Writing Block Appeared!

I have hit a bit of a writers block with the Film review. I have tryed to mix positives with negatives to not create too much of a scathing review. Here's what I have so far:


With Lost finally retiring into cult obscurity with the arrival of the final series, short film directors Lauren Edwards and Kyle Bamford have attempted to construct the same levels of confusion and obscure events— In 4 minutes. Waking up in the middle of nowhere, Jack (Jonny Ellis – Pirates, Ninjas and the Stone) soon finds 2 equally clueless teens in the form of the overly melodramatic John (Tom Bircham) and Matt (Darren Stapleton – Pirates, Ninjas and the Stone). Little known to them, while they stumble helplessly around looking for a way out, a much sinister evil has awakened…
Like its characters, the style of this film wanders aimlessly but bashfully through each scene. Happily this is a refreshing break from the oddly perfume advert smoothness of Lost, but in places the amateur nature is rudely thrust upon its audience with slightly off camera cuts slicing through that low budget charm. It might be that the directors have intended this to be a rebellion against the aesthetic focused cult television productions of today. Yet they have done so in such a vague way, to anyone looking for escapism, this will be taken at face value.
That would be a shame because Edwards and Bamford have made intelligent veiled jokes at the expense of various aspects in modern media that bloat our television screens. One such is the inclusion of the advert ‘Lawyersthatsueforgold’, which pokes fun at the plague of identikit daytime advertisements that circulate for months on end. But in the end the unfortunate thing is these jokes often are better than the more narrative driven parts of the film.

So far it isnt quite right so im going to think about it for a while

Its the Final Poster .. TBC

This is the roughly finished Poster. I looked at other posters including 300 to get a rough idea of the poster to credits ratio. Key ideas I picked up from the poster was the size difference between the Names of cast and crew with their job titles (Names are larger, meaning I made a seperate layer for some areas of text, halved the size and ran it on two lines to match the size of names.

Another feature I added were the Production company logos. They are pretty basic but i think they work well. Because we are parodying Lost, Lauren and I decided to parody their production company names (ABC Studios - CBA Studios (aka Cant Be A(censored)ed) and Bad Robot - Bad Reboot) so I based my designs around simple indicators of each thing. The lazy guy as if he cannot be bothered for CBA Studios and the computer on fire for a bad reboot. I also included the Lawyersthatsueforgold website as most films include their websites in posters and this is the closest to our film website.

I'm Going to speak to Lauren today to make sure that she agrees with my decision for film poster.

Freedom! and No we dont have to edit another 5 series!

We have finished editing our film!! We may make changes but to be honest this is a definate final template if any changes need to be done. Considering the Heroes link, we changed some of the colours to make them seem much more vivid, like a comic. This is what took most of the time as we were often staring at the slow red imovie editing bar to find that it was too bright or vibrant. However in the end it turned out really well. We included some outtakes at the end for the credits as this is twisting a conventional way a parody/comedy series presents its credits. In the film Airplane! and the serie's Allo' Allo' and Dads army they have a 'you have been watching .. ' title followed by clips of the different actors with their names. We incorperated the outtakes instead of serious clips for a comedic effect as other series have done similar. For instance the sitcom 'My Wife and kids' plays some outtakes from the episode as the credits play.



All in all, there has been an obvious improvement through the editing phase of production. The adding of music and sound effects in particular really created tension , and in the case of the advert, a silly but dated feel. Some of the effects and transitions work well to highlight points that weren't so well pointed out in the film (such as Darrens 'talk to plushie' power). We used letterbox and QT margin subtitles to convey the mental conversation between Darren and the plushie. Other special effects we included were the circular highlighting around the hello Kitty after Jonny says 'Oh No!' (Much like a poor japanese dub - not to say this is a bad thing!) to add to the whole comic book feel . Personally i think the editing has been of big importance to the success of our film, however if i had one criticism it would be that perhaps changing the colour values and contrast might make larger playback screens really pixelated.

Attention Duelists! My blog gives me the power to post about Parodies

One parody I know of is the Brilliant Yugioh: The Abridged Series. The maker of this series, Little Kuriboh, has taken original Yugioh Raws (Japanese episodes with no subtitles) removed the sound and recorded the sound for each character. He clearly knows the series well as he often redicules characters for their key traits (ie: one character constantly saying 'Attention duelist' in the actual series)and has worked hard to make sure the voices are similar to the actual characters english voices.
At times he also parodies various aspects of real life. A good example of this is Episode 17:




At 5: 15 LittleKuriboh parodies Mastercard Adverts in the context of the series using Kaibacorp as the basis. As a series he has also parodied various songs (This is My United States of America - Bandit Keiths catchphrase in the Abridged is 'In America , Brooklyn Rage - Copying Poker Face and Im on a Blimp - Lonely Islands Im on a Boat). Additionally he has created 2 Christmas Specials (1 parodying Charles Dickens Christmas Carol and the other parodying Dr Seuss's Grinch).
The Series is an interesting insight into how anime or cartoons are not free from the possiblity of being parodied (within themselves). It is also a testiment to how We- Media can generate popularity and whole new markets for user made videos, as Yugioh The Abridged Series has caused several others to create their own abridged series (Such as 'Team Fourstar'S ' Dragonball Z abridged and Naruto Abridged (Interestingly both of these have been referenced to in Yugioh the Abridged series, with Little Kuriboh making his own parody of the Naruto Parody and referencing Team Fourstar in later episodes of YOTAS)).