Vladimir Propps' theory of their being many different types of people in the programme and these can be seen in nearly all programmes/films, these include people like the hero, anti-hero and villain. All the way up to 32 different ones.


In Casualty i see more than one hero, i see all the doctures, nurses ect to be the heros on the surface but as you look deeper you see that they do have different characteristics.

Here is 'Nick Jordan' played by Michael French, it seems that he is the hero in it because he's the one in the suit and acts like he knows what he is doing whilst still keeping calm. but i feel he is more of an Anti-Hero because in previous episodes he has seen to be doing thing this is very un-hero like such as drugs.

Suzanne Packer who plays 'Tess Bateman' i feel is the donor of the show, not only has she been in the show since 2003 to the present day, she doesn't have a high position and her position is to help the doctors which helps us to form my conclusion. this is emphasised by the fact that she is compelled to help people that she doesn't have to.

Lucy Gaskell is playing 'Kirsty Clements' in the show seems to me to be the princess in this episode, the story of the episode is based highly around her and what happened between her and 'Adam Truman' and how he cant have her, which is what Propp describes as the princess.

Original Theorists

Vladimir propp

View more presentations from Harry Tibbles.


Roland Barthe


- born: 12 November 1915 
- died: 1980
- French theorist, philosopher, critic and semiotician
- he had a license in grammer and philosophy 
- 1953 he made his full length work writing degree zero
- theories: cultural, action, symbolic and enigma 


Todorov


- born: 1 March 1939
- he had influences from the 1960's and further 
- published 21 books
- theories: - stories start with an equal balance of opposing forces 
                - the balance is then thrown by an event 
                - this causes a problem which needs to be solved
- for life on mars: gets trapped in the past through the  car crash and then he tries to solve the problem by getting back to thecurrent day  


Levi-Strauss


- French theorist 
- dies at the age of 100
- around the war period he was very influential 
- theory: there are always binary opposites in films
- life on mars: the obvious contrast between the 70's and the present day 

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

Toy Story 3 - Animoto