Conventions of the Superhero Genre
Content:
Production Techniques:
Ex. Tony Stark's ship in Avengers: Endgame (2019) is in space; these visuals most definitely cost a lot.
Django Unchained is one of my favorite movies of all time. The classic revenge story and rise of a hero will never get old, and that combined with it being a Western, as well as a Quentin Tarantino film all add up to create a masterpiece in cinema. Representation is a huge part of this movie because the whole plot is based on subverting stereotypes. Racism was extremely prominent in 1858 America, especially in the South. We see a lot of that within the plantation culture of rich white men. Slavery was also still a thing as this was two years before the civil war. In this post, we will discuss two major characters in the story who highly contrast each other and their representation throughout the film.
Dr. King Schultz is one of the two protagonists, a German dentist who is also a bounty hunter. At the beginning of the film, he rescues and pays our main character Django, who is a slave, in exchange for help tracking down his former owners. They journey together and become partners, rejecting any anti-black laws there are at any establishment they visit. Schultz is a break from how most white men are depicted in the film because he opposes racism. He sees Django as a fellow human being and juxtaposes all of the white men who often always show hatred towards him because he isn't a slave.
Speaking of the evil slave owner, the next character I want to discuss is Calvin Candie. He owns a plantation called Candyland and takes pleasure in hosting "Mandingo fights", where slaves fight bare-knuckled with each other to the death. He always dresses up in the finest clothing, and his character represents the racism of rich white men in the South. He views his slaves simply as toys for the white man's amusement and always presents himself with a charismatic demeanor towards other rich white men. This demeanor is shown towards Schultz, who claims to want to buy one of his prized fighters as a distraction for Django to find his wife and rescue her. He tours him of his Mandingo operation whilst demeaning the fighters. Schultz offers to buy his wife alongside a fighter, for a decent amount of money. Once finding out about the plan that Schultz has to rescue Django's wife, he becomes filled with rage and threatens to murder her if he doesn't pay the full sum only for her.
In the last two weeks, we moved on from editing to focusing solely on sound design. It was actually very interesting, and you never realize just how much sound contributes to a movie until you actually learn about it. We learned about several sound types: Synchronous sound, Asynchronous sound, Diagetic, Non-Diagetic, Sound motif, Sound perspective, Sound bridge, Voiceover, Addressing audience, Direct address, Narrating 'I', Epistolary voice, Score, Music, Sting, and Sound effects. That note taking session was long....
Anyways, soon after that we started our next project: The Sound Project. This would have us produce a scene without any visuals, only relying on audio to tell a story. The first class was spent on brainstorming and creating a document outlining every sound effect used throughout the project. We were assigned random partners, and I got partnered up with someone who is actually very good at this type of thing. We immediately got to brainstorming, and by the end of class we had our outline. We were going to do a hotel check-in scene.
The next few classes were spent working on the project. We were going to edit it all on Adobe Premiere Pro. Since we didn't know how to make a group project that both of us could work on, my partner volunteered to edit the project as I sourced the audio files. The outline made this process a whole lot easier, since it served as a checklist throughout the project. This was extremely efficient, and we got about a third of it done during the first class. In between that first and second class, I also recorded a handful of my own authentic audios for the car sound effects featured in the project at the beginning, as well as some voice acting and some Foley for key sounds. By the end of the next class, we were just about done. All my partner needed to do was finish up the last few seconds and record some of her own Foley and then that was it. We finished a few days ahead of the due date, which made this my most stress-free project yet! We planned ahead exactly what we were going to do, and executed it perfectly.
I think what we did well was planning and executing said plans. I also think we were very organized. I honestly don't think there is much to improve when it came to this project!
In this post I will finally share my idea for the CCR. I have been pretty excited to write out this idea, since it has been in my head f...