Preliminary Exercise

Tuesday, 29 November 2011

Creativity Development - Exam Help

In our last lesson we looked at how our creativity skills have developed from our AS production.
This will help in our final A2 exam

Monday, 28 November 2011

Filming Schedule

Here is our schedule for filming until the end of Christmas half term

Wednesday, 23 November 2011

Green Screen


This week we ordered our own green screen material off of eBay. Our plan was to make green screen clothes and having moving images on them, however unfortunately the material was too dark and therefore did not work! 

Sunday, 20 November 2011

Trip to RichMix on 16.11.11


On Wednesday the 16th we took a trip to RichMix in Shoreditch. We had a talk from Pete Fraiser, the chief examiner, about music videos through time and how to achieve a succesful music video for our coursework.

So music videos started very early - as early as the 1930's. However, this was not made to be a music video. An artist was experimenting with his work and put it to a piece of music so it infact promoted the art work rather than the song.



Dated 1945, we begin to see some of the early forms of music videos coming from Nat King Cole with Frim Fram Sauce. We see elements of voyeurism and the male gaze (the "shocking" shot of the woman's legs).


1964 we see The Beatles music video for "Cant Buy Me Love" which includes footage taken from the film "A Hard Nights Out". Here we see the concept of music videos developing.



The music video industry has now been discovered as people finally saw that there were huge amounts of money to be made from it. Queen released their famous "Bohemian Rhapsody" in 1975.



Now the market was discovered, MTV was founded in 1981. However, they were mainly british acts like Madness and the americans were yet to make their mark. Furthermore there was no black artists or music.



In 1982, Michael Jackson releases "Thriller". This is when black artists make a real breakthrough on MTV and Jackson opens up a whole new window for music videos - a real big money production.



We then see black artists like 50 Cent release his music and his videos are very stereotypical for a rap artist. It includes women in little amounts of clothing, big cars, big houses and "bling" (although I hate that word).



Then we see artists like Jay-Z release real pieces of art for music videos instead of just stereotypical products. The video had thousands of frames and as a media student you can really appreicate the work that has gone into it.



Clearly there has been a huge development in music videos and it very interesting to see the change.

Pete then gave us his top tips for making our video.
TOP TIPS:

1.Practice
2. Choose a song
3. Write a treatment
4. Plan EVERYTHING
5. Set up a blog
6. Know your equipment
7. The shoot
8.Capture your footage
9. The edit
10. Screening
11. Analysis

Monday, 14 November 2011

Audience Theory

AUDIENCE THEORY IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE...

  • gives you a target audience
  • can fulfil audiences expectations - codes and conventions
  • produce something they want
  • relate to them


Stuart Hall - Audience Positioning

- developed the concept of audience positioning as a result of examining new reports on industrial strikes
- audience watching a media text would be likely to fall into three categories:

1) dominant (or preferred) readings - audience adopts point of view implied
2) oppositional readings - audience challenges points of view implied
3) negotiated readings - audience sees both points of views

Aberrant readings - preferred reading is not recognised by audience at all.

Levi-Strauss - Binary Oppositions

In the mid-20th century, two major European academic thinkers, Claude Levi Strauss and Roland Barthes, had the important insight that the way we understand certain words depends not so much on any meaning they themselves directly contain, but much more by our understanding of the difference between the word and its 'opposite' or, as they called it 'binary opposite'. They realised that words merely act as symbols for society's ideas and that the meaning of words, therefore, was a relationship rather than a fixed thing: a relationship between opposing ideas.


For example, our understanding of the word 'coward' surely depends on the difference between that word and its opposing idea, that of a 'hero' (and to complicate matters further, a moment's thought should alert you to the fact that interpreting words such as 'hero' and 'coward' is itself much more to do with what our society or culture attributes to such words than any meaning the words themselves might actually contain).


Other oppositions that should help you understand the idea are the youth/age binary, the masculinity/femininity, the good/evil binary, and so on. Barthes and Levi-Strauss noticed another important feature of these 'binary opposites': that one side of the binary pair is always seen by a particular society or culture as more valued over the other.


When studying any kind of literature, it is worth looking for the ways in which layers of meaning are being created, shaped or reinforced by this sense of 'binary opposition'. In Simon Armitage's poetry, for instance, you might notice the binary opposition he creates between the ideas we associate or attach to 'sincerity', 'genuineness' and 'truth' because of our culture's utter dislike of their binary opposites, 'insincerity' and 'lies'.


Recognising such binaries can open up the ideas the writer is trying to express. Look out for these oppositions as they can allow a deep understanding of what is happening in the text as well as alerting you to the 'big picture' - what it is all about.