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A few recommendations of anime & manga
Here’s a list of a few anime & manga worth watching/reading:
- Tokyo Ghoul (manga) – tragedy
- Original Yu-Gi-Oh manga – similar to Saw
- Clannad + After Story – slice of life anime
- Psycho Pass – Deconstruction of the justice system
- Gintama – the random incarnate, however can be very serious. (My personal favourite.)
Media Profile Pics.
Profile sounds
Jeremy Bowtell’s presentation got me thinking on Inception
I’m not even sure if this is SFX or editing but Jeremy’s presentation got me thinking of a scene in Inception. The scene where Leonardo Di Caprio’s character was explaining the architecture of the dream world to Ellen Page’s character. The editing/SFX had a particular effect on me when I first watched this in theatres.
Watching it for the first time I was awed in a way that I haven’t in a long time. The landscape being ‘folded’ on top of each other via the buildings, the infinite staircase and the bridge building scene amazed me on the scale that this movie had at its premise. That from one angle the staircase was infinite but from another the staircase was incomplete. The landscape was infinite but could also be literally right on top of you. The use of Ellen Page’s character’s imagination to create more features of the dream world I thought was amazing. The editing combined with the SFX in Inception is a great example to produce a sense of scale, imagination and epicness to the audience.
The Scott McCloud comic got me thinking about Ishida Sui
So upon reading the comic by Scott McCloud it got me to appreciate one of my favourite manga writers that I follow. Ishida Sui, who is most famous for writing highly acclaimed series Tokyo Ghoul. A quick synopsis of Tokyo Ghoul: an ordinary quiet boy Kaneki Ken, gets turned into a Ghoul (someone who can only survive by eating humans) against his will. So he has to learn to adapt to survive in this world where Ghouls are hunted and oppressed, only to be met with tragedy.
Anyway, Ishida is a master at creating a story and this McCloud’s comic got me more appreciative on why. Ishida is very much into a ‘show don’t tell’ kind of approach and it keeps the audience guessing. McCloud describes Western comics or manga as a kind of ‘in the moment’ with each panel and Ishida exercises this practice beautifully. He is ever so subtle with each panel with reveals and foreshadowing scattered throughout every chapter. This conveys his story in a subtle way and always leaves the audience guessing what’s going to happen. Not in the way that someone says ‘I wonder what’s gonna happen next’ more like ‘I need to know what happens next’. This is why Ishida is one my favourite manga writers and Tokyo Ghoul is one of my favourite manga series.
Scott McCloud, 1993, ‘Blood in the Gutter’, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art(Northampton, MA : Tundra Pub)
Ishida Sui, 2011, ‘Tokyo Ghoul’, Tokyo Ghoul (Japan)
A commentary
‘What kind of commentary is this?’ people may ask. Well it sounds like a sports commentary, but the terms the commentator uses aren’t similar to any sport out there. This is a new breed of sports commentary, of E-sports. What is E-Sports? It is professional competitive gaming and the business has grown exponentially over the past few years. This clip is a recording I did of a game me and my cousin was watching and our reaction to this certain bit of commentary.
So what is the commentator actually talking about in this sound clip? A bit of context, the team Evil Geniuses (Team EG) is playing against team Complexity (Team CoL) in an elimination best of three match in a current ‘Major Tournament’ worth 3 Million US dollars held in Shanghai. Anyway, the commentator ‘Tobiwan’ (one of the best in the scene) is talking about the player ‘Universe’ from team EG is one of the best at the ‘hero’, ‘Dark Seer’, after a play that gives them the upper hand in the game they are currently playing. This type of commentary is similar how a footballer is complimented at being one of the best kicks in his position. The reaction you hear from myself and my cousin when Tobiwan says ‘reason number 322’ which is an inner joke within the community of Dota 2 E-Sports.
This piece of commentary is just an example of how far E-Sports has gone in the past few years. The scene has gone much more professional and has attracted crowds enough to fill stadiums and I would hope one day to be a part of this or contribute to this scene.
The Two Dogs
Well these two dogs, Cooper the husky and Polly the pomeranian, aren’t even my dogs, they’re my uncle’s dogs. But I spend more time with my uncle than I am at home or anywhere else so these two are part of my family as much as anyone in my family. Polly is the older one by about a few months, she is a little over a year old and Cooper just turned one year old. I’m always excited seeing and playing with these dogs every day I come over to my uncles house. These two will be a very important part of my life over the next couple decades. So who is this uncle that I spend most of my time with? Well that’s a story for another post, this one’s for the dogs.
Starting Uni. Round 2.
So I’m starting uni, again. Second year, different course. I was an engineering student, I switched over to media because I realised I wanted to do what I love rather than things I was good at in high school. I fell out of my interest for maths and science, but was I really that interested in it at all? It doesn’t matter because here I am. ‘So why Media?’ my relatives often ask me. Well, I love watching TV shows, movies, anime, music and video games so I decided I wanted to be a part of it.
I already knew what to expect before the first lectorial in terms of how they run. Throughout the first lecture I could only think about how much more laid back this course was, everyone was much more friendlier and more social, compared to engineering at least. I felt at home. Which was something I never felt in engineering. I was particularly intrigued by the video that we watched at the end of the lecture. The constant techno beat coincided with the visuals on screen. With each scene as it was essentially repeating, something was added to the scene. From what was just a peaceful beginnings of the music video turned out quite chaotic by the final repetition got me thinking about how I want to direct/film something similar, in scale at least. I want to produce something that starts of small or peaceful and gets grander in scale. I guess this is one of the many reasons why I’m in media.
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