Analyzing Creed, 1:57:00

Notes 1:57:00- 1:58:04

During the later rounds of the fight, the more Adonis and his opponent go toe for toe and trade blows we get these intense rotating cutting scenes. In this scene Adonis takes a heavy right hook, once the punch lands we get into a slow motion scene, shot from a lowered medium shot. The camera follows Creed to the ground, the shot lowering to the ground as his body does. This punch being portrayed in this way gives us a dramatic effect on understanding how heavy the hit was. Between the moment of impact and him hitting the ground we see blood spew from his mouth, his body appear to lifelessly hit the ground, and the reaction of the men in his corner and others ringside. Once this shot ends we immediately get an overhead shot of his opponent jumping on the ropes and celebrating his victory, then cutting to a shot of the unconscious Adonis from the ground level we last saw him at. Right after we get out of that we cut to a medium shot of Conlan from behind who is still up on the ropes. In the shot from behind we are not about to see his face on his body but in the background we see his frontside celebrating from the big screen in the corner of the arena. We then get close-up shots after Rocky telling Adonis to get up then cutting to Bianca telling him to get up as well, then his mother from home. These outlooks from outside the ring add the emotions to the people who care about him in panic, two being Rocky and Adonis' mother, who have lost a loved one to a fight in the past. Then we get flashback cuts into Adonis' mind. First being one of him as a child, with a gash on his left cheek then a shot reverse shot of his mothers' disappointed face at that time. Then jump cuts of when Bianca shut the door on him and a close up birds-eye shot of them lying on the ground staring at each other.  Then a cut to a close-up of Rocky when he initially got sick when training with Donny yelling for help from Stich in the background. Then a side-lit, close-up, overhead shot of Rock during treatment. This shot has the focus on Rocky but you can see the IV drip out of focus in the foreground. Then we get a low medium close up shot of his dad from outside the ropes. The grain and quality of this shot resembles the same from when he watched one of his dad's old fights against Rocky on Youtube. In between each of these flashbacks we get the same shot of Creed from ground-level, him laying unconscious on the mat. After the montage of flashbacks and quick cuts we get the same shot of Creed and he wakes up. We go from muttered on-screen sounds from the ring and internal sounds from his memory to a violent gasps for air when Adonis arises. We then get a shot reverse of Conlans' reaction that Adonis is up and appears to be ready to fight again. Then we get a medium close-up of Creed, gathering himself getting ready to fight in his corner. 

During this action packed sequence that last a minute there are three long shots, three medium-long shots, fifteen medium shots, three medium close-ups, and fourteen close-ups. This scene carries an emotional rollercoaster with it, that you of course don't see during a fight you may pay to watch on HBO. The close-ups and medium close-ups outnumber the long shots and medium long shots by such a large number because of the need to add extra emotion and personal feel to the fight itself. In comparison to the old movies, today I am going to look at how they made this fight scene more realistic, add emotion, and include the realistic physical damage in the fight scenes. For this fight scene to be fully put together the shots needed to be more than these guys just throwing hands obviously. The scene where Creed gets momentarily knocked out we get multiple quick cuts of him and the three people he cares most about, his mother, Rock, and Bianca. In other movies we don't typically see this psychological type of flashback scene. Typically what we see is our fighter get knocked down, a POV of their blurry vision coming together, and then them somehow finding their significant other in the stands or someone else ringside whose presence rejuvenates them. Some of us may love this type of scene but, it has been done so many times that it is particularly corny at this point.