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Tag: Mad Max

  • Video Essay: Echoes of Mad Max (WhoIsPablo)

    Australian Director George Miller decided that he did not wish to do a remake or retell the Mad Max story – rather, he wanted to update the universe and the wasteland. He even asked his wife Margaret Sixel to edit the film, even though she had never edited action before. his logic was that, “… if a guy did it, it would look like every other action movie.”

    Even though 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road is technically an independent movie in the series, it was always a matter of time before someone put in the effort to see whether there were visual echoes between the original Australian New Wave trilogy (1979, 1981, and 1985) and the 2015 release. The good news for fans of the original series is that despite 30-years between drinks, as well as all his intentions to give the world something fresh in Fury Road, a Miller film is a Miller film – and there are echoes in abundance. I hope you enjoy the comparisons as much as I did.

  • Video Essay: Mad Max: Center Framed (Nedomansky)

    Continuing my series of resource links, today I want to return to one of my favourite videography bloggers – Vashi Nedomansky. He recently posted a fantastic little piece that demonstrates the importance of framing and composition.

    We often have it drummed into our heads that our framing and composition will look best when it follows simple rules such as the rule of thirds (or perhaps the slightly more complex golden ratio/phi ratio. Don’t know the difference: check this out). And while you can’t exactly argue with the visual efficacy of either of these rules, it’s always nice to be reminded that there are still other alternatives.

    Ergo, we come to Vashi’s latest clip. In it, we explore how sequences in the newest edition to the action-packed Mad Max franchise actually work by utilising a centre-framed focus. Though technically it is still working within a rule of thirds/phi ratio framework – it has been a marked deviation from the normal sense of framing for modern action films (which have utilised more of a chaos cinema approach). While, “This is by no means a new technique… by shooting the entire film in this way, [editor] Margaret Sixel could amplify and accelerate scenes, cut as fast as possible with the confident knowledge that the visual information would be understood.” It is a short piece, so I hope you enjoy it.