Hey guys, it's time for a New Year!

As with all career paths, a video student like myself will always have room for improvement. Showing something about my character (since some can't even do this) I am more than willing to admit from the most base level that I have a lot to improve on still. And this is fine, so long as I am willing to admit and willing to work on it. I do not currently plan to pursue a career in film, but having a broad range of talents and abilities is a desirable thing in the modern work-place.

Last semester we did a variety of projects, some of which I am more proud of than others. Actually... With nearly all of them I am not very fond of my work. As far as school work goes, my favorite project was Blake and I's opera music video. We need to reshoot in order to make it something I am truly proud of, but it may well be the best one of the semester. As far as my biggest project last semester, we had a contract with the FCCJC Junior Cheerleading competition. That took up hours of my life, only to put the entire project on the back-burner. It was rather stressful though, so I am content with stopping work on it for a while.

What did I learn last semester? Not so much as I'd like. I wish I would have learned more about camera-work, being good at it. I wish I would have taken the time to learn to do fancy stuff with Final Cut Pro, to learn a bit about Adobe After Effects. Mostly, I just wish I would have taken the time to learn the things that make one a better student, and a better videographer. However, I did learn about working with clients last semester, which is very helpful. I learned that you have to keep in contact with them (though sometimes they won't communicate back with you...)

This semester, I really am hoping to accomplish a lot more than the last. I want to surround myself more with people who I know to be more skilled, versus people whom I believe to be on a level with me. I can't improve nearly as quickly when I work with people on par with myself. I want to shoot more of the type of video I love most - music videos. A fellow student of mine and myself are into shooting music videos, and are talking of entering the eMagine competition with a music video. I want to do client work with bands, and more besides. My goal this semester is to have a variety of work under my belt, items for my portfolio that can and will show off a broader range of talents.

There is too much that I would like to learn this semester, that I can't really list it all. I want to learn a lot more about camera skill, and even more about the post-production work - sound editing, color editing, all kinds of work. Both parts of the process are entirely vital to make a good film, so one should know how to do both in order to understand. As with the rest in general terms, the pre-production of a project is something I want to get into more. However I feel that does require creativity, which is something I am currently lacking. I am able to act on ideas decent enough, but I have an issue developing those ideas.

I guess to wrap up, I should kind of give how this will even be possible. I mostly already answered in a previous paragraph, but I want to surround myself with people who will benefit me as a student. People that will make me better. I plan to be more open to learning, and I plan to just work harder overall. Just... be a better person, and be a better student.

The Power of Costuming

When one sees a dancer, the first thing they look at is the dancer's make-up (if applicable) and their outfit. Immediately afterwards of course, you notice the lithe movements, but the first thing to stick in your mind is still the appearance of the dancer's costume and make-up. When you watch Star Wars, you immediately know that the sinister guy with black armor is the bad guy, even before he chokes Captain Antilles to death.

The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy based off the books of J.R.R. Tolkein. Throughout the trilogy, one can gather the different societies and stations in life the characters are from. For example, Legolas has long, flowing hair and, although rugged, his outfit definitely hints at his life before the quest: an elvish prince of Mirkwood.

Aragorn, a character initially introduced to us as Strider, is heir to the throne of Gondor, but he doesn't want the throne because he fears making the same mistakes in his kingship as his forebear. When we see Aragorn, his clothing looks dirty and worn. He definitely does not seem the part of a king. When one of the Fellowship dies - Boromir of Gondor - Aragorn takes his bracers and wears those. It's as if he reclaims a little bit of his heritage in that scene. As time continues, he acquires armor for the battle of Helms Deep, and by the time the battle of the Black Gate comes around in Return of the King, he has accepted his heritage. He rides into the battle wearing the full armor of a king of Gondor. His outfit symbolizes his internal transformation from a lowly ranger who makes a bit of difference to the individual people he meets, to his rightful place as one of the greatest kings of Gondor, where he helps to build peace for all the people of Middle-Earth.

There are even examples in my own experience in which costuming is important. During my filming of Torn, we had to make our actress look dead in a scene, and had to make do with the fact that she cut her hair in the middle of the shooting process. It ended up being not as good as we hoped, but I learned a bit about makeup and such. More impressively, ONW Roar was a project most of our entire school participated in. We applied make up to hundreds of students at a time to look like animals, and used that for the artsy idea of the project. The sheer amounts of makeup applied was almost overwhelming, but turned out rather well.

Overall, costuming may be one of the most important aspects of a movie, because it is the part that the audience recognizes and can end up being a symbolization of transformation. To leave you with a question, what costume do you think was the most well done in any movie you have seen? Does it symbolize any sort of transformation like Aragorn, and if so, what changes?

Most Important Part to Translation?

When a book is translated between languages, a lot of information could potentially be lost. So with that in mind, we are going to analyze what the translator should carry over, and the issues faced to a translator.

First off, a book being translated should, without a doubt, carry over the basic plotline. That is a given in any situation. Supporting details and subplots are important to an extent, which depends on the novel selected. For example when translating between languages, it is easier to lose a detail in a book like Eragon - where the plot is quite linear, than A Game of Thrones - where there are literally hundreds of fairly important characters and multiple plot and subplot lines.  On the same subject, dialogue should be pretty faithfully carried over, although vocabulary brings up an entire slew of issues. Different languages have different order of words, like for example in spanish, one would say la Casa blanca, literally "the house white." So in a situation like this, it just has to be translated as accurately as possible in the confinements of the language.

A translator has to make the book readable in a different language. And if he speaks two languages, it seems like an easy task right? From what we just saw previously, we would guess not. An author writes a book with a certain rhythm, a certain prose. A translator has to try to capture the author's style of writing, but in a different language. A word can have an entirely different number of syllables in a translation, a different order again, or any number of things.

So how important is all of this, realistically? So lets say the important parts of a book translation are keeping the prose and style of writing, keeping the plot the way it was written, and ensuring that side details and other important things are captured. How would I personally rate them, being an avid book reader and film student? First things first, the plot has to stay true. No doubt about that. After the main plot, I think making sure that the author's prose is captured. If the vocabulary is entirely different, how would people of different languages and ethnicities enjoy works like Shakespeare, which relies solely on his prose. But another priority on the same topic would be to make sure it is readable by the new audience. Only then do all of the supporting details and subplots become important.

During one scene in the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, one of the main characters, Aragorn, is fighting a warg raiding party.During the battle, he falls off of a cliff, apparently to his death. (Though we find out later he doesn't die.) This scene does not exist in the slightest in the novel. In fact, in the multiple times I have read the novel, I don't recall a warg raid against the Rohirrim at all! There is artistic license for ya!

Let me know of any situations you have where people don't follow artistic license! Have a great one, and I'll see you all tomorrow!

Love Creates Horror

I'm not particularly fond of horror myself, but Stephen King is a world renowned author in the horror genre. He recently came out with his sequel to The Shining, which was written when he was just 28 years old. Doctor Sleep, coming out now that he is 65 years old, is about Danny's character (the kid from The Shining) when he is grown up. He apparently works in a hospice as a care worker. There is a little girl who has the power of the shining, and a bunch of psychic vampires who want to kill her because they feed off of the essence of people like her.

In an interview, King stated that "love creates horror." By this, he is referencing that when writing a horror novel, making the audience absolutely love a character will make the entire idea a lot scarier than jump scares.  Jump scares are essentially becoming void as the audience matures more and more from horror films and movies. For example, in its hay-day, The Terminator could have been considered a scary movie, especially in the scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger's character is being smashed by machines and still chasing Sarah Connor. However, watching it today, it is not nearly as frightening as it once was. The movie Alien is the same way. It is supposed to be a lot of jump scares and such. However, now it is not scary.

Contrast this with The Walking Dead. This show was not even shot to be frightening. However, over the course of numerous episodes you grow to absolutely love the characters. I remember sitting and watching in horror (a different context of the word, admittedly) as T-Dog, a personal favorite character of mine, was bitten by multiple zombies. In every episode of this show, I fear for the survival of every character (besides Rick, they pay him too much to kill him off) because not only are there zombies that could kill them, but also living people who kill survivors. In fact, one of the catch phrases on the posters and t-shirts sold is "fight the dead, fear the living." Basically, this show is 100% proof that by building love for a character, it actually makes the show or movie ten times more frightening.

So what does this mean? It means that jump scares are becoming less popular. They aren't as frightening as they once were, so the world of horror and scares is evolving. And the evolution helps with character development, which is considerably for the better.

Is the book ALWAYS better than the movie?

When an author writes a few words on a page, he does not expect to make a bestseller. Realistically, writing a bestseller happens to very few people right? Now, out of every bestseller that does exist, how many have been turned into films? Now I am going to have to ask you a question: how many awful books have been made into films?

For a book to become a movie, it has to be of crazy high quality. However, as we have discovered in cases like the Eragon adaptation, the movie does not have to be very good. But the real question is whether or not the age-old adage "the book is always better than the movie" is true. To answer this, we must first define what it means for one piece of media to be "better" than the other.

So what does it mean to be better? Instinctively, I want to say that to be better, it has to be more enjoyable to me. But is that better, or just enjoyable? For it to be better, I think it has to be more fully plotted. Well written, whether in the form of dialogue and actions, or a fictional work. All around just a more complete, well created piece. Entertainment is an important factor, but Frankenstein for example was an awful book to me by entertainment standards, yet it is one of the most well-known and highly renowned books of all time.

Art on the other hand, is easy to be defined. Or nearly impossible, depending on how one looks at it. In one sense, art could be anything creatively designed with a solid goal in mind. However, one could argue that anything is art under those terms. A common debate today is if film, books, and video games are considered to be art. Some, like my own stepfather would say that they are not; art can only be limited to paintings and such. The actual camera work in film can be considered art, as he believes photography to be a form of art, but not the film in its entirety. However I would argue that the editing process in a film is considered art, as is crafting a bestselling novel and programming a popular and renowned video game.

Now, this art definition does in fact relate to my spiel on movies and books earlier. Remember when I was talking about what qualities make one book better than another book? I think that with all of the above factors, for a piece of media to be "better" than another, it should be artfully created as well. I can write a novel this week if I wanted. It would actually be really easy. It would be awfully created and definitely not a work of art. The hard part however, is writing a good book.

So I have defined art, what it means to be better, and linked them both. But to get back to the heart of this blog, is a book always better than a movie? I am kind of torn. I would say no, because I have one example of a book that I disliked even greater than the movie edition. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, is an awful book (in my opinion of course). The movie was pretty bad too, but I would much rather watch Frankenstein than read it. But that is really the only example. Eragon, A Game of Thrones, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and countless others all have movie adaptations. None of them have ever been better than the original books. None. The reason I think the movies are always less fantastic, is because oftentimes they take the "creative license" and almost completely rewrite the plot. Examples? Percy Jackson and the Olympians and Eragon. Both of these almost completely rewrote the storyline.

In fact, the best movie adaptations for a book that I have seen still don't come close to the majesty of the books (in my selected genre of reading.) The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and directed by Peter Jackson is one of the closest adaptations, and probably my absolute favorite film trilogies ever created. A Song of Ice and Fire, better known by the HBO series name of A Game of Thrones is by far the closest film adaptation to the book series. Of course, they have 10 hours of air-time to make it the best adaptation, but even so. The book is still better than the TV series.

So what does all of this mean, and what is the final verdict? While it is possible for a film to be better than a book, the occurrences are few and far between. But that is just my opinion! Comment on here your favorite book that has been made into a movie, and tell me which version of the story is better!

One Blog to Rule Them All

My name is Robert Maldonado, a high school film student in the mystical land known only as Kansas. I enjoy making films, watching films, and studying films. Favorite Films? Braveheart and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Who else is excited for the next Hobbit movie?