The Wonderful Days of Korean Animation

Review: Sky Blue (Kim Moon-saeng / 2003)

Sky Blue is a Korean animated science fiction film that was simply not as big a hit as it should have been. Released in 2003 and with a $30 Million budget, it disappointingly mostly just did the festival circuit, before finding somewhat of a home on DVD. There is no doubt it deserves to find an audience, for being a revolutionary piece of cinema for its visuals, with a fairly solid story backing up its presentation. Labelled as “Akira for the 21st Century”, fans of Cyberpunk, Anime and Sci-Fi will find it a short and sweet ride into the future.

You're Terminated: Story Development

(Note: An edited version of this post was previously submitted for my AFTRS Screen Culture course, Development Task, March 2010) 

To start off the new course that is the Graduate Certificate in Screen Culture at AFTRS, we began by discussing the topic of Development. An area often under thought and under explored in the Australian industry, the creators of the course specifically placed it as the first subject for the year. This instilled in our minds the importance of the general basis of the idea for a film. As is you cant sell a 27 word concept for the film, how can you sell the film itself?

I had previously explored these story development concepts in the Cracking Yarns scriptwriting course I undertook with Allen Palmer, now a lecturer at AFTRS. In this course we discussed screenwriting in much greater detail, but again Allen also stressed the most important element to a good script, the basic concept of it. Whether it be high-concept (a story easily described by a succinct statement) or something more in depth, the importance of these 27 precious words should not be understated. They should be referenced throughout the entire production, to identify what the film is actually about and what it is trying to say.

 Arnold made a big impression