Female Representation in Film

More recently than not, especially in this day and age where superhero films dominate the box office and Marvel receives extreme positivity from critics, however one of the biggest problems reviewers have is the lack of female characters in these films. Now I'm a big fan, and I do agree that it is a fault. Luckily they've heard fans crys and in the new movie coming out in May, Captain America: Civil War, there are three key female characters in the story. Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch and Sharon Carter/Agent 13. It's really exciting to finally see such a strong presence of females in these movies, the comics there are so many powerful women that it's quite remarkable to finally see them on screen. Little by little they are diversifying. Check out this women in Marvel featurette that showcases Black Widow, Scarlet Witch, and Agent 13

Marvel Sony Spiderman Deal

In the realm of CGI and animation lies a genre a movies that has gained a lot of popularity over the past decade, superhero movies. That being said, if one company had to be given credit for said rise in popularity it would have to be Marvel. Since creating the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008 with Iron Man, Marvel has built an extremely successful franchise filled with individual movies for each character as well as The Avengers, where they all team up. However, not all Marvel movies were able to be part of this universe. The X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Spider-man movies, were all owned by different companies making it impossible for them to be a part of the MCU...or so we thought.

This past week, Marvel Studios and Sony struck a deal regarding Spider-man. According to the deal, a new Spider-man will first appear in a MCU movie and then Sony will release the next installment of the series. Unfortunately for Andrew Garfield this does mean another reboot of the Spider-man series. However, for everyone else, this is really exciting.

Fan Created Superhero Media

I'm a big fan of the superhero genre. I watch all the films, I read the comics, and I binge all the superhero TV shows. As I often peruse comic book websites, a big thing that they feature is fan created videos. Most of these are videos are mashups of various movies, cut to look like two characters exist in the same universe and, usually, fight each other. Although they're never spectacularly well-made, they can certainly be entertaining.

Every once in a while, there some really brilliant videos that play on the superhero genre and have some really decent animation and visual effects. The effects are cool and are fairly easy to do, I've found upon looking up various how-to videos. These videos just go to show how the market is drastically expanding, and how anyone can be a content creator. Here's my favorite one: It's Batman vs. Darth Vader.

Are heroes born or created?

After seeing Captain America: The Winter Soldier this past weekend, I remembered a question that I had about the first Capt. America movie that I never got answered. If you've seen the film, you've seen the amazing transformation Chris Evans' character, Steve Rogers, goes through in order to become the patriotic hero we all know and love.

It's pretty absurd to even think about, let alone to try to figure out how they did it. They must have used two different actors. That's what I originally thought, at least. I figured there weren't any visual effects at all. It made perfect sense to me for them to use two actors with very different physical builds and similar faces and then to have Chris Evans ADR (automated dialogue replacement) the scenes with his own voice.

Well, it turns out that I was partially correct in the two actors assumption. Partially. There were two main techniques the crew used to shrink Cap. down to his original, scrawny size. The first one of the two (the one I was closest to guessing) indeed required the use of a double. Leander Deeny played Evans' double before Steve Rogers goes through the physical transformation that allows him to become the super soldier that stands for all that is American. What they did to cover for the fact that the two actors clearly don't have identical faces, was to place green dots all over Deeny's face to use as motion trackers. Using these motion trackers, animators were able to take Evans' face and place it on Deeny's body. This was achieved by having Deeny act out each and every shot pretty much exactly the same as Evans. Then came the hard part.

That was the easier of the two techniques. The other one (and certainly the more time consuming one) required an entire physical makeover. Basically, the visual effects specialists would take the shots with Evans and literally reshape the majority of his body, making him smaller and thinner. This includes everything from thinning out his neck to completely reshaping his jaw line. The reason for sometimes using this technique over the other one is...well, I'm not quite sure. Apparently the motion tracking was simply less effective in certain circumstances. I don't know what those circumstances must have been, but I'll leave that up to the professionals. For a more detailed explanation of the entire process, take a look at this behind-the-scenes video:



Glad that another mystery in my life has been solved. Onto the next one!