Friday, December 6, 2013

Aidan Eljumaily-Reflective Blog


            Over the course of this semester, I have learned many great things about Tim Burton, his work, and about how perception can make everything beautiful. Burton and his deep dark ways have made me take completely different views on certain things, and also have provoked me to watch movies with attention to much greater detail. Every movie that Tim Burton directed held some sort of special dark meaning to how his life and personal experiences were. It was incredible to go from watching huge grossing films that the man created to reading Oyster Boy and other Stories and seeing how really dark and unusual he was.
            From Fantasy to Science Fiction and even Musicals, Tim Burton’s library of successful films is immense. All these different films brought to light so many different issues and ways of thinking throughout the semester. From looking at the end of the world in a satirical sense like in Mars, to complete and utter world and time disaster in Planet of the Apes. Burton shows that you can take any sort of idea or story and find ways to put bits of yourself into it. This makes for a much more personal and direct way of directing.
            The correlations between Tim Burton’s movie character’s and their lives are numerous. His focus is on stories that involve tricksters and the unusual, and through this focus he makes positive thinking experiences with his films. Sweeney Todd, Edward Scissorhands; these are just exampes of characters Burton truly relates to. His effortlessness to take his bleak past and put it into the art form of filming is incredible. From it I have actually grown to be a better musician and artist.
            When you watch film after film after film of different Tim Burton productions, you start to see the underlying common lessons and emotions he is trying to portray. This honesty, that Burton believes in the beauty of the unusual and a world where even the strangest of people can do good, has inspired me to be more honest in the work that I do and the things I want to present about myself. Burton took a very dreary, negative life and made a positive one out of it all by being honest in his work and never lying to himself.
            The fact that he also used many of the same actors for different movies surprised me. Burton using actors that he was comfortable with and knew showed that he wanted to really have people he could trust. He wanted to know that an actor was going to go out there every day and have some personal connection that he could put onto his or her character. This is an incredible way of filming, because Burton makes it so personal and comfortable. With movies as dark as Sweeney Todd and fantasies as bright as Alice in Wonderland, all with similar casts, Burton shows that you can take any group of people that make art together and merely shift the tides every time you make a new project.

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