Welcome to week 16 of the weekly blog series. Today I have decided to try and use some of the ideas from our class this week and see if they apply to anything outside of my school life. The idea from class that I will be focusing on today is continuity and change, which essentially is being able to tell what has change about something over time, and what has stayed the same. I hope you enjoy this weeks post.
For the last little while my brother and I have been watching a show on the TV called Forged In Fire. The best way to describe it is like Master Chef but with weapons. Every episode there are four new contestants who will be given a certain type of weapon to make within 3 hours. The first weapon they make is usually something small like a knife, but the difficulty is in making the knife to fit the time it was used and the place it originated ( specific styles that different times periods and cultures have).
There is usually a panel of three judges who will examine and test each weapons that is made. Eventually it comes down to just two people remaining and they have usually four days to make a really difficult weapon. I personally enjoy watching how each blade is forged and the process in which is takes to make a weapon, so I thought is there any way I could apply this to what I am learning in class. I guess we will see. I want to look at some episodes from a while back and compare what they are like to the ones that air today.
The first episode I looked at is from season one of the show. The layout of it seemed to follow what is one TV nowadays but I did notice some small changes. First while the blade smiths are working you can notice small text boxes that appear and inform the audience about certain forging words that describe things. For example is one of the contestants was to say that he was going to use a certain strategy to make his blade, then the text box would explain that to the audience.
Another thing I noticed that was different was that the competition was down to the last man, and then the judges would bring in a master blade smith to compete against the final contestant to see if they could make a better weapon. Along with that they only have a few hours and they have to use the forges provided at the shop. This is definite quite a big change compared to the current day episodes were contestants have multiple days at their home forge to create a weapon.
What actually surprised me the most was the fact that I could only find small differences like these. I looked through about three episodes and only was able to identify these major changes. Overall I think the show has stayed the same from season 1-8 which I don’t often see.
Overall I have to say that this show has stayed mostly the same for a number of years, and overall I think that is what makes it pretty great. I hope you guys enjoyed this post, I am glad I got to shake things up and try something new for this week.
That’s all for now.