Media Project
The topic I chose for my media project is the authenticity of a martial arts film. Popular culture in East Asia has influenced different media and martial arts movie is one of them. I am a big fan of martial arts films since I was young, but I never thought about why those movies were so attractive. After taking this class, I began to think about why martial arts films could become one of the popular cultures in East Asia and it also has such a large amount of audience. One thing that I learned in the class was not all the martial arts movies were likable. For example, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a Chinese movie that had a great success in America. However, as one of the residents from mainland China, this movie did not perform a very outstanding job among the martial arts movies that I watched before. The main reason is the fight scenes are not realistic enough. The angles of the movie change too often which does not provide a complete fight scene to the audience. Moreover, the storyline is thinkable which makes the whole movie lack attractiveness. My question is what elements does a successful martial arts film needs? First, the cast of the film determines the size of the audience. For example, Chow Yun-Fat in Crouching Tiger attracts a large amount of audience from Hong Kong and mainland China. Michelle Yeoh is a famous actress in Malaysia and people from there would watch it because of her. In short, if the cast is more diverse and they are from different places around the world, the film will have a larger size of audience. Second, the plot of the movie must relate to a certain cultural background. For example, if a martial arts film was based on popular fiction which was written by Jin Yong, then there will more people are willing to watch it. When the terms like Wudang, Shao Lin etc. appear in a movie and become visualize, people usually define it as a martial arts film although they haven’t watch it. In summary, to make an authentic and successful martial arts movie need to have a powerful cultural background. For example, martial arts become one of the symbols in China, but not all the martial arts films made by China were authentic.
The medium I chose is video because I think the form of video is the best method to explain what people want to talk about. One problem that I had was how to make the fight scene more realistic, however, I cannot fix it. This is one of the problems that I have never thought of in movie production. I understood why it is so difficult to make an authentic martial arts movie and how bad the movie will be if you don’t change angles very often. I learned that it will take a very long time to accomplish a perfect martial arts movie and I think that is the reason why video as one of the medium could have a large size of audience.
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- Final Portfolio Wenshuo Zheng
