Action Genre: Codes and Conventions

  • Characters/villain/hero: Main protagonist, always the hero controls the action. The villain, often a rich millionaire or ex- military, usually has an accent that sounds menacing(E.g. Silva in Skyfall), sometime hides their identify and usually have a female companion.
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Biff Tannnen Becomes a millionaire and represents the antagonist throughout most of the movie
  • Costumes: Actors wear quiet expensive clothing, battle clothing.
  • Storyline: Hero fighting against the evil trying to stop them .
  • Editing: There is quiet a lot of editing involved including adding in sound affects, adding cgi for explosions etc. Action movies have a variety of clips including long clips without and vise verser.
  • Sound affects/ music: High drum beat/ intense music, explosions, gun shots, running,screaming, car engines.
  • Use of colour/ Lighting: Lighting is mostly scene lighting such as daylight, searchlights, and street lamps. Often dark colours like brown and black are worn to make the characters more suspicious but the main protagonist and heroes are often wearing white to make them stand out from the others.
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Design in Mad Max: Fury Road is both obscure and unique
  • Setting: These movies usually take place in cities, built up urban areas. specific locations can be something like skyscrapers to underground tunnels, flats, warehouses, roads, police stations, cars, casinos, the sky and banks.
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Batman overlooking Gotham City
  • Camera shots: There tends to be very fast paced shots in actions films. including close ups to show emotion. Establishing shots are important to show where the action is taking place, usually these shots are done from helicopters. Tracking shots are also very common when there are chase scenes to capture it and to make you feel apart of it.
  • Themes: Good vs bad, family issues, revenge, death, car chases, gun fights.
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James Bond see’s an explosion happen at a special cinematic angle

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