#How to make short films without budget | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

kimberleyjean · 1 year ago

Text

The Ineffable Detective Agency Presents: What Happened in Before the Beginning?

Hello Good Omens clue hunters and detectives! I’m super excited to share what we’ve discovered in Before the Beginning. Read on if you want to see what no one else has spotted yet!

To put a long story short, something is “up” about Good Omens - Season 2 in particular. While the eagle-eyed have documented a number of odd things in Season 2 already (summarised here), I’ve never seen anyone call into question what was presented during the Before the Beginning scene. Let’s take a closer look shall we?

Remember this scroll to start the nebula? Well, guess what - it changes!

Here’s the first scroll we see on screen, I’m going to call this the “new” scroll. Note the straight edges and completely pristine look, like brand new paper:

Then suddenly, here’s what it looks like as they start up the nebula:

Whoa, that’s looking pretty old and ragged! It’s got rips, a bit of discolouration, several wavy bends running through it. That’s a significantly more worn scroll than we were just shown. Let’s show that in close up just to be sure:

Yup, that’s certainly not meant to be the same scroll!

During this scene, the old scroll is seen again during the close up of Aziraphale holding it. However, once Crowley instructs him to put it down, it’s the new scroll again. (And then at this point it disappears into hammerspace like in a cartoon, or drifts off into space, never to be seen again).

So... there's TWO scrolls?

Well, yes, but also, no. If you're wondering, “Are they both real scrolls? Are you telling me they had two on set?” the short answer is no, this was done with VFX. To explain why we know this, I’m going to hand over to our resident Art Director, @noneorother:

Hi all, @noneorother here. Sure. So it's mostly to do with the shadow inside the scroll curls and under the right hand side curl. You can see when it's the real scroll that the shadows are all orange or brown, because of sub-surface scattering:

It happens when light partially passes through a thin porous object like skin or paper. So when the scroll is new, it's real. Where they've added "scroll is old now" VFX on top of the shots, it's very well tracked, but there's no more sub-surface scattering because it's VFX, not filmed. So the shadows are now base-black inside the curl and to the right hand side of the image. This is the VFX scroll here:

They already perfectly tracked the astronomy animation into the center of the scroll, so they had all that tracking info just sitting around. It wouldn't have been very expensive to add the "old scroll" the way they did it (the cheap and dirty way).

Thanks @noneorother! So there we have it folks, the Good Omens team have intentionally designed some shots with the old-looking VFX scroll and some without. They had the assets created for the old scroll and the tracking to place it correctly, so how could they possibly make the “mistake” of adding it sometimes but not others? This wasn’t a budget thing. If it were budget related, they wouldn’t have created the old scroll VFX in the first place.

Personally, I think this discontinuity was to tell us, the dedicated rewatchers, that what we initially saw in S2 was not the whole story. There is something else at play during S2. Something that, depending on what we find, may make S3 even more enjoyable.

So, why do this? Is this scene being conveyed from different perspectives? Are we viewing different characters’ memories of the same event? If so, why would that be important? Is someone tampering with past events? Did “Before the Beginning” happen multiple times and we’ve seen a spliced together version? What do you think?

One More Question...

The other question worth asking here (which Aziraphale helpfully asks for us) is “which way up” does the scroll go? Look closely at the central rings.

Is it the top version (small rings to the right)?

Or the lower version (small rings to the left)?

... and what happens if you create a nebula upside down, I wonder? Here I’m reminded of the Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square lyrics:

The moon that lingered over London Town Poor puzzled moon, he wore a frown How could he know we two were so in love The whole darn world seemed upside down

In a season where something is going "Down in the Up", and the answer to Gabriel’s mystery is achieved by turning the delivery box upside down, this is yet another up-down reversal we can add to the list!

..................................................................................

If you’ve been following our Good Omens posts up until now, you’ll be aware that this is not the only time scenes have been inconsistent or discontinuous. If this is new to you, please check out my summary post on Season 2 discontinuity here. For more of our posts, plus a collection of Clues and metas from all over the fandom, see here.

However, there is still more to come, so watch out for future updates. If you’re not currently puzzling over Good Omens and would like to join in, please do! We’d love to hear what you find - you can use the tag #ineffable mystery.

Special thanks to @noneorother, @embracing-the-ineffable, and to all the other lovely people at @ineffable-detective-agency (@theastrophysicistnextdoor, @ghstptats, @somehow-a-human, @lookingatacupoftea, @dunkthebiscuit @havemyheartaziraphale, @komorezuki, @251-dmr, @maufungi).

#ineffable mystery #good omens #good omens meta #ineffable husbands #aziraphale #crowley #before the beginning #good omens clues #good omens details #good omens analysis #good omens season 2 #ineffable detective agency #go meta #go 2 #good omens discontinuity #good omens speculation #good omens vfx #milk vfx

210 notes · View notes

onyichii · 2 months ago

Text

Annecy & Ankama

I am at the ANNECY ANIMATION FILM FESTIVAL in Annecy France.

I watched the first 10 mins of wakfu season 5, welsh & sheddar, and etc.

All i have to say is...

Wakfu - I think they showed the scrapped version that had nothing to do with the Brotherhood of Tofu. It was interesting and a nice build to the world. I think it would make for a good mini seperate series.

Welsh & Shedar - It was very anime styled. Personally, I like the original Ankama art style (xaxaxa style). It sticks out when put next to modern Japanese anime, but with this style, it looks the same as the others. I don't really watch anime so I have not much to say. Not a big fan of the story structure (some sequences felt dragged). For anime lovers, it could be interesting, but I will not be tuned in.

Morkishen - This looked fun. It was a comedic-action about a skull guy who wants his own dungeon. There is a iop in the series (of course). I can see this as a short (like the mickey mouse shorts—no more than 4 mins) NOT as a full series.

We also got a QnA after the showings. There are a lot of questions I wanted to ask like…

According to fans online, there is a lot of inconsistency what do you have to say about that?

Wouldn’t the Sadidas be okay in the great flood since plants adapt over time?

Even without the eliacube/eliasphere would you agree that Amalia and Yugo would be a powerful couple since they both wield magic. Given that Yugo can manipulate Wakfu couldn’t he essentially even combine powers with Amalia essentially well

People say that the woman in Wakfu, Eva and Amalia aren’t written well. If Wakfu was never cancelled back in 2009-2011 would we have gotten a more developed storyline for the girls. Would we have learned more about Amalias mother and her influence. How much story was axed? And would you consider doing another manga to fill in those gaps? To better show if Eva even wanted a family, to better show the romantics of yumalia, to give us more papa Ruel.

However, instead I asked,

With the budget, is there plans for a new opening sequence given that an new opening theme has been produced?

The answer to that is

Yes, there will be two introductions. That is according to the person who translated for me (since I don’t understand French either).

I was nervous, and panicked okay. Maybe someone can ask that last one if it hasn’t already been answered (which I’m sure it has).

I got to speak with the Japanese team and they were cool! I wish I got her IG. I did get their signature so when I draw something over it, I'll post it on Twitter.

If the Catsuka dude was there, he probably got all the details. So hopefully he was there and will spill the deets but I think he was elsewhere.

I think this will be my last festival/convention/expo. I am no longer into them like I was 6 years ago. It was cool getting to see Ankama up close. I filled my inner nerdy-teen-girls dream as much as I could. I can close this chapter of my life.

The next time I go to one of these, I will have to be invited.

#annecy #wakfu #ankama

35 notes · View notes

storytellingbadger · 2 months ago

Text

Walking With Dinosaurs 2025: “we think our audience is stupid”

This is not a complimentary review. Beware of misery and spoilers.

In short, all issues circle back to the programme not trusting the audience to get it. Same as a lot of modern film. Explain the joke. Screw nuance. Show your workings. Give an excruciatingly big, face-scrunching wink! It’s dumbed down, not simplified. There’s a cavernous difference.

Let’s get visuals out of the way. Obviously, they’re not groundbreaking. But I’m not going to linger on CGI quality - to me, that’s a secondary issue to pacing/plot/legibility/accuracy/entertainment/etc. That’s just lack of budget. I hope. So put that to the side while the bigger problems take centre stage.

I wasn’t expecting it to be a perfect replica. The original came out in 1999. New facts, new discoveries, new shebang. But if you’re going to base your appeal on it being a sequel of the OG dinosaur documentary, you need to pay at least a token gesture of respect. But it has sod all to do with the old one, aside from the title. Not in format, not in series layout, not in scripting. Not even an updated rendition of the iconic intro.

Missed chance for easy brownie points.

Speaking of format. Personally, I’m really, really not a fan of the modern day dig site cutaways. Not because I don’t want to see that - I bloody do, I want to see every bit of it. I want to see these talented, dedicated humans teach me something new, leave me in awe. Give me a whole programme of that! But I despair of it here on 2 big points.

1: it irretrievably breaks the pacing—and immersion

The beauty of the original was that it was immersive from start to finish. The lack of stop-start means you can get invested in the animals. There weren’t cutaways to dusty dig sites and intelligent people standing around a fossil, pointing and nodding for the camera’s benefit. You saw a dinosaur story based on modern science, and the script/story/visuals trusted you to follow without handholding or storyboarding. What starts as charming in the 2025 rendition becomes quickly irritating.

2: why show dinosaurs when we can kill time with sod all

The real life cutaways are set up to eat time rather than showcase exciting discoveries or professionals at the top of their game. Take Spinosaurus teeth. Conical. Wiggly fish-stabbers. Cool. All that needs in the script is something like a “At first glance, Spinosaurus teeth might not be fearsome bone-crushers like Tyrannosaurus Rex, or flesh-shearing blades like Carcharodontosaurus—but they’re perfectly adapted for snaring their elusive prey.“ Or something similar written by a documentary expert. Cut to Sobek hunting Onchopristis. Ta da. Instead we get a whole modern section of paleontologists finding a tooth, talking about how crocodilian it is, but then never actually explaining why that shape is efficient at catching and holding slippery, thrashing prey. Even if they had, instead of showing the facts at work with the dinosaurs, the palaeontologists are filmed talking about it instead.

Masterclass of tell, don’t show.

These are clever, specialised experts who know their shit. If you insist on cutting to them every 5 minutes, let them tell us something new, not force the poor buggers to give a paint by numbers stilted lecture.

Why not do as many other modern BBC nature documentaries have done, and have the nature documentary on first, then a “behind the scenes” feature with all the real-life work at the end? Instead of this clunky, tedious Frankenstein effort of people trying to look dramatic flying a drone or pretending it never occurred to them before this exact moment that Spinosaurus’s sail may have been used in threat displays. It’s insulting to the audience and the palaeontologists.

Somehow making a dinosaur dig site boring is quite the achievement, I suppose.

The “treating the audience like morons” theme pervades the entire script. It’s stunted and prescriptive, despite Bertie Carvel’s seemingly sincere efforts in making it compelling. Constantly telling the audience what to think instead of setting the scene, dropping facts and trusting us to have the grey matter to understand.

The original was refreshingly bereft of faux theatricality. It wasn’t overtly contrived or exaggerated. Never mind the dinosaur liberties taken in the new one (baby Triceratops dodging a biting Tyrannosaurus on repeat like a Marvel movie because “she’s nimble?” Give me strength.) And god help the eye-rolling cliches, fuck me. I dread to think how many times the line “but danger is never far away” gets used. Could be a good drinking game.

To be clear, I am not a paleontologist. I like dinosaurs, I’ve watched a lot of documentaries and read some books and papers. I’m a sad, wet enthusiast, nothing respectable. But there’s nothing here that made me sit up and go “holy shit.” There’s material in here presented as ground breaking that I recognise from 2011’s Planet Dinosaur, for god’s sake.

Ultimately, this isn’t a sequel to Walking With Dinosaurs. It’s not even an homage. It’s a “that’ll do” dinosaur programme making convenient use of an iconic title. It would’ve been better off standing alone rather than piggybacking off the original, in which it disappointingly falls off the wagon and just looks silly for the effort.

Worth a watch? Sure, if you’re really keen and starved for paleocontent. Easily better than Dinosaur Fight Club or whatever “is Megalodon still alive” bollocks occasionally eating air time. A worthy successor to the Walking With Dinosaurs mantle? Let’s cutaway to my workings…

…

No.

#walking with dinosaurs #walking with dinosaurs 2025 #walking with dinosaurs 2025 is mid #at best #not a worthy successor #I’m devastated #I was so excited #had it in my calendar and everything #I wanted so so so badly to love it I really did #not my usual content

31 notes · View notes

7andaswitch-blade · 3 months ago

Text

Apple dropped the ball pretty hard with Murderbot.

They got excited about the project and threw too much budget at it. What they have is a shiny turd that's being written very poorly. And I get why, the books are very short and direct. They take place mostly in Murderbot's head and they didn't know how to do that without near constant voice-over. The peripheral characters are written very thinly because, ultimately, Murderbot doesn't want to know them. So the show made them act like liberal art college students and turned the cringe up to 11. Now, I don't know if this is because they think these are good characters or because they tried to make the kind of people that would make Murderbot uncomfortable, but it's irritating.

The biggest disappointment for me is the Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon scenes. If I had a chance to watch this before they released it I'd have screamed in their faces "LESS IS MORE". Those scenes are such visual noise they're painful to look at. I had always pictured Sanctuary Moon like a Dark Shadows type soap opera, with cheap production and fuzzy filming. I know it wouldn't make sense to the time period the series is meant to be in, but it would simply work better on screen.

The real test will be how they handle ART, if the show even gets that far. The first book was fine, but there wasn't much to it. They should have knocked that out quickly to get Murderbot off the planet and meeting the more interesting characters. So far this show is a complete fumble.

#/rant #murderbot #the murderbot diaries #apple #orange #pear #banana

20 notes · View notes

ros3mari3 · 6 months ago

Text

Problematic Stunt Double

Bucky Barnes x reader

AU : Stunt double ! Bucky x director ! reader.

3rd Person POV.

This is sort of inspired by the movie Fall guy !!

The movie set was buzzing with the usual frenetic energy, a sharp contrast to the atmosphere that had settled into Bucky Barnes's life over the past year. Once, he’d been in the heart of it all, pushing the limits of his body with each death-defying stunt, always striving to make the impossible look effortless. But that was before the accident.

Before everything changed.

A year had passed since the accident. A year since he’d stepped away from the adrenaline rush, the thrill of taking on impossible stunts. Since the moment when his body had betrayed him, leaving him with a broken back and ribs. The injury had been a wake-up call that he wasn’t invincible. And so, he had left the world he knew, cut ties with the people who once called him family, and disappeared into the shadows.

But the world, as it always did, had moved on. And now, after months of introspection, Bucky found himself on a familiar movie set once more, only this time, it wasn’t for a stunt—it was for a comeback.

The call had come unexpectedly, an offer to return to a big-budget action film, and against his better judgment, he had accepted. Maybe it was the desire to feel useful again. Or maybe it was the longing for the adrenaline, that high that had become a part of him. But what he didn’t know was that the director of this new film was someone he hadn’t seen in over a year.

Someone he had left behind.

The set was massive, more extravagant than anything Bucky had worked on before, but there was no mistaking the feeling in his chest as he walked toward the familiar scene. The smell of the stage, the hustle of the crew—it all felt like home. Until he saw her.

Y/N.

She stood on the opposite side of the set, clipboard in hand, directing the actors through the scene with the sharp focus he remembered all too well. She was wearing black cargo pants, a loose top, and her hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. The sight of her took him by surprise, like a punch to the gut.

Their eyes met for a brief moment, and he could see the flicker of recognition in her gaze, but there was no warmth behind it. No smile. She stood stunned for a moment, before turning back to the crew, as if nothing had happened.

Bucky felt a pang of hurt. He hadn’t expected a warm welcome, but the coldness stung.

The last time they’d seen each other, it had been a bitter goodbye. He had pushed her away, knowing that his world was falling apart and he didn’t want to drag her down with him. He couldn’t bear the thought of her seeing him break.

But now, as he stood here, so close yet so far away, he regretted it.

The first few days on set were nothing short of awkward. Every time Bucky tried to speak to Y/N, she deflected him, her professional mask firmly in place. She didn’t want to talk about the past. She didn’t want to talk about why he left without a word or how he cut off all contact.

Her focus was on getting the stunts right. And Bucky? Well, he was struggling. His body wasn’t what it used to be. Every time he attempted a stunt, he faltered. There were cracks in his confidence that hadn’t been there before, and every failure felt like a personal blow.

"You’re going to need to redo that," Y/N said, her voice steely as she glanced over at him from the director's chair. The words didn’t sting so much as the way she said them, as though she expected nothing less than perfection from him.

Bucky clenched his jaw, fighting the frustration that simmered under his skin. He knew he wasn’t the same, but the way she kept pushing him made him feel like he’d never left.

He stood there, chest heaving, sweat dripping down his face, trying to steady himself. His body was sore, but he wouldn’t admit defeat—not yet.

He nodded sharply, the words caught in his throat. "Again."

The stunts continued like that for days—one attempt after another, with Bucky failing more than succeeding. Each time, Y/N's voice cut through the air like a whip.

"One more time," she said, her eyes hard and unyielding. "That was better, but your timing��s off. Again."

Bucky had been thrown from a car, leaped off a building, and narrowly avoided being hit by a speeding truck all within the span of an hour. And now? Now, he was running through the same damn scene over and over, and it wasn’t getting easier.

"Come on, Bucky!" Y/N yelled from her perch, her arms crossed as she observed. "This is the seventh time!"

Bucky let out a loud groan, standing up slowly, his body stiff with exhaustion. "You’re killing me, Y/N. You know that, right?" he called back, his voice full of dry humor.

Y/N raised an eyebrow, never one to back down. "You wanted to come back. Remember that when you’re crawling out of here in a body cast."

Bucky shot her a look of pure exasperation. "You know, some directors give their actors water and breaks, not... eternal suffering."

Y/N smirked, her eyes sparkling with that same sharp wit he’d missed. "If you wanted a break, you should’ve stayed retired, Barnes."

Nightfall came, and after another grueling day of filming, the crew finally wrapped up for the night. Exhausted and frustrated, Bucky retreated to his hotel room, his mind still reeling from the day’s mistakes.

His body ached, a constant reminder of why he had retired in the first place. He’d been living on borrowed time, and now he was paying for it.

But then, there was a knock on his door.

He opened it to find Y/N standing in the hallway, her arms crossed over her chest, looking as weary as he felt.

"Can we talk?" she asked, her voice low, almost vulnerable.

Bucky didn’t hesitate. He stepped aside, letting her in. The door clicked shut behind her.

She lingered for a moment, unsure of what to say. She hadn’t come here for answers, not really. But she had to understand. She had to know if the man who walked out of her life a year ago was still the same one standing before her now.

Bucky, for his part, wasn’t sure how to begin either. The silence stretched between them, both of them unsure of how to break it, how to fix the cracks that had formed.

Finally, Y/N spoke, her voice softer now. "You’ve been struggling with the stunts. I can tell. I am partially for my actions today, I guess I just wanted you to feel the same pain you left me to deal with, alone." She paused, her gaze meeting his. "You’re not the same as you were before."

Bucky swallowed, his throat dry. "I know. I thought I was ready. But I’m not."

Her eyes softened, a flash of something that resembled sympathy crossing her face. But it was quickly masked by her professional demeanor. "Then why come back? Why put yourself through this?"

Bucky’s jaw tightened. "I didn’t have anything else," he confessed, the words slipping out before he could stop them. "I thought… I thought maybe if I came back, I could prove to myself that I wasn’t broken."

Y/N’s expression faltered. She stepped closer to him, her voice quieter now. "You’re not broken, Bucky. You never were."

His breath caught in his throat. She was so close now, her warmth radiating off of her, and for the first time in what felt like forever, he let himself feel something other than pain.

"I pushed you away," he said, his voice thick with regret. "I didn’t want to drag you down with me, but I didn’t know how to handle it. I couldn’t… I couldn’t let you see me like this."

She reached out, her fingers brushing against his arm. "You don’t have to be perfect. Not for me. Not for anyone."

Bucky looked at her then, really looked at her—the woman he’d loved, the woman he’d left behind. She had every right to hate him, to hold onto the anger and disappointment. But she didn’t. And that was all the answer he needed.

Without another word, he closed the space between them, his lips finding hers in a kiss that was tentative at first, as if they were both testing the waters of their long-lost connection. But then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, the kiss deepened, the years apart fading into the background, leaving only the raw need to feel each other again.

When they finally pulled away, both of them were breathless, their foreheads resting against each other.

"I missed you," Bucky murmured, his voice hoarse, every word soaked with longing. "I missed you so damn much. I… I thought I could handle being without you, but I was wrong. I can’t."

Y/N smiled softly, her hand resting against his chest. "I missed you, too, Bucky," she whispered, her voice just as full of the ache he felt. "But I never stopped believing in you. I never stopped waiting."

And for the first time in a long time, Bucky felt like maybe, just maybe, he was ready to try again. Ready to heal. Ready to be the man he used to be. With her by his side.

#love #comfort #fanfic #fanfiction #x reader #bucky barnes #marvel #sebastian stan #angst #not angst #stuntman #director #acting #3rd person pov #injury

22 notes · View notes

mazalejeenekasong · 3 months ago

Text

How Eshwarprasad Built EP Ka Meter Films: From Smartphone Dreams to Real Stories

Introduction: You Don’t Need a Big Budget to Tell Big Stories Big dreams often get delayed because we think we need big resources.But the truth is, creativity starts where excuses end. Here’s how I, Eshwarprasad, founded EP Ka Meter Films with just a smartphone and a love for storytelling. The Beginning: Filmmaking with a Smartphone I didn’t have money for fancy cameras or lighting…

View On WordPress

0 notes

epkameterfilms · 3 months ago

Text

How Eshwarprasad Built EP Ka Meter Films: From Smartphone Dreams to Real Stories

View On WordPress

0 notes

sepublic · 8 months ago

Text

Seeing creators discuss the problems of production and executives, it’s made me come to a bitter realization;

Anyone could write the greatest, most satisfying, most compelling story in the world with just a word document, infinite pages, and infinite time.

Anyone could create the greatest show or film in existence with all of the budget and time they need to iron out the details and revise, or to get a certain thing done.

But that’s not what happens at all. Every creator’s going to have to deal with time constraints. They have to worry about the budget. They’ll have executives. They don’t have all the time in the world to go through every draft needed at their luxury, they have to settle for their first idea and work with it. They’ll be stressed, it’s a job for them and they need a break rather than to use that time to think about their work more. You’ll have a plan for five episodes only to have to do it in one.

It takes an actually good writer to work with limitations, to adapt to new changes, to keep themselves open. Planning is good but it really is necessary to be able to write on the fly. You’ll have to leave things out, you’ll have to go with second instead of fifth drafts. The ability to make the right sacrifices is key. But as much as you agonize over what could’ve been, if you play it right, the viewer won’t notice a thing.

(Sometimes they will. It really boils down to the artist’s skill and the extenuating circumstances. Sometimes even the best writer can’t pull off a feat in such a short amount of time.)

You’ll be surprised by what happy accidents occur all the time, often as a result of compromises. Sometimes you’ll have to do X not because it’s great for the narrative but for a more banal logistical reason, such as in the writing or the filming. The B-plot is half-baked because you had to trim it down for time, so you might just cut it out and so the A-plot has more time to breathe.

The writing has to make sense when going from Point A to B, you can’t just throw in a bunch of disparate scenes and information, they need to flow and connect together. Is this a Binge format show where it’s one huge continuous episode, or is it episodic and they’re all separate, with some overarching stuff? You’ll have to let the audience draw their own conclusions, hope they can make connections and fill in the gaps as you focus on what’s strictly necessary.

This is why Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! is a great show. This is why I quote Dana Terrace, “Limitation breeds innovation.” It’s never going to turn out the way you want it to, even if you could easily do it by yourself. Because you won’t have the space or budget to do it. Or because you’re just so tired after a long day’s work that you don’t have the fresh mind to look at the story from another perspective and ask this simple question, especially after answering ten other simple questions. The script has already been submitted to be animated/filmed when you realize so it’s too late.

This isn’t to say that media criticism isn’t warranted. Some people couldn’t get stuff done even with all the time and budget in the world. But again I think it helps to better appreciate the process behind creation instead of taking it for granted, how creators have to wrangle a million different factors, and leave some to others in the process to interpret.

It’s easy to be the audience who has the luxury and no pressure to imagine it in their head or make a million small adjustments, to poke at little details. But imagine having to build that from scratch, instead of just standing on the shoulders of others! And isn’t established canon itself a limitation to work with, rather than the freedom of empty space? Perhaps canon does breed innovation in the fan, who otherwise would not be inspired without it.

#Ramblings #Writing

38 notes · View notes

sideprince · 19 days ago

Note

I read your posts about HP films and I really love them. They're very interesting and detailed and you point out many things and problems I never noticed before. I'd love to read your thoughts about the end of DH2, mainly the King's Cross scene and H&V duel. KC scene doesn't explain anything, nothing is said about Lily's sacrifice in Harry's blood or Deathly Hallows. Precious screen time is wasted on Dumbledore's lines about help at Hogwarts. And then Harry's stupid comment about Snape's and Lily's patronus. The duel is a complete disaster.

Lily is erased from the films almost completely - she's not in Snape's Worst Memory in OoTP and her blood sacrifice (ie. why Harry to stay at the Dursleys each summer, why Pettigrew cut his arm to resurrect Voldemort, why Voldemort touching Harry caused him excruciating pain, why Harry was tied to life as long as Voldemort was alive) was completely left out and remained unexplained even in the moment when Dumbledore explains everything. Not just in DH2, but in the entire film series through all the moments where it was relevant. In fact, Lily only appears in PS in the Mirror of Erised, and in DH in Snape's memories. She's so unrealized as a character that she can't even fully be the martyr/Mother Mary character she's written as. Whether it was a deliberate choice or just oversight, I think it's indicative of how negligible Steve Kloves considers female characters to be.

This is such a great ask and I can't wait to dive into it, but I have to take a second first to note every appearance of Lily in DH (seeing as her only other appearance in PS is next to James in the Mirror of Erised, and in a photo with him where they're dancing - ie. as one half of a couple. This photo appears again in PoA.). I promise it'll be relevant.

In Snape's memories, we start out with Lily showing a floating and blooming daisy bud to Petunia, who shouts at her and calls her a freak. Lily doesn't defend herself or plead with her sister, she just walks away from her passively. When boy Snape appears (from inside a tree???) and floats a leaf to her, Lily merely smiles. He smiles back. (All of this is filmed with the children looking at each other with big eyes and odd smiles, almost like a horror film, which is certainly a choice.) We then see Lily and Snape lying side by side - Severus calls Petunia ordinary and Lily special, and Lily replies that this is a mean thing to say. The children watch more leaves fly like birds and their echoing, eerie laughter once again feels almost like a horror film out of context. We then see Lily wearing the sorting hat, smiling as it calls out Gryffindor. She smiles at Snape as she walks to the Gryffindor table where James introduces himself politely and she introduces herself with a smile (I guess they weren't going alphabetically). Then Lily and Snape get shoved as they walk side by side without looking at each other, by James and Sirius running past. For some reason young James doesn't wear glasses. Anyway.

Cut to adult James and Lily kissing as they dance in the photo Harry's had since PS. (Then we get a flashback to Trelawney's second prophecy, because why get Emma Thompson in for just a day), and Snape on the hilltop warning Dumbledore. Horribly flattening retouching work is done on Snape's face, making him look like a 90 year old Florida beauty queen who's spent the last of her dead husbands' money on financing her local plastic surgeon's superyacht, because that's where the special effects budget went, I guess. Then follows the completely fabricated scene of Snape walking through the Potters' destroyed house as Lily's voice is heard telling Harry he is loved - we see Harry in a crib, Lily talking to him as if she has all the time in the world. Voldemort then kills her. Bla bla bla, other memories, that's all we see of Lily until we see Snape cradling her dead body which, again, is fabricated and not canon.

In short, Lily has 3 lines of actual dialogue:

"That's mean, Severus."

Her dialogue here is chastising, like Hermione's often is. Her role as a female friend is to keep him in line, as far as Kloves is concerned. Kloves tends to present Women close to the protagonist as mothering, and mothers are there to enforce rules and tell you off. There's no conversation about Hogwarts or the magical world. Lily shows no curiosity, only disapproval. For all the opportunities she could have had for dialogue up until now, this is her first line, and one of only 3.

2. "I'm Lily."

Kloves erases Lily's personality completely. In cutting these moments short for time, both he and the director and editor focus on long pauses and effects like flying willow leaves, and cut out Lily and James' animosity and tension completely. They also cut out any palpable connection in the friendship she has with Snape - on the riverbank they lie side by side without touching or looking at each other; same as they walk through the corridor, they're literally looking in opposite directions. In the process Lily is flattened, which makes the moment when James and Sirius knock her and Snape aside to run past seem odd and out of place. Lily doesn't get to have the fire and sass she does in the book - she has no characteristics other than passivity.

3. "Harry, Harry you are so loved. So loved. Harry Mama loves you. Daddy loves you. Harry be safe. Be strong."

The protection she gave Harry in the book in this moment isn't mentioned. She doesn't protect him, doesn't shield him from Voldemort, doesn't beg for his life, she just bestows love and empty words of guidance, then gets killed without trying to defend even herself. Once again she's a passive woman and is cut down without a fight.

I wanted to highlight how Lily is presented before getting into all the ways the Kings Cross and battle with Voldemort scenes miss the mark, because passivity and misogyny are such recurring issues with how the Harry Potter films are written, directed, and edited, and I think they manifest particularly in the way that a crucial theme and plot point is left out completely due to how the filmmakers in these roles overlook and flatten female characters consistently. This issue goes far beyond the blood sacrifice not being mentioned in Kings Cross, because it's not mentioned period. In order for it to be relevant, Lily would have had to have been presented as someone with a personality and capable of making intentional choices, which isn't hard (the books manage it, and she's barely present in those). The protection of a mother's love is a central theme of Harry Potter, which comes to a head in DH both in how Lily's protection ultimately manifests in tethering Harry to life and allows him the chance to defeat Voldemort, as well as in Molly Weasley killing Bellatrix and Narcissa Malfoy throwing all caution aside to get back to Draco. The convergence of Kloves' inability to understand, let alone convey, a literary theme and his very obvious misogyny ends up rendering the story less meaningful and more confusing than it needs to be.

This lapse in storytelling sets up the Kings Cross scene to let a lot of key pieces of the narrative fall by the wayside. I found a video of the scene here, shoutout to fans of Dutch subtitles:

youtube

I also found a copy of the script that might be legitimate (which it may not be - the scenes are numbered and there are bits of dialogue that aren't in the final film, as well a WB disclaimer on the cover, but the "by screenplay Steve Kloves" on the cover is odd and when a character continues their dialogue it isn't noted, which is a standard thing Final Draft automatically does). The date on the cover is from Sept. 09 which tracks, in any case, and it follows the book more closely than the film ended up doing. Whether the final version is a result of Kloves cutting the scene down or a lot of it getting scrapped in editing is unclear, but I do want to give potential credit where it's due.

In the film version of the Kings Cross scene Dumbledore is presented as wise and all-knowing, holding all the answers and handing them out in response to Harry's questions. The focus of the scene is on Harry choosing death or life and defeating Voldemort. Not much else is mentioned, except Harry asking Dumbledore about how "curious" it is that Snape's patronus was the same as his mother's. The actual meaning of this is left ambiguous (it's also an interesting addition that wasn't mentioned in the book), perhaps because it was never revealed in PoA or since then that Harry's stag patronus is a reminder of his dad's animagus form, so there's no connection made between stag and doe. I wonder sometimes if people who only saw the films see more of a connection between Harry and Snape due to their patronuses, than between Harry and his dad.

In the book version of this scene, Dumbledore allows Harry to figure out many of the answers himself. This works on several levels: it shows Harry's growth and how his relationship to Dumbledore has changed, and reinforces the answer at the end of the chapter that this may all be happening in Harry's head. It also makes Dumbledore more human and mortal, instead of holding him up on the pedestal as the film does.

They discuss the significance of the blood connection between Harry and Voldemort, and Lily's sacrifice and how it tethered both Harry and Voldemort to life while the Horcrux remained inside Harry. In fact, Dumbledore refers to her as "Lily" and not just as Harry's mother, which is a minute choice but nevertheless hints at her being an autonomous person and not just a plot device. They then proceed to discuss Harry's wand and its importance. This leads to them talking about the Deathly Hallows, which leads to Dumbledore allowing himself to be vulnerable with Harry and reveal his desperate insecurity over whether he was any better than Voldemort in his youth. They talk about Grindelwald and the Hallows, and Dumbledore's regrets over his sister's death. Dumbledore acknowledges that power is his weakness and temptation. He admits to setting Snape up with the Elder Wand. Finally, Harry realizes he has to choose between returning to life or moving on to death.

This is the pivotal scene of exposition that the entire book series has built towards and culminates in. Afterwards Harry still has the battle with Voldemort, but the Kings Cross conversation with Dumbledore is where the great questions of the story are answered and the stakes and importance of facing Voldemort are confirmed. It's the moment where Harry gets to choose the peace of death or the pain of life, but just as he sacrificed himself by dying, he will now do so by living. The reasons for it, the understanding that informs his choice, are contained in his conversation with Dumbledore. This conversation is also a result of Snape's final memories. Both that and the Kings Cross scene are oversimplified in the film, stripped of their relevant exposition (both character and narrative), and both minimize Lily or leave her out completely. In Snape's memories she becomes a blank canvas for him to project feelings onto; in Kings Cross she plays no part whatsoever. Once again, in the process of flattening the women of the narrative, the narrative itself is compromised and makes little sense without the book to clarify it.

Harry returns to fight Voldemort, and in the book this fight comes down to the two of them squaring off face to face. Harry chooses to use this moment to urge Voldemort towards forgiveness, sharing the understanding he came to in the Kings Cross scene. In a twist on the usual trope of the villain confessing at the climax of the story how he executed his evil plan because he thinks he got away with it, the protagonist is the one to tell the villain where he went wrong. He openly tells Voldemort that the Elder Wand may not work on him, putting Voldemort's choice to attempt or reject remorse at the fore. Of course, Harry knows he's safe, as is everyone else in the hall, because of his sacrifice - but because this is part of how the ending is constructed, Rowling is able to emphasize the importance of giving people a chance at redemption.

All of this is, in large part, informed by Lily's sacrifice. The fact that Harry understands how it protected him as a baby, and that this same protection is what he's paid forward to everyone present fighting alongside him, is because of Lily, and Harry says openly:

‘You won’t be killing anyone else tonight,’ said Harry as they circled, and stared into each other’s eyes, green into red. ‘You won’t be able to kill any of them, ever again. Don’t you get it? I was ready to die to stop you hurting these people -’ ‘But you did not!’ ‘- I meant to, and that’s what did it. I’ve done what my mother did. They’re protected from you. Haven’t you noticed how none of the spells you put on them are binding? You can’t torture them. You can’t touch them. You don’t learn from your mistakes, Riddle, do you?’

Deathly Hallows, Ch. 36

The other aspect of Lily's sacrifice is that she was able to make it in the first place. Because Snape loved her and asked for her life to be spared, she had the opportunity to step aside but didn't. The overarching theme of love in the series converges on Lily in this moment: love flowed to her and from her. She received love and gave it, and in understanding the significance of both, Harry has expanded the power of that love exponentially and wielded it to protect hundreds of others, limiting Voldemort's power. It's not only he that can't harm the people fighting with Harry in the battle, but none of the people serving him can do so either. Harry has, in effect, created an army impervious to Voldemort's power. All, ultimately, because of Lily.

Harry tells Voldemort this openly and then urges him to feel remorse. This scene isn't about Voldemort, though, it's about Harry - about everything he's learned, not just factually, but emotionally. The Harry in this scene is the person at the completion of his character arc, and every word out of his mouth, every choice he makes, has been built to throughout the series. When he chooses to use Expelliarmus against Voldemort's Avada Kedavra it's because he's choosing to disarm his opponent instead of attack him - he's choosing non-violence instead of violence. He's choosing this approach, and the spell that embodies it, because he learned it from Snape when he was 12. Snape likely chose this approach by the time he taught it to Harry - and the rest of the Dueling Club - because of what Lily's death taught him. Again, Lily is a key influence. In the end, Voldemort is killed by his own spell, not Harry's, and Harry knows this - or rather, he knows that if Voldemort dies in this moment, it will be through his own choice of action, and not Harry's.

The way this is depicted in the film is pretty devoid of most of this, but aside from the dialogue I understand why they made the choices they did. As the climactic moment of the final film in a franchise, it made sense to play up the visuals and have Harry and Voldemort move through the castle, then literally through time and space together, and end up back at the entrance, even if some moments are a bit too on the nose (like when their faces literally meld together). I thought the choice to minimize the audio and dampen the sound effects in the final moments was interesting and creative, and it's one of the few moments in the whole series where tension is embraced and amplified, and it's clever to have done so through a kind of minimalism.

The choices the characters make, whether scripted or following directions or personal choices by the actors, don't really echo anything of their book counterparts, though. I found the extended version of the scene that was shown in IMAX screenings on youtube:

youtube

It shows Harry lying in wait for, and actively attacking Voldemort. Tying him up and restraining him, Voldemort asks him, "why do you live?" and Harry replies resentfully, "because I have something worth living for." Voldemort then hits and kicks him repeatedly, using muggle methods that he, as a character, would never use as he would consider any action that can be done with magic yet isn't to be beneath him. After their death grip flyover tour of Hogwarts, they land and are alone as their final battle moment begins. Because the crowd from the book is nowhere to be seen, the stakes don't feel as high as they could be, and Harry has no opportunity to tell others to stay back - and the camera has no opportunity to portray Harry as the protector behind whom all the people fighting with him are safe. Once again, the films miss an important trick - it can be more effective to illustrate solitude in a populated environment. Voldemort and Harry squaring off in their own space amidst a larger group of onlookers would emphasize their isolation from their respective groups even more, and raise the tension by using a large cast to separate them from.

The spells they cast against each other are non-verbal, so unless we know the story from the book, we don't understand that Voldemort is casting the Avada while Harry is casting expelliarmus. Visually, it's a throwback to GoF (where the spells were cast verbally), but this moment doesn't stand up on its own in the context of this film. Voldemort looks increasingly panicked, but it's unclear why or why he seems weak. The spell breaks, though again, unclear why. Voldemort falters. Cut to Harry, who's turning his head back towards Voldemort, though it doesn't make sense that in this, of all moments, he would look away, and no one else is there so I'm not sure who he's meant to have been looking at. Voldemort gets a second wind, the scene repeats, and basically re-enacts the moment in GoF when the beam from Harry's wand pushed back against Voldemort's. There's no indication that Harry used a defensive spell that backfired on Voldemort, because the visual implication is that he was stronger and his strength won out. It also makes no sense to refer back to the visual from GoF, because the significance then was of the two phoenix feather wands at odds and priori incantatem being triggered.

While I think that Voldemort dying by breaking into a thousand tiny pieces and being carried off in the wind is a much better visual choice for a film than the book version where he drops dead with a "mundane finality," the way Harry achieves this has little substance and shows little of the character arc he's had. I also feel it could have been executed better, ie. more similar to Bellatrix meeting this same fate in the film - had it only been Voldemort's body that disintegrated and we were left with his empty robes on the ground, it would have given us a visual anchor that remained after his departure. Had he broken into pieces like Bellatrix entirely, it would have been more visually satisfying, rather than the camera moving up and away before we could see that he disintegrated entirely, but as it is the camera follows these flakes, which are thin, oddly shaped, and flexible and basically look like bits of skin - which I think they're meant to be, as they're the same pale grey as Voldemort. The satisfaction we might get out of this moment is undercut by the absurdity of watching villain dandruff float by; the final moment of this fight, this crucial scene, is not focused on Harry the bittersweet complexity of his achievement in winning, but on the effectiveness of the destruction that happened at his hands.

What's missing from this scene is Harry's insight. His willingness to allow Voldemort room for remorse. Your ask was profoundly perceptive, because Harry can't be who he is in the book in this scene, can't say what he says, understand what he does, if he can't have those epiphanies first in the Kings Cross scene. But because the Kings Cross scene in the film only focused on his fight with Voldemort, when he arrives at the fight he's only focused on winning, and doing so by killing Voldemort. The fact he's using a defensive spell or why is so irrelevant to the director and producers that it's not even hinted at. It just looks like he and Voldemort have color-coded spells to illustrate their individuality, like the light sabers in Star Wars. The film has no lessons or wisdom to impart to the viewer; it just wants to entertain, and hand the audience a bit of catharsis in a reductive, low-effort way.

While the visuals in this climactic moment are stunning, they're sparse in a lot of the film. In particular I'm frustrated by the moment in Snape's death scene when Harry asks Hermione for a flask and she pulls one easily out of her supposedly bottomless bag instead of summoning it or conjuring one - the visual effects are mostly thought of when trying to distract from narrative shortcomings, but the general approach wasn't one of immersing the audience in a world where magic is second nature (plus, there wasn't much of a budget left after the hatchet job all the retouching they did to make Snape look young on that hilltop). As a result, even though I understand and even agree with some of the special effects choices in the final Harry/Voldemort battle, few of them do any visual storytelling and they certainly don't fill the gap left by skipping over most of the meat and substance of how that scene plays out in the book.

It is, ultimately, a story without much to say. It relies on the audience filling in the narrative gaps by having read the book, and having enough of an emotional connection to the story as it was written to shell out the cost of a movie ticket. The gaps left by leaving Lily out of the Kings Cross and final battle scenes aren't filled, they're left empty and thus wanting. Without her as one of the ultimate cruxes of the story, there's little to work with, so these meaningful scenes end up short and without substance. Kings Cross is a short scene with a lot of pauses and only one topic of conversation, and the battle scene is glossed over with captivating visuals to compensate for the lack of character and narrative arc closure. Of course, these scenes don't need to be verbatim re-enactments of the text in the book, but certainly a better balance could have been struck between adhering to the basic themes and sentiments of the book and what ended up on the screen.

#asks #sigrun23

7 notes · View notes

collecticon-lou · 29 days ago

Text

Prospectives: Studio Series 86 Megatron

So, after years of expecting him, theories of Age of the Primes Megatronus being a pretool for him, and a number of cute leaks, we are finally getting a new, G1-accurate Megatron mold through the Studio Series 86 line. A pretty big deal, too, since basically every G1-adjacent Megatron figure has been reusing that same Siege mold since it first dropped in 2019. So a new figure, hewing much closer to the cartoon model, and on a beefier leader-class budget sounds like a dream come true, right? Well...I have thoughts.

Before this, actually, I was kinda championing a commander-class Megatron, to compliment last year's commander-class Optimus Prime. Granted, back then I wasn't super aware of the intricacies that went into figure classes, and how smaller figures can be sold at a "larger" figure class if it has greater engineering and/or more accessories. Seeing as how this figure scales wonderfully with 86 Optimus, and the theories floating around of a trailer-less Optimus being sold as a leader-class price point, my qualms have been mostly settled. I just like seeing Megatron get as much love as Optimus, ya know?

Now, of course, this isn't a truly accurate figure to Megatron as seen in the 1986 film, given that outside of Masterpiece, no Megatron has been 100% G1 accurate since the original release. Having a gun alt mode kinda does that. That said, there are still a number of nice details present here, such as his tank treads disappearing completely into his legs to better resemble his old gun grip legs, or having an accessory that is basically a scaled version of his original alt-mode, bearing a few minor changes. Honestly, a really clever way to capture the spirit of that classic alt-mode (even if I personally always found the gun alt-mode silly, albeit thematically fitting).

As for his ACTUAL alt mode...still a tank? Seriously? I suppose it is the closest they can get to a gun without BEING a gun, but I'm always gonna be a plane Megatron truther. He should have something like he had in Animated or EarthSpark, spice it up a bit! Points for evoking his Devastation design, but oof that barrel...is the barrel on his back really that necessary for his design? G1 really is the only series that actually had that in his design, hm? Clashing colors aside, the turret doesn't even look that good. Seems both too short and too bulky, which is weird cause as a fusion cannon, it looks perfectly fine. Maybe it's just an issue seeing it through photos, could be better in-hand.

A smaller gripe, but where's his energon mace? Like. he's got this sword he apparently had in the film, but not his mace! "He didn't have the mace in the film", sure, but neither did Optimus have his ax, and yet it was in HIS SS86 release. Like, if they're trying to make this the definitive G1 Megatron, I feel they should have included his second most iconic weapon, especially since they DID do that for Optimus. It's small, yeah, but an indication of how Hasbro favors Optimus over Megatron.

Ultimately...I think I'm gonna pass on this guy. For one, with leader classes now being $60, I'm a bit pickier now on which ones I'll pick up, and I have too many hang ups with this figure to justify this price point. And two, I just don't think I like G1 Megatron that much. I think it's the head sculpt, to be honest; just makes him feel old? Or his face is just too long. If ya don't get what I mean, compare his G1 head to his head from Cyberverse or One. The proportions just feel very wonky, which I get it, it is G1, but I feel the animated models (which this figure is based on) are a bit more consistent for making a character feel even.

At the moment, my current main Megatron on display is the Studio Series Transformers: One figure. Do I want a bigger Megatron? Yes, obviously, so much so that I even considered getting Legacy Armada Megatron, but I ultimately went against it given the price point and the fact I didn't like the Armada design that much. 86 Megatron is basically the same thing here, right down to the figure class and everything. Guess I'll just have to wait for the voyager-class One Megatron they're gonna release in like five years. Seriously, if that figure was just a little bit bigger and more a silver, it'd be perfect. Perfect!

But hey. It is Megatron. They're gonna make more of him, right? Bound to eventually make one I'll like.

#maccadam #transformers #Collecticon Reviews #Prospectives #review #studio series #the transformers the movie #the transformers #transformers g1 #megatron #g1 megatron #studio series 86

9 notes · View notes