I know I've already talked about characteristics of the action genre but I found a bibliography, right here, that talks about common characteristics of action movies.
It says, "Action films are based around a core set of characteristics: spectacular action; a narrative emphasis on fights, chases, and explosions; and a combination of state-of-the-art special effects and stunt-work." These are all true. But I want to focus on the special effects portion of the quote. For obvious reasons, films use CGI to create images on screen that would be impossible to film like a knight fighting a dragon. It goes without saying that it would be impossible for a film crew to record a real dragon fighting a person. So, VFX artists use CGI to 3D render a dragon into a piece of raw footage.
The action movie I want to discuss is an action adventure film called Avatar (2009). You may have heard of it as the highest grossing film of all time. Avatar was a groundbreaking film in that it was almost completely CGI. The movie takes place on the alien planet of Pandora. The plot revolves around a disabled U.S soldier who, through complete sci-fi technology, is able to transfer his conscious to the body of one of the native humanoids of Pandora, the Na'vi. The Na'vi are significantly larger than the average human and are blue. Rather than having to find hundreds of 9" to 10" tall people and painting them blue to play Na'vi extras, the film uses CGI to track the body movements of human actors and transfer them to 3D models of Na'vi. Not only are all the Na'vi CGI, Pandora is also 100% CGI. All plants, trees, and creatures on Pandora are fictional and thus, were created and added into the raw footage via CGI.
Obviously, this caliber of VFX takes years to make and would cost thousands to produce. I just wanted to mention that special effects are an essential part of the action genre and that I would like to incorporate them in my project.
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