Assignment 1 Week 2
Danny Castillo
English 225
Instructor David Preizler
April 21, 2014

For my clip from http://movieclips.com/sKPe5-real-steel-movie-twin-cities-vs-atom/ is from the movie “Reel Steel”. It stars Hugh Jackman in a story where he is a former boxer that fights robots in a sort of Robot MMA in the future with his son. He plays the character of Charlie, and his son Max played by Dakota Goyo. The scene that we will be analyzing will be the one in where their robot Atom fights another robot named “Twin Cities”. The director for this movie is Shawn Levy (movieclips.com). In making a movie, that person is usually the director. “His or her role is often similar to that of the foreman, translating the screenwriter’s story so that the actors and crew can carry it out. And like the foreman, it’s up to the director to turn the elements he or she builds with—words, images, and sound—into something not just coherent but entertaining, even moving. It’s no accident that when films are described, they’re often talked about as the possession of the director—Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and the like”.(Goodykoontz/Jacobs). It’s the director’s job to make sure that everything in the movie goes exactly the way it should. He controls the way actors do things, whether they can improvise or not, down to overseeing the editing. He or she is the overall boss on the set. They interpret or take the screenwriters story and make it into a running film. The production designer for this film is Tom Meyer. “Production Designers are major heads of department on film crews, and are responsible for the entire Art Department. They play a crucial role in helping Directors to achieve the film's visual requirements, and in providing Producers with carefully calculated schedules which offer viable ways of making films within agreed budgets and specified periods of time”(creativeskillset.org). The production designer is in charge of all the artwork, and scene setups. They basically look at the script and see what it would take to actually make scenes visually possible for the movie, and to fit that into the films budget. He is also the art director for this film. “Production Designers deliver their design sketches (detailing mood, atmosphere, lighting, composition, colour and texture) to Art Directors who oversee the production of technical drawings and models, which are used by the Construction Department to build the sets and to adapt locations. Props Buyers and Set Decorators liaise closely, sourcing props and organising the manufacture of specialist items.”(creativeskillset.org). Art directors sort of also get blue prints once they figure out how much the film is going to cost and what type of props they need for the set , that gets handed off to the Art directors that have the construction department of a film actually build the set. All of these jobs go hand in hand. If the director doesn’t like how the set is made, or has been constructed, or he feels like adding something he goes back to the production designer they draw up the plans. Then the Art director takes that and supervises the actual building of it to the specifications of the director. In this scene of the movie they are using low key lighting. “A low–key lighting design looks dark overall by comparison. It is marked by extreme use of deep shadows, with very high contrast between the brightest parts of the scene and the darkest parts, which are obscured in shadows. Often there may be only a single source of light, coming from the back or the side of the main characters.”(Goodykoontz/Jacobs). In the scene you can see that the crowd is very dark , and the light is on the main characters , and on the actual fighting in the ring is where the director wants the audience to focus their attention on. Even the main characters are slightly overshadowed by the actual fight scene that their robot Atom is in against Twin Cities. The lighting evokes the mood that there is an event going on where everyone has to have their attention on center stage. I think this mood is even displayed in the characters. In the scene everyone in the arena is focused on the fight , and the 2 main characters are focused on winning that fight, so I would say a sense of competition and alertness. The lighting in a way effects the story of the movie by in a way saying that the robots fighting is bringing the Father and son closer together. They have the dark light set on , and when they win the lighting is focused on them as they celebrate their victory bringing them closer together. This clip takes place in this huge Arena in a time where people were tried of boxers fighting , and needed better entertainment. They created these robots to replace the human fighters in a professional league. The time period is 2020, and the culture of that time period is similar to everyday culture here. People sometimes need a distraction, and to these people their distraction was watching robots beat each other up! The costuming of a character can tell us different things about them. It can tell us if they are sad, or happy. The costuming can be a reflection on how the characters might act. If they are wearing sporty clothes they could be athletes. If they are wearing clothes that are really dirty nasty, or maybe have a beard that’s growing out and unshaven they could be considered a homeless person. Here the robots are shown fighting in arenas, which tells us this is a film about fighting robots with hints into the plot. In this particular scene the hair, and make up don’t really have significance in my opinion. As someone watching the film I’m more interested in the way that the characters are behaving. Now on the other hand I wouldn’t want the characters to be on an extreme side of the spectrum neither. If the main character was extremely shaggy I might think he’s a hippy. In that sense I think the hair, and makeup could reveal traits about the characters personality. For this particular scene in “Reel Steel” the mise-en-scène appears to work together especially the lighting , with the arena, the crowd going and the actors getting into the fight as they are controlling the robot. You can see in this scene that they had to put a lot of attention to detail especially in the opponent robot if the main character robot Atom. The 2 headed robot, the size differences between the two also played a factor for the mise-en-scène to go smoothly. It was kind of you could get the sense of urgency in the characters desire to win the bout. The way that Charlie was controlling his robot with voice controls, also gave you the sense that they were in a more advanced time then we are in right now as far as technology goes. This little clues like that made everything go smoothly.

References:
Goodykoontz, B., & Jacobs, C. P. (2011). Film: From Watching to Seeing. San Diego, CA:
Bridgepoint Education, Inc.
Production Designer. Retrieved on April 21, 2014 from http://www.creativeskillset.org/film/jobs/productiondesign/article_4645_1.asp Twin Cities vs. Atom. Retrieved on April 21, 2014 from
http://movieclips.com/sKPe5-real-steel-movie-twin-cities-vs-atom/