CherwellMedia6147PMarshall

How does the opening of Skins represent young people through it's use of media devices?

2010-12-06T14:53:00.000Z

Intro - Skins shows young people as chaotic, emotional beings by reinforcing a common stereotype in the mainstream media.

Middle - Skins rejects this stereotype and creates a "humanised" representation that takes into account many factors and features multiple representations.

End - In conclusion Skins only represents young people in opposition to adult culture.

At fist Skins appears to support the prevailing stereotype of young people that they are unruly and anti-social. The title sequence shows this by featuring simplistic iconography (alcohol, cigarettes) as a quick and easy way of establishing the stereotype from the beginning.

The mise-en-scene of the girl's bedroom also reinforces this stereotype. It features clothes strewn untidily across the floor, and elaborate trinkets and decorations, the personality of that character is physically projected onto the set before she even speaks. The representation we gain from this is that the character (teenage girls) are very fashion-conscious and give value to their appearance. The scene with the other girl in her bathroom is highly sexualised, the camera tracks across her leg and she's referred to only in terms of her appearance, again this reinforces the same representation.

On the other hand the excerpt features many other young people, some of whom differ from the initial stereotype.

In conclusion Skins only defines young people in opposition to adults. The best example of this is with the music at the beginning of the extract. The style of music is deliberately used as an antagonism for the adult. In this youth are represented not with one single stereotype, nor with many different representations, instead each representation is presented with a common stereotype.

2010-11-18T10:25:00.000Z

Homework 18/11/2010

From Mr. Gray's blog:

How does Al Jazeera REPRESENT the world Islamic communty?

1) How do the look and layout of the Al Jazeera home pages (English and Arabic) compare? - can you think of any explanations for these differences.

The Arabic homepage is very dense. Content is the top priority and the entire thing is neatly organised. There's a marquee on the top of the page which acts as instant rolling news to direct users as quickly as possible away from the index page.

The English homepage is relaxed about it's layout. It has one simple unifying theme and is not organised efficiently so as to shorten the path between the user landing on the index page and their arrival at content. Essentially this is because the English section of Al Jazeera is only really included as an afterthought, a second priority. The audience is different, those arriving on the english Al-Jazeera will be much more likely to search hard for what they want, as they must have gone out of their way to find the english Al Jazeera.

2) Describe the 'interactivity' of the website (explore several pages) - where do the links take you? How does this compare with a similar website such as the BBC Homepage?

I spent fifteen minutes clicking on random links, Google Translate got itself stuck in a loop and I can't speak Arabic, so I have no idea what I'm reading. I've noticed each page usually has two pictures, and these give handy clues as to what the stories are about. For example a stroy with a picture of some people playing football is probably a sport story.

I quite like the cartoons, this one in particular:

I can't read the writing on the cake, but the message is clear: Zionism and American imperialism are united to divide the middle east (I'm guessing the cake represents the middle east). Having looked at other cartoons on the site they all have a strong arabian nationalist theme.

Al Jazeera features a prominent two-way dialogue. Commenting appears to be anonymous and easy, unfortunately threads are not nested, but it's much better than the BBC, whose response sections are relegated to 'Have Your Say', and recent experiments checking twitter hashtags #HIGNFY for Have I got News For You and #BBCQT for BBC Question Time.

3) Now look at a different media source - Watch Al Jazeera TV - How does the production and style of the reporting differ from the BBC TV news?

Unfornately I can't, because the school computers use Internet Explorer and don't have RealPlayer. I have Firefox on my USB drive, but I left it at home. Instead I watched something on the arabic website about ancient plates. I didn't understand anything but 1 minute 30 seconds seemed a bit long for a report that was basically just someone being interviewed about old crockery. Having watched a second report featuring long shots of people walking up a hill I would say that Al Jazeera tends to focus on trivial events so as to distract people from the actual news. Then again Al Jazeera were fantastic during the assault ont he Mavi Marmara, and I can't really judge without fully understanding what's going on.

DISCLAIMER: I'm actually doing this ~2 hours before the lesson, as Patrick has only just told me about it.

Representation of Islam on the internet

2010-11-05T12:16:00.001Z

Revolution Muslim. Copy the following address into the browser address bar, that way you can't be tracked. http://www.revolutionmuslim.com/

It's a fundamentalist Islamic website which has it's own quite particular representation of Islam.
EDIT 10/11/2010: I remember reading sometime last week that this site has been taken down by blogger. Perhaps the site administrators should have used BayWords instead?

http://www.inspiredbymuhammad.com/
^it's worth pointing out that the second result for this on Google is a thread on Stormfront. And that thread is blocked on the school internet filter because of 'violent language'.

Muslim Council of Britain
http://www.mcb.org.uk/

Possibly related: this weekend I went to the carnival against racism in London. There was music and dancing, George Galloway and a representative of the Muslim Council of Britain gave speeches. There were some good antifascist activists there, though they didn't have any fascists to stand against, so they came off a bit out of place.

Analyse the ways in which the media represents woman

2010-10-19T21:37:00.003+01:00

Part 1

I have chosen to focus on the representation of woman in britiain, using contemporary british film as a case study. I will examine wasp, fish tank and red road by Andrea Arnold. I will also touch on the personal styles of Amma Asante and Lynne Ramsay. In my answer I will consider feminist theories of gender.

Part 2

Women have traditionally been represented as equals or as support characters in british cinema, for example in 'my beautiful laundrette' the female perspective is neglected. In a film like 'a kind of loving' women are portrayed as limits to the male character's ambitions. There are of course exceptions, such as 'a taste of honey' which cast women as the main characters.

New realist film is a kind of extreme realism which refuses to lie in any way to it's audience. Films are shot on location, use natural light and 35mm colour film. No special effects or distortions are allowed. This is called the dogme 95. These rules or 'vows of chastity' make certain these films do not detract from the central theme.

Directors such as Andrea Arnold aim to produce a feminist perspective using these rules. Awareness of these vows of chastity is important when studying british film from new realist directors.

Part 3

Andrea Arnold uses the vows of chastity in Wasp to represent women trapped in their domestic position. The world she creates has an atmosphere of repression. The diegetic sound and over-use of close-ups helps create and sustain this. I also like how Andrea uses the motorway as an icon of a wall literally trapping the main character (Zoë) in their world.

Part 4

Some of Andrea Arnold's films represent women as failing mothers, take for example Zoë's inability to feed her children in Wasp. This invites the audience to criticise the wider social conditions which lead to Zoë's situation. However because Andrea Arnold does not specify any dominant reading the text is open to be interpreted from a quite reactionary viewpoint. Zoë could easily satisfy a deep-seated resentment of single mothers and their demonisation in some areas of the media.

Andrea does allow the audience to see the 'human' side of Zoë by allowing the audience to empathise with her reaction to the wasp. Zoë may be a negligent mother, but it's only natural that she protect her child from serious harm. Andrea portrays Zoë's behaviour as typically human, and as such she forces an unnecessary emotional reaction from the audience.

Lastly when Mia says goodbye to her sister, Tyler, she demonstrates an emotional attachment. This shows a dimension of their relationship which had been previously hidden behind a layer of insults and mutual dislike. This revelation shows that women are capable of meaningful relationships, and stops the film from slipping into chauvinism.

Part 5

There's a tendency to over-emphasise appearance in magazines aimed primarily at either men or women. This puts pressure on people to hide behind masks and cover their faces in facepaint. It's accepted by common society that this pressure is more manifest in women than it is in men. Both Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold chose to cast their actors based on how ordinary they looked, rather than whether they were 'glamorous'. This is because they do not believe in subverting reality to conform to an unhealthy aspiration of what the ideal woman should look like. Both directors challenge the emphasis on appearance, choosing instead to go on different factors, such as acting ability.

Wasp succeeds in demonstrating how the proletariat can be distracted from their oppression by the false aspirations to fame and celebrity. In fact it makes Zoë's predicament all the more shocking as the audience knows she will never be able to achieve her aspiration, and they recognise that Zoë is being lied to by society.

This can be taken further that the women in Andrea Arnold and Amma Asante's films define themselves in relation to men.

Zoë in Wasp does everything she can to subordinate herself to Dave's authority. This is harshly criticised in the film as the consequences of it are clearly explained.

Joanne in Fish Tank competes with Mia for Conor's attention, Conor is given 'male authority'.
According to Althausser's theory of interpellation the women in these films misunderstand their role in society, and actively suppress this role.

Part 6

The beginning of red road presents Jackie as benevolent watcher. She watches the lives of ordinary people and takes pleasure in thesimple things they do, such as dancing to musing whilst cleaning. Later on in the film the atmospheric background noise takes on a sinister rumbling tone as she watches someone being stabbed. The film plays on voyeurism by over-using close-ups and often presenting events from th point of view of the secuity camera.
When Jackie starts following the man her behaviour becomes more paranoid and animalistic, she grows rings underneath her eyes. The film also sometimes uses Foucault's theory of the panopticon to demonstrate how she is powerful by her ability to observe events. As she starts to stalk the man it seems she is abusing this power. However the film continues to present her behaviour as human and her curiosity as natural. The 'female gaze' she develops is no different from the 'male gaze' seen in the rest of the media. The film does challenge male gaze, but only to the extent that it show it as appicable to both men and women.

Part 7

In conclusion it is important that british directors continue using new realism to represent women, as it generally rejects many of the unrealistic concepts which are attributed to women by the mainstream media. However it can also be said that there is little stopping it from reinforcing these unrealistic concepts.

Discuss how the film Fish Tank represents and explores youth culture in contemporary Britain.

2010-09-30T07:40:00.003+01:00

My initial impressions of Fish Tank were that it featured a very pessimistic representation of youth culture. While Mia's lack of respect for authority is admirable, her relationship with her family appeared to be based on a constant stream of insults and abuse.

Mia's mother, Joanne, is described by Jonathan Romney of the Independent as 'sexually competitive', I think this is an adequate description which also goes some way to explain the tension between both characters. The two characters are also portrayed as opposites, Joanne is often shown with a cigarette and garish makeup, whereas Mia is athletic, and her makeup is subtle. The cigarette is a key index, but while it signifies bad health and insecurity, it's also a reminder of Joanne's adult position.

In some ways Fish Tank can be seen as a coming of age story, many rites of passage into adulthood are covered in the film: leaving education and seeking a job, losing virginity and leaving home. Fish Tank deals harshly with Mia's loss of 'innocence' and then redefines what it is to be innocent. Later on we see Mia's sister, Tyler, smoking with her friend, this scene hammers home the loss of innocence. However, the act of smoking by Tyler is not glorified, nor is it used as a tactic to shock the audience, instead the film presents it accurately and without bias. The audience is invited to judge the scene within the context of the wider social conditions, and this leads them to greater understanding of the situation.
Unlike earlier 'kitchen sink' social dramas, this 'new realism' refuses to implicitly make the link between working class oppression and anti-social youth culture in deprived areas. This could make the film appear as a piece of bourgeois pretentiousness which makes a patronising sneer at the oppressed youth. On the other hand because there is no 'dominant reading', the audience has the freedom to come up with their own conclusions.
At the end of the film Billy becomes the saviour, the 'knight in shining armour who frees the damsel from her captivity in the fortress'. In some ways this traditional 'happily ever after' ending breaks from realist convention, but it also subverts the traditional ending in a post-modern way. For example Billy is a traveller, and his lifestye is one which the audience would normally reject, and then it is glorified as an escape from the estate.
The horse is important as a theme to understand the travellers. Mia's recurring visits to the traveller camp are encouraged by the horse, and when it dies Mia is forced to turn to Billy as the only remaining character who she can trust. The horse is out of place in the urban environment, Mia is drawn to it as it's her link to nature, she tries to set the horse free because her situation and the horse's situation are very much the same. They are both uncomfortable in their environment.
The moment of freedom comes when Mia kidnaps Conor's child, Keira, she runs through the fields near Tilbury and long establishing shots describe the beauty of the natural environment. Despite this the audience knows that the scene will not end well, as Keira has been removed from her natural environment. The shaky camera shots and increasingly louder noise of the wind creates a tension which indicates that equilibrium will soon be restored.

There comes an earlier moment of freedom, when the family go fishing. Conor anchors his position as a patriarchal role model for Mia, he takes her out of the urban environment and we are shown her first experience of nature. His position is later destroyed as his middle-class lifestyle is revealed. Mia comes to hate what he becomes, she reacts to this by attacking Conor's house, weeing on his floor and kidnapping Keira. This attack is made worse by both the jealousy Mia feels for Keira, and her anger at his unfaithfulness.

The audience expects something to emerge from Mia's dancing talent. Initially this was what made me unhappy about the film, it seemed to present dance as a method for escape. Thankfully later on the realism kicks in and the view of dance changes from a means of expression to something dirty and crass, in effect it's another means of exploiting Mia. So she rejects it. This is important because dance forms a large part of youth culture in the film. There's much meaning involved in the clash between Mia's preferred
dance music and Conor's older music. Mia choses to use Conor's music in her audition, so she accepts it as her own.
There's also the scene at the beginning where Mia attacks the other youths dancing as a group. She rejects their form of dance as too sleazy, perhaps she is uncomfortable when dancing in a group.
Lastly it could be argued that Fish Tank doesn't even try to represent or explore youth culture at all, because it only focuses on a small section of society. Rather than holding up a mirror to society it hands us a magnifying glass instead. It does nothing to deliberately exaggerate or even subvert youth culture, it simply ignores the overwhelming majority of young people who don't live near the poverty line in smashed-up 1970s council estates.

HTML5 & Ogg video

2010-09-14T19:32:00.001+01:00

Last year Ms. Kate mentioned we'd have to display our practical coursework on a custom website, and that the deisgn of the website could form part of the coursework. As before I'm still enthusiastic about open standards and I've tried a few experiments in implementing them. If the IT department doesn't allow us hosting it might be quite difficult, that's something we can come to later.
Put simply HTML5 video replaces flash video, except there's no plugin. It works much the same way as an img tag, you link to the file, then the browser renders it.

Now if you want to go one step further you cold encode your video in the Theora codec and put it in an ogg or matroska video container. There are various practical advantages to this which rest on ideological reasons.

Firstly H.264 video compression (which is used by most video codecs, except for Theora & some others) is owned by MPEG Los Angeles, they have a patent for it. H.264 is proprietary software and not under collective ownership (-1 for digital communism!). Normally this wouldn't bother anyone, but one day the MPEG group might actually start enforcing their patent and charging people to use it, it's valid up to 2028 so we never know what might happen.
On the opposite side Theora is an open format and not encumbered by patents.

Flash video relies on a plugin, which like H.264 leaves you at the mercy of an outside company (Adobe). Furthermore flash doesn't work well on handheld devices such as mobile phones, if internet video wants to join the portable trend it'll have to leave Flash behind.

/ideology

incidentally yesterday I saw someone from IndyMedia at an anti-cuts meeting, I got his card and might cover events for IndyMedia in future.

Motion Capture

2010-09-03T15:48:00.001+01:00

I remember at the start of these holidays I said I'd try to do some motion capture to see if we could use it in a coursework piece, I carried out the test two weeks ago with the help of Matty. As expected there were some problems (but this is why we do tests, so that problems can be anticipated for later):

I had 4 live video sources (webcams), one of them was a Mac webcam and required a firewire port, which my computer doesn't have. Two others didn't have the driver software pre-installed. This left me with one remaining webcam.
How can this be improved in future? Check all video sources work properly before going to film.

No calibration software. I was able to get up the motion capture software, this is no easy task as it's all quite crude and command-based. Camera calibration is done by a complicated maths suite, I think it's called MatLab, anyway we didn't have it so cameras were uncalibrated.
How can this be improved in future? Find a way of calibrating cameras, possibly without downloading MatLab, I'm sure someone from the Maths department would help us out.

Natural light. We were doing this in the South Site drama studio and there are blinds on the windows, we wanted to close them but couldn't find the stick which is used to turn the special wheel which closes them.
How can this be improved in future? Find that stick, or use the North Site drama studio.

Matty bought a green-screen kit last week, it cost him £140. I already have a blue screen, it's about 10 metres by 4 metres of blue cloth which I bought from the Glousceter Green market for £15. I've also still got a £25 work light somewhere in the tiny shed in my garden, it's not exactly a professional photographer's light like Matty has but it's pretty bright, and it does the job. DIY film-making is cheap.

Nonetheless, a high-quality green-screen kit might come in handy for the practical piece next year, if Matty lets us use it.

posting from ScribeFire

2010-07-28T12:12:00.001+01:00

I'm writing this post from within Google Chrome with an extension called ScribeFire.
And now that I'm here I might as well keep on updating what's going on.

The radical film archive project is in it's baby steps, I have a page up with a list of all the films to acquire.

Motion capture is still going to happen. Probably.

Jonny is away in the US, Matty is in hospital. Currently undergoing surgery, I wish him a painless recovery.

The new teacher we have, Mr. Gray, knows about RSS feeds and has hosted servers somewhere (I think). This is good news as it allows me much more flexibility in blogging.

And tonight is #oxtuttle again.

Facebook experiment conclusion

2010-07-24T17:43:00.000+01:00

Over the last ~~few weeks~~ 17 days I've been running a Facebook advertising campaign pointing to this blog, now that it's over and I've run out of advertising credit I can go over the final statistics.

The advert made 946,416 page impressions.
This generated 85 clicks.
Over that time Google Analytics drew the following graph of visitor numbers:
The click-through rate (number of clicks received divided by the number of impressions) for the adverts was 0.009%
Those 85 visitors cost me £35.26 in advertising credit. Which works out at 41p per visitor.

The account is now marked as 'pending closure' and when it's closed hopefully Facebook will get rid of my credit card details.
So, what have I learnt from this?

Facebook is not a social network it is an advertising platform. Any personal information a user gives it is not to make it a deeper or more rich social pool. No, the personal info you give Facebook is used to target your demographic. And it's very powerful, advertisers can target users on a whole variety of factors and end up with a very narrowly defined audience.
Very few people click on the adverts. They're easy to ignore and very rarely clicked on.
Advertising on Facebook is relatively expensive.
The advertiser has a lot of information at their fingertips, they can even track users as they move through facebook into the advertised site. I didn't use this feature, partly because it was only in beta and I couldn't be bothered to put the code on this site, but also because of ethical reasons. It feels a bit stalker-ish to be tracking user movements. I mean, I do it with Google Analytics, but that's different.

EDIT: Found this 'ethical code' in the advertising terms & conditions:

You shall not make any public statements or press releases with respect to this tool, these terms, or Facebook without our prior written consent. Furthermore, you will not disclose any conversion data or any other information from the tracking report, except to your own employees or agents who have a need to know such information.

Remember: always read the terms and conditions.

Chandler's Myth 02

2010-07-07T20:21:00.000+01:00

Yes, we're still doing this. It is still confusing. What has changed from last time is that I understand it better now, and I'm not getting Reception and Reference mixed up. I re-drew the notes I made in the lesson (posted below).

Just received word that burning helmets are unlocked for all Halo 3 multiplayer characters for the next 24 hours, brb.

Hello Facebook!

2010-07-07T20:16:00.001+01:00

I'm testing out Facebook ads at the moment, and I'm seeing what can be done to them, currently there's an advert pointing towards this blog. So if you're coming in from Facebook, firstly welcome, and secondly I'll set up Google Analytics some time this week so I can measure the incoming traffic from this end.
Also now Facebook has my credit card details. I am not happy about this, given their past record on privacy I don't trust them at all.

EDIT: Just noticed that the ad is 'pending review', because I targeted it at under 18s. Whoops. Still it just shows the power of Social Media advertising; I can specify the exact location, gender and age of my target audience, that's pretty nifty.

EDIT 02: Checked now and the ad is live. Success!

Putting a film poster through Chandler's myth

2010-06-29T12:07:00.006+01:00

We have to analyse a British film poster of a film which has been released in the last 2 years.
I picked Harry Potter, which is technically still British:

Reception

The audience sees Harry as the most important character and Hermionie as the least important, this is because of his place at the front and her place at the back. It also distinguishes Ron and Hermionie as support characters because they're isolated to the right of Dumbledore and Harry.
Ron and Hermione are shown as equal which implies gender plays no part in the support characters
The slanted text is unconvential, as it cuts off some of the text which shows how anyone looking at the poster already knows what 'y Pot' means along with the picture of harry at the front.

Reference

The Harry Potter logo is so recognisable that it doesn't need to be shown in full, it only needs to be half-displayed. Equally the characters are recognisable and they symbolise the text.
The content of the film is supposed to be darker to reflect the changes in plot (as opposed to narrative). Harry Potter as a series has accumulated a lot of history in the 12 years of it's existence. The later films, of which this is a good example, have tried to steer the direction of the series away from the original young fantasy school setting. After all there's only so many times you can re-make what is essentially the same film. The poster reflects this. It must distinguish this film from the last five which came before it.
The same attempt to wrench Harry Potter away from it's fantasy world is evident in the urban skyline in the background. There are no mystical elements such as dragons or castles.

Production

All the main characters need to be introduced, and the film poster displays them all.
The target audience of the film are all of roughly the same age as the main characters, this is to make the audience identify with the characters. [link w/ reception]
The mostly dark tones, semi-saturated colour and high photo contrast denote a melancholic and macabre style. This reflects the content of the film.
The dark tones are also related to the target audience. There's a weird train of thought floating around marketing departments which sees colourful stuff associated with children and depressing grey tones associated with teenagers. By making the poster 'grimy' it's somehow adult or mature and therefore attractive to teenagers.
The tagline 'DARK SECRETS REVEALED' makes use of the enigma code. It is there to create curiosity which will drive the audience to go and see the film.
Dumbledore is shown in a strong wind potentially implying or foreshadowing later events in the story

I will update this post periodically as I get emails from Ben and Claire.

EDIT 03/07/2010: ~~Haven't received anything from Ben, although he did seem enthusiastic, I hope I haven't given him a bogus email address. I wish I had access to his blog.~~
Claire doesn't know much about Chandler's Myth, and so is floundering not quite sure what to do. I have to declare that I don't fully understand Chandler's Myth, it sits as a hazy and vague concept in my mind. Need to re-read my notes.

Also Chandler's Myth is woefully under-explained on Wikipedia. Come on people, if you don't write this I'll end up doing it, and you don't want your super-brilliant theory being written up by a slightly confused teenager do you?

2nd EDIT: Daniel Chandler wrote a book, and it is available as a word document. Thank you internet!

Chandler's Myth

2010-06-28T12:38:00.001+01:00

Last lesson we were meant to put our main task through Chandler's Myth, here's the result:
Reception

The main character is portrayed as a hero.
The female character stays behind.
The military is glorified.
Aliens are vilified. They do not represent anything other than a simple narrative device, a necessary opposition.
The society in which the film takes place has no identifiable class structure (it's kind of hard to fit that kind of stuff into 120 seconds).
The age of all characters is ambiguous.

Production.

Romantic interest is required as a sub-plot.
Religion is not represented at all.
An enemy is necessary to the story, this is why it aliens are included.
The story is male-dominated, womans only play supportive roles.

Reference

Military action taking place in a sci-fi environmnet is a convention of science fiction.
Society dictates that womans are not meant to fight, they are protected from conflict.
The military is male-dominated.
There is no religious 'driving force'.

It's fairly unclear, and still in note-form. Piyal muttered something about turning it into an essay, he wasn't in the lesson when we studied it.

I have a few other notes to offload, the condensed definitions of Reference, Production and Reception.

Reference is the content and context of the media text.
Reception is the effect the media text has on an audience, it includes representation.
Production is how the media text is constructed.

These all affect one another.

Trailer research 02

2010-06-27T11:06:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I went to the Oxford BarCamp, and I'm sorely tempted to write something about that, however I've neglected the set curriculum for too long. On Friday, me and Jonny sat in the Media room discussing Kinect and watching more trailers, I decided to boil them down to their most basic components:
Name of publisher, distributor or production company. (4-6 seconds)
Name of director or main actor. (2-4 seconds)
Date of release. (4-7 seconds)
Introduction to setting, including an establishing shot. (10-20 seconds)
A single shot designed to linger in the audience's memory. (2-5 seconds)

The major difference I can identify between the trailer task and the film opening task is that a trailer is not supposed to cram as much story as possible into the sequence. It's also perfectly acceptable to break normal cinematic practice and show almost random unrelated scenes together in one long montage. A trailer doesn't need to make any sense, it just has to give the audience a quick preview of the film.
When I mention a single shot which symbolises the film for the audience, it applies to all genres. For example in a horror trailer there's the close-up of a scared face, an action trailer generally uses the most impressive action sequence, meanwhile a romantic trailer uses a kiss, a comedy film uses one of the film's visual gags. In short a film can incorporate a motif of it's genre into the trailer to identify itself.

All these are just conventions and are frequently challenged.

I'm also aware that trailers are made after or during a film's creation. Those making trailers have a full film to rely upon, with an established narrative imposed upon them. I'm not naive enough to know that some shots are given higher priority in films so that they can be used in the trailer afterwards. Not having a film to follow is both a blessing and a curse in that we're more free but we don't have a pre-existing setting to work with. If it becomes necessary we might be forced to script a very vague over-arching narrative for an entire film, even if we'd only then include small chapters of it.

None of this was really necessary for the film opening task because we only had to set up the beginning of a narrative and there was no need to carry it through to it's end.

Before I go, I recommend watching the first episode of Pioneer One. It's not 'good' in that it couldn't be compared with, say, Firefly (which I haven't watched). But it is definitely worth studying, it couldn't rely on a hollywood budget so it makes the audience use their imagination. The director uses as much visual trickery as possible, and the action is implied when it cannot be recreated on screen.
Plus it's pirate video, independent and creative.

Guest post by Matthew Springett

2010-06-24T19:01:00.022+01:00

Matty was kind enough to write a short piece about noticing my account was left logged on. I found it in the 'draft posts' pile, here it is published with his permission:

This is a hack post... in other words you are being hacked. Thank you for your time, I will now log out... before you see me do this, even though I'm doing this long to make you see and stop me because I don't really want to post this... DAMN YOU why are you not looking and stopping me, you are a fool do you not care about your blog... still not looking I've been doing this for an age now. Soon I'm going to have to publish this because you don't seem to care, you clearly trust me too much.. LOOK UP HERE NOW... YOU'RE STILL NOT NOW COMMON GET LOOKING THE TYPING IS LOUD ENOUGH, STOP ME FROM PUBLISHING THIS PIERRE, YOUR MEDIA WORK IS AT STAKE...

LOOK AT WHAT I'VE WRITTEN!

I know it reads like the rantings of a sleepless maniac, it just takes a while to get used to the style. Apart from that in today's lesson we ran our main AS coursework texts through Chandler's Myth and I scribbled out a handy diagram to online video.

Trailer research 01

2010-06-23T19:34:00.001+01:00

First post researching trailers for films. I went to the Youtube Trailers site and took all my examples from there:

I am Love - 2:10
Katate Kid - 1:54
The Lottery - 1:56
Toy Story 3 - 2:19
Winter's Bone - 2:26
Get Him to the Greek - 2:31
Killers - 2:10
Marmaduke - 0:42
Ondine - 2:24
Splice - 2:18
Spring Fever - 1:34
Grown Ups - 1:32
Restrepo - 0:30
Love Ranch - 2:31
Twilight: Eclipse - 1:40
The Kids are Alright - 2:29
Cyrus - 2:25
Despicable Me - 2:22
REC 2 - 1:16
Winnebago Man - 2:19
Inception - 2:25
Countdown to Zero - 2:33
Ramona and Beezus - 1:47

This tells me that the mean average trailer is exactly two minutes in length. I used Google Spreadsheets to work that out, if it's wrong blame google.

Now I've realised I've got some political reading to catch up on for tomorrow. It'll be worth analysing these trailers in greater depth for later. When do the titles appear? How long is the date of the film's release displayed?

When new posts come rolling in from the rest of the class I'll build on their research.

Newspapers are unaccountable and innacurate.

2010-06-23T19:04:00.000+01:00

I'm supposed to be covering research for trailers however a quick glance at my feeds shows that Matty's the only one who's written anything yet. Jonny started a new blog but I don't know the url. I could find out quite easily, but that's for another time, what I want to write about here is how the newspaper model is unaccountable and inaccurate. I rediscovered Angry Mob's new site today and was reading this story.
In my last post I said one of the disadvantages of the modern newspaper news distribution model was that:

innacuracies can spread like a virus and their source becomes ever more hidden with every word printed.

The story of Cinders the pig is a perfect example of how the system is systematically broken, and it's a current example to back up that statement. A lie was able to work it's way through almost every level of the press in this country (except, you'll note, Social Media) without being checked once. All it took to check the story was to visit the site of the public relations agency which reported it. Each news source copied and re-wrote the story and there was no financial incentive to do any actual journalism. The only stage in the process which put the story through any scrutiny was a blog. The author of the post is not a self-proclaimed professional, and yet they trumped every other professional "journalist" in the country who covered the story.

Interestingly enough I was forced to go back on my my earlier disdain for local newspapers when I had to admit that they are the only ones to engage in any real journalism. They're forced to because they are unable to rely on any press agency, they're forced to check facts and cannot copy the competition.

The 'free press', or at least the for-profit press would want you to believe that the news is a conversation and that they know best, if journalists can't hold the facts to account it's up to you, as a citizen, to call them out.

Next post is movie trailer research.

for Peace and Socialism!

2010-06-21T17:44:00.002+01:00

Last week I did Journalism at the Morning Star.
I'm working at the foreign desk, here's a list of stories I've covered there:
Monday:

Swedish Greenpeace activists protest at the Forsmark plant. I phoned up Swedish Greenpeace then was embarrassed because I don't speak Swedish. Still, good story for a first day.
Staff at a Chinese factory return from strike.
World in Brief. I did Iran, Nepal, India and Germany.

Tuesday:

US Military leaves behind dangerous waste in Iraq.
Canada and Columbia sign a free trade agreement (plus a blob about human rights of trade unionists in Columbia).
World in Brief. I did all of them this time.

Wednesday:

Human Rights Watch releases a report on female genital mutilation. This one was quite a challenge, partly because the subject matter is so delicate. I had no problem with writing about numbers of people killed in various situations, but this one was different.
French government wants to raise the official retirement age. This was a late page lead, and I got to phone up various French trade unions.

Thursday:

Wikileaks declared they were ready to release another film. I like Wikileaks and it gave me the opportunity to use Twitter as a source.
Migrant workers in Gibraltar don't have full rights. I doubt this was reported elsewhere.

Friday:

Sweden approves new nuclear power plants. Directly related to Monday's story.
United Auto Workers union unhappy about Toyota's new non-union car factory. Proud of this because the point about wages took an lot of trawling through various documents in research.
World in Brief. I did United States, Vietnam and Kyrgyzstan.

I think that's everything, I also did a few World in Briefs on Wednesday and Thursday.

I saw the gatekeeping process in action, every morning myself and the foreign editor picked the day's stories, we rated them in terms of priority, then picked the ones we wanted to cover.

On Thursday another journalist from home news came to cover the foreign editor, he explained the world view of the Star. For example, if people die in floods in Bangladesh it's not covered in the mainstream press, because the mainstream press doesn't see Bangladeshi lives as important, the Star does, to a certain extent.

The Morning Star scorns 'popular celebrity culture' and refuse to cover gossip stories about the personal lives of professional celebrities. Under their 'reference to elite persons' they include Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.
They support socialist and anti-imperialist governments. Under their 'reference to elite nations' they include Bolivia and Gaza. Although some could argue that they don't recognise the concept of elite people or elite nations at all.

The Morning Star looks out for dissent, direct action, protest and the voice of the proletariat. This is why strikes and industrial disputes are nearly always reported. Whenever a strike is declared the editorial line always sides with the workers, their demands are published and bosses are demonised. This is how propaganda is applied.

As many stories come from western news agencies they are sometimes checked through state-run news agencies, or verified by trade unions on the ground. I did this for a few stories. It's scary to see how much journalism truly consists of blindly rewriting press releases from a news agency, and how all the papers all have the same four or five news agencies who basically dictate the news agenda. I regularly rail against 'bad journalism' so it was interesting to see how my Tintin-esque romanticised vision shored up against the practicalities of deadlines. John Pilger is all very well and good but news is news after all and needs to be punctual, this constraint means innacuracies can spread like a virus and their source becomes ever more hidden with every word printed. Journalists are supposed to hold authority to account and make heard the 'voices of the voiceless' otherwise they become little more than a tool of the establishment.

The paper is a tabloid, but it keeps a formal writing style, which I had to adapt to. It does not wish to patronise it's readers, but to make the news accessible to all. It avoids distracting readers from events with words they might not understand, which maintains a practical approach to language.

When I finished the foreign editor gave me a book and the staff had threatened to go on strike. Indeed "co-operatives operating in a Capitalist system are forced to exploit themselves".
On my last day I tracked down the Marx Memorial Library to see if they had any archive coverage of the Wapping print worker's strike. They were closed.

Revision and filming

2010-06-07T11:55:00.001+01:00

Firstly I've done the basic storyboard and some early filming for that Modern Warfare machinima I've been talking about for a long time.

Jonny kindly helped out, my second and third body actors were playing Red Dead Redemption and Gears of War respectively. By the time they'd finished their missions/levels we had finished filming. I also had trouble with Xbox LIVE regularly booting me from parties for no apparent reason, this made filming very difficult, but not impossible.
This is a frame (after encoding) of the film in progress:

Because my player is the cameraman, I can only get camera angles from where I can go. This means I can't fly around like in the Halo Theater. It also means that the cameraman and the body actor are at the same eye-height.
Jonny couldn't get the Cold-Blooded Pro perk, which means I couldn't face directly at him, in some cases I slipped and his gamertag flashed up, it'll be a challenge in editing to get rid of it.

And of course I've been doing masses of revision, I re-wrote most of my book of notes over the holidays and I'm still not keen on analysing a TV drama. Well, I'll see how it goes. I've still got one more day and it's my last exam...

how to find your blog

2010-05-27T09:15:00.000+01:00

I've got lots of free time on this study leave so I've been busy messing around in HTML5 video, and while doing that I somehow managed to stumble across the Blogger API in Google code labs. And I found something to fix a common problem: that a teacher can't find the URL for a student's blog.

Okay, no problem, as long as they have the student's profile there's a solution. Each profile has a unique ID. My ID is 14086874072997756246.
All the teacher needs to do is put that Profile ID in this url:
http://www.blogger.com/feeds/profileID/blogs
So mine is:
http://www.blogger.com/feeds/14086874072997756246/blogs
This is an XML feed which they can put in a feed reader, mine (Google Reader) took me to my first post. From there the teacher can click through to the blog. If not search the XML code for 'alternate' and the url for the blog should be there somewhere. I know it's not an ideal solution but it's not a bad last resort, and it only takes about 2 minutes.

I'm also still planning to film that Modern Warfare machinima, during the holidays, I seem to have a team of enthusiastic people and all I need is a better storyboard and lots of time. Oh and revision, do that as well.

Okay very last thing I just remembered: Passe Partout. Analyse this. Because it's propaganda. And it's brilliant.

Twitter log

2010-05-16T09:09:00.000+01:00

During production of the final task we used twitter to communicate with each other. This morning I complied the entire twitter conversation log, hopefully it'll give a small insight into how we worked together. It's also an example of flexible short-form communication being put to good use.

socialistgamer seriously this is my ownly way of contacting you. Get the presentations off Adam's account and send them to ************************* 12:37 PM Feb 10th

eluminesent1 hay pierre, I cant access adams account as Im still ill at home, if you need it unsername is ************* password is *********** 8:42 AM Feb 11th

socialistgamer No problem, Matty showed me how, thanks though. Also he's joined Piyal & Patrick for practical project. Can I go with you? 12:55 PM Feb 11th

socialistgamer Oh, and Conor didn't turn up for the presentation today, we didn't really expect him to. 12:55 PM Feb 11th

socialistgamer last tweet before the end of lunch: my idea for the practical project is to have a fantasy character in the real world + Cliches of RPGs. 12:58 PM Feb 11th

socialistgamer what's the address of your media studies blog? 7:22 AM Feb 17th

eluminesent1 http://cherwellmedia5177jnesbitt.blogspot.com/ 11:13 AM Feb 17th

socialistgamer fyi there's only going to be about 2 people at oxtuttle, probably, no other people have said they're coming. Pass this on to @patmanu92 4:46 PM Feb 25th

socialistgamer Storyboard uploaded: http://tinyurl.com/ybnqmmk also, I like Russian film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33melM5EVf0 Genius. 9:45 PM Mar 2nd

eluminesent1 iv written up the 5 movie research on my blog if you want to copy it to yours 9:52 PM Mar 4th

socialistgamer Thanks, much appreciated, I'll link to it in a while. Also I'm editing teh film on iMovie :( will send you linky to uploaded fiel later. 9:34 AM Mar 5th

socialistgamer been somewhat busy. Will upload files tomorrow. Probably in the afternoon. 9:05 PM Mar 6th

socialistgamer okay, files are uploading w/ FTP. they will be up at www.occupationalthoughts.com/videoarchive/prelimfootage.zip in an hour or two. 8:18 AM Mar 7th

socialistgamer according to lutragem (YouTube) the Art room next door to the Media room has computers with Adobe Premiere Elements on them. Try it out. 7:00 PM Mar 7th

socialistgamer Free Music here! www.musicfrommusicians.com send the artists a message asking them if it's kay to use their music. They'll probably say yes. 10:06 PM Mar 9th

socialistgamer more stuff up at www.occupationalthoughts.com/videoarchive/prelimextras.zip can you get that and the footage on your iPod for tomorrow? 8:54 PM Mar 10th

socialistgamer the music is by a guy called Joseph Carmichael, I'll try and contact him to ask if he's okay with us using it. 8:55 PM Mar 10th

socialistgamer I'm in the art room, it should be finished with exporting in 2 hours, bring your flash drive there after school export1.wmv same computer. 12:36 PM Mar 11th

socialistgamer come back to room. Stopped export. It took too long, try it next time with only single-pass encoding. 2:41 PM Mar 11th

eluminesent1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzPkCxayY6k think i got the write one, looks ok, says will improve after prossessin 7:09 PM Mar 14th

socialistgamer that's great! I did my evaluation, it's up and still processing. 7:12 PM Mar 14th

socialistgamer I was just thinking about that earlier on, I do have Bungie Pro, and it can record videos but it has a one minute cap. Still useful though. 7:40 PM Mar 15th

socialistgamer and yeah go ahead and send me clips, although I'd rather record them all at once. Here's my research: http://tinyurl.com/yaer2gd 7:42 PM Mar 15th

eluminesent1 xbox? 2:44 PM Mar 15th

eluminesent1 just thought , if i file share halo vids you could then record in HD, plus do you still have bungie pro? --> render videos! 7:36 PM Mar 15th

eluminesent1 those shots look fantstic. check out my file share if your on halo: med-enter1 n 2. i forgot b/w filters, just a badly filmed test 8:27 PM Mar 15th

socialistgamer I checked Wikipedia, it says that machinima on Halo is not illegal. I'll make a post about it. Still working on that script. 6:49 AM Mar 17th

socialistgamer Did the script: http://cherwellmedia6147pmarshall.blogspot.com/2010/03/script-for-sci-fi-main-film-task.html 7:12 AM Mar 17th

eluminesent1 making a checklist for sat:360controller+charger, premiere pro. maybe my laptop, capture thing, sound capture, other software,anything else? 7:09 PM Mar 19th

socialistgamer that list sounds fine, I might be getting DivX Pro (up from DivX 7), if it's any good, we could encode with that when it's finished. 7:24 PM Mar 19th

socialistgamer bring your storyboard, I might have other stuff to capture when we set up capture rig too (from other games). 7:25 PM Mar 19th

socialistgamer dood, it's 11, you said you were coming this morning, I've been up for 5 hours already and I'm bored of waiting! 11:08 AM Mar 20th

eluminesent1 im busy at the moment , ill come over after lunch, see you at 12:30 11:19 AM Mar 20th

socialistgamer http://tinyurl.com/yl2hsw6 Blackmagic uncompressed HD codec. 5:05 PM Mar 20th

socialistgamer my laptop broke :~( and I'm backing up all the files to hard drive now. It should take 1 hour or so, might not be fixed when you get here. 9:51 AM Mar 21st

eluminesent1 oh no hope your laptop isnt too broken, afrade im busy again this morning so is one pm ish still good 10:20 AM Mar 21st

socialistgamer I've recorded 24 shots, they play but I can't edit because of laptop. Don't bother coming at 1, I'll do an analysis of Perfect Dark instead. 11:38 AM Mar 21st

eluminesent1 ok cool, i recorded avi with divx codec, looks good but premier dosent like it, could be codecs not sure. my email *********************** 12:25 PM Mar 21st

eluminesent1 premier dosent like the mjpeg codec so im convertng, may lose some quality, ill play around and see what i can do 5:12 PM Mar 22nd

eluminesent1 m4v frm imovie works but lower res. iv cut scenes added the radio, put elite etc in layers, dont have blue scn vid. hope your laptop is ok 6:39 PM Mar 22nd

socialistgamer my laptop finished backing up and 'startup repair is looking for problems'. I'll try to remember to bring in the bluescreen footage tomoro. 6:55 PM Mar 22nd

socialistgamer also, if possible get some voice-acting done tomorrow, it's one more thing to get out of the way while we can. 6:56 PM Mar 22nd

eluminesent1 iv found a tryal mjpeg codec that works so i can import the origional recordedness if necassary 9:45 PM Mar 23rd

socialistgamer I got the go-ahead from (@) GarryNewman who made Garry's Mod. I've got a draft email to Bungie and I've signed you too, should I send? 9:23 PM Mar 25th

socialistgamer this is the text of the email so far, do you have any additions? http://piratepad.net/sJaASKr8kk 9:24 PM Mar 25th

eluminesent1 bungie email looks good, could say were from cherell school 9:58 PM Mar 25th

eluminesent1 cherwell* 9:59 PM Mar 25th

socialistgamer Okay, make whatever changes you want on PiratePad and I'll send it tomorrow morning. Yawn. Got to sleep now, too tired to think. 10:01 PM Mar 25th

socialistgamer just sent the Bungie email. Didn't know how to include Cherwell School so left it out. Do you have space in your file share? 3:27 PM Mar 27th

eluminesent1 i have filmed and put on file share the conversation with girlfriend, i have filmed more but will put on file share after these 6:26 PM Mar 28th

eluminesent1 just noticed that on orbital on forge there are big slidy star trek doors that you can open, if we wanted doors 6:34 PM Mar 28th

socialistgamer film whatever you think is appropriate and we can make decisions on it later. I can't record your clips now, have sort of a homework crisis. 6:37 PM Mar 28th

socialistgamer just checked, you have m-girl talklong, m-hero talklong, m-entranceside and m-entrances. Can you do one OTS shot with Hero and no girl? 6:43 PM Mar 28th

eluminesent1 ah yes, ill have a look 7:17 PM Mar 28th

eluminesent1 did i need to film anthing 3:56 PM Mar 29th

socialistgamer I recorded the shots on our list, can we go to my house tomoro during media + lunch and edit them? I can't fetch my laptop during break. 9:31 PM Mar 29th

socialistgamer Bungie aren't replying fast enough to their email. I sent them this: http://twitter.com/socialistgamer/status/11268891380 9:39 PM Mar 29th

socialistgamer edited clips all come out at 3:20 total. Some are too long but I don't know by how much. Tomoro we need to edit them down to 2 minutes. 6:33 PM Mar 31st

eluminesent1 ok, too long is better than too short for editing. do i need to do anything/bring anything for tomorrow? 6:46 PM Mar 31st

socialistgamer bring your pen drive, and that's it. Ben H said himself and Claire W & Claire A would be there so they can voice-act if necessary. 7:00 PM Mar 31st

socialistgamer and if possible try getting some, any sort of dramatic music. 7:00 PM Mar 31st

socialistgamer if it's not too much could you also try generating some TV noise in Adobe Premiere/After Effects? The stuff I have is a bit crap. 7:06 PM Mar 31st

socialistgamer also I checked earlier on and Bungie Pro now has 100 render minutes for sale, $10 :O they love machinima. 7:10 PM Mar 31st

eluminesent1 all cool, out of interest what kind of render quality do you get from bungie pro, would it be full hd 7:13 PM Mar 31st

socialistgamer they render 720p in wmvx format, and last time I checked it cost 5x as many render minutes. Otherwise standard definition 360p. 7:18 PM Mar 31st

socialistgamer and speaking of strange file formats, your edit exported in NSMOV, a format which I haven't seen for a long time, my old camcorder used it. 7:19 PM Mar 31st

socialistgamer Hay, sorry for not being on Gmod yesterday, was busy levelling up my character in Fable/writing blog post. I'll edit the dialog in today. 10:39 AM Apr 2nd

socialistgamer finally got round to doing some kind of editing, what do you think of this: http://bayimg.com/caLfkAaCK Did I get the perspective right? 5:04 PM Apr 2nd

socialistgamer did you do some White Noise in the end? I found a way to do it here and it's rendering in glorious high-resolution. 5:38 PM Apr 2nd

eluminesent1 that girlfriend shot looks good, not certain on the talking technique yet. no i havent done the white noise yet but i can if we need it 6:31 PM Apr 2nd

socialistgamer the white noise came out okay in the end, I rendered 3 seconds of it. Was wondering if the fast running shot (reshoot6) was necessary. 6:47 PM Apr 2nd

socialistgamer actually, do you have all the footage I re-shot? 6:47 PM Apr 2nd

eluminesent1 i have reshoot(0) to 18 6:58 PM Apr 2nd

eluminesent1 i definately think we need some running, but the 3rd person may look a but artificial, cctv looking angles may work 7:00 PM Apr 2nd

eluminesent1 i cant find your steam account, ************** or **************** 7:03 PM Apr 2nd

socialistgamer ah, ************** is my steam ID I think, my username is *********, try that, if not try *******. 9:13 PM Apr 2nd

socialistgamer FYI, I will be away during the weekend. Editing will resume on Monday, pick up anything handy in preparation for then (sounds, music). 9:17 PM Apr 2nd

socialistgamer and lastly, this was done by someone in my form, if we ask them nicely they might let us use it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEUf8kJE3aQ 9:19 PM Apr 2nd

socialistgamer I'm having trouble with the export, I suggest we render it in parts then combine them in Premiere, are you k with that? 4:26 PM Apr 7th

eluminesent1 all cool, whats up with the export? but yeah iv got premiere figured good i think! ill check out the sounds 8:09 PM Apr 7th

eluminesent1 nearly forgot, check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juNdnbGSjmI ps, wonder if we could use copygay music if we get permition 8:11 PM Apr 7th

socialistgamer that Stop-Motion sequence looks really good, I use JPEGVideo. It works for the most part. Explain 'copygay'. 9:45 AM Apr 8th

socialistgamer the export stops at around 55 seconds, it just gives up and leaves the unfinished file in the project directory. 9:47 AM Apr 8th

eluminesent1 i was trying to abriviate copywrite 9:48 AM Apr 8th

socialistgamer http://tinyurl.com/y95qytg Editing update 02 9:48 AM Apr 8th

eluminesent1 i now have gmod 11 or 10 with an update, but have no idea how to use cameras and such 9:50 AM Apr 8th

socialistgamer you can come round now if you want, I'm free and will be going to watch Ponyo at 13:00 but you could come to that as well. 9:53 AM Apr 8th

eluminesent1 i have work to be done so maybe another time 9:57 AM Apr 8th

socialistgamer okay, no problem, how about tomoro morning? 10:00 AM Apr 8th

socialistgamer film is finished rendering, exporting and it's done, ready to see, I'll upload it to my FTP server later today. 8:17 AM Apr 10th

socialistgamer didn't get round to doing it yesterday. Here it is: http://www.occupationalthoughts.com/videoarchive/finalrender.m2t 7:21 AM Apr 11th

socialistgamer actually I am free today, for editing. 9:36 AM Apr 12th

socialistgamer Final video is uploading to youtube now. Plus I had a new idea: message Bungie members on the Halo forums. 8:10 AM Apr 15th

eluminesent1 found this!: http://www.xbox.com/en-us/community/developer/rules.htm , looks good, just need to add that text to youtube somewere 9:57 AM Apr 15th

socialistgamer those content rules look mighty helpful, stick them on the blog, here's the upload: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjcEqaiRSpE 10:29 AM Apr 15th

socialistgamer Halo Reach, limited and legendary editions http://tinyurl.com/23ekg72 http://tinyurl.com/2dutcwa were talking about it today. 4:35 PM Apr 22nd

socialistgamer How to film machinima in MW2: Hardcore, equip flashbang & hold down LB. 8:49 PM Apr 30th

socialistgamer I don't have the evaluation questions, can you please email them to me? 2:20 PM May 2nd

#Voicetweetup

2010-05-14T21:20:00.000+01:00

Yesterday evening I went to #voicetweetup at the Jam Factory, I was going to liveblog the event, I was all prepared with my netbook fully charged, and then it failed to find the Jam Factory's Wi-Fi network. Forced to use traditional methods of pen and paper here are my notes:

7:30 Ask Rosemary about Florence... Arists commune?
Laptop broken, ChomeOS not tracking mouse movements, blargh.

7:35 Resorting to liveblogging with pen & paper.

7:58 iPad has been activated! Take lots of photos.

8:05 Talk about volcanoes, no airplanes. Presley was stuck on Chile for a long time. This may not have actually been a bad thing.

8:20 Apparently South Park made an episode about Facebook. I have to see this.

8:34 lol Pr0nz? 'Pornography in the 21st Century'. Now on the iPad.

8:53 Geni

And then people started going home.
The iPad was most interesting, here are the photos:

Directly related to the media course, this is the Guardian.co.uk website on it. It does support that nifty multi-touch zoom thing which people who make touchscreen devices always seem to get excited about. Wendy made a good point about the fact that you can zoom to a level where the banner ads are no longer included in the screen. I regularly do this anyway in chrome on my laptop, but the multi-touch thing feels far more natural than pressing Ctrl+scroll wheel. It's certainly a new way of interacting with a screen which was only hinted at by the Microsoft Surface.

Altair's chronicles. This is particularly interesting because since the announcement of the iPad I've seen many gaming blogs talk about the potential of the iPad as a gaming platform. The mobile Assasin's Creed adventure is actually an iPhone app but it's been scaled up in size to fit the bigger screen.

This is me, touching an iPad while performing the multi-touch action with my fingers.

The iBook app, most notable for it's inclusion of books from Project Gutenberg which are in the public domain. Here you can set the font and text size. It's certainly a technological leap forwards in terms of publishing. But not as much as a leap forwards as the Kindle, including a book app on a more expensive device doesn't count. Technological convergence has it's disadvantages (see: cameraphones).

And this, the 'virtual page turning' only really interesting because it tries so hard to pretend it's a real book.

And lastly the Kindle app, alongside my notes, I think it lets you doodle virtual notes on the iPad, but I forgot to try it at the time.

Also if I may make a declaration at this point that I actually think Apple products are generally bad, not because they're low-quality, on the contrary they always tend to be of incredibly high quality. But because they always dismiss functionality for aestethics and are aimed at people who are just slightly richer than I am, and that annoys me because I know I'll never be rich enough to afford one of the damned devices. A better device is one which:
1. Is as cheap as possible.
2. Is functional.
3. Runs Linux.

Also I'd like to add a later comment on the discussion of pornography. Firstly I'm actually quite happy that I can talk about this in a purely sensible way without descending into a fit of giggles. And secondly I'm going to invalidate that by mentioning the 'time to penis' which some people look for in video games. I went to GameCamp 2 last weekend and only stayed for an hour (I know, I should have stayed the entire day, next time I will), there was one discussion about creativity and I happily got down to listening to famous journalists argue how games can foster creative thinking in players. It was most informative, and something I can take from it is that people are far more igenious than we normally give them credit. And also that people are driven by very very basic desires. The evidence is there in the hundreds of mods, like the Sims one which removes blurring when characters take their clothes off, tbagging fallen opponents in Halo, the fakefactory naked models of Alyx Vance for Gmod, the various naked mods for Fallout 3, or the bizarre cases of sexual harassment in Playstation Home. This doesn't show humans as these evil perverted creatures, on the contrary we are all motivated by natural instincts; and if that manifests itself in constructing a skyscraper-sized penis to replace all the boring normal skyscrapers in virtual New York then so be it.

Machinima in Modern Warfare 2

2010-05-14T09:26:00.000+01:00

Here's how to do it on the Xbox:
1. Start a Hardcore match. This gets rid of most of the Heads-Up-Display.
2. Make sure your actors have the 'Cold Blooded Pro' perk enabled. This means their username doesn't come up when seen by the player designated as the cameraman.
3. The cameraman should equip a flashbang and hold down the left button. This pulls back the character's arm in the motion of throwing it, but as long as you don't relese the left button the character remains in that position without releasing their projectile. This leaves the screen completely empty and ready for filming.

I discovered step three when wandering aimlessly with Matthieu around Overgrown, and it's essential. It's also useful to note that very different from Halo you'd need a minimum of 2 Xboxes either conected locally or over Xbox LIVE. All the filming takes place in real-time so you can't rewind time to re-shoot the same events again and again.
You also have very little control over the costume of your character.

Despite all that it's not impossible so people will definitely attempt it sometime in the future.

we broke the rules

2010-05-09T10:22:00.001+01:00

There was one shot which we thought had violated the 180 degree rule so I went back to the saved scene, viewed it from above and marked on our camera positions.

In conclusion we did break the 180 degree rule, but nobody watching the film actually noticed.
To justify the breaking of the rule it was the only way that shot could have been set up, otherwise the second monitor would have gotten in the way. The shot was also necessary to break up the conversation by viewing it from another angle.

Evaluation

2010-05-03T08:41:00.004+01:00

Here is the filmed evaluation on YouTube:

As usual there were some points I missed out on my two and a half pages of notes. I will explain them here.

When Ms. Parish watched the final piece she made a point about how there was a tension between it's retro elements and the very modern ones. This is a more academic way of pointing out our original intention to make a very conventional, very dated film with new technology and new film techniques. For the most part I think that was a success, the greyscale film effect, the noise effect and the dark gradient overlay all work to make the piece appear as if it was made a long time ago. The relatively new filming technique and the narrative events are the modernist aspects.
Another reason Orbital was picked as a filming location was because of it's unconventional art-deco architectural style, futuristic space-bases are expected to be full of wires, crates and defined angluar structures. Orbital challenges this and creates a new futuristic setting reminiscent of the curved upper levels of Coruscant in Star Wars. Our setting reconciles both retro and modernist styles.

There's an explosion which takes place while I'm speaking on the monitor. That explosion was originally planned as a way of visually showing that the base was also under attack. One of the downfalls of constantly re-shooting scenes until they are perfect was that I didn't want to re-shoot it a second time as it would have cost a disproportionate extra amount of time in editing (about an hour). The explosion was left, and in order to make it appear natural within the scene a sound effect of an explosion was added in. It's justified by adding to the atmosphere; apart from that it can't stand up to much scrutiny as little more than an odd occurrence.

The music begins early, this was the subject of debate between myself and Jonny, when it comes down to it the scene does have greater emotional impact with music than without music.

Elias correctly identified glitches in the frame rate when Nick is walking up and down stairs. These happened because the hard drive on my computer does not spin fast enough to write all the data to it in time for the video. Sometimes frames are dropped, although I was under the impression that because I was recording at sixty frames a second that wouldn't be a problem. Jonny taught me some things about de-interlacing video to get rid of a problem I'd previously had when recording in 60fps. I didn't apply that de-interlacing to this film, it's good to know for future projects though, if it's necessary.

As for the institutions which would distribute our film, I maintain that distributing it for money would be wrong, as it would needlessly restrict the audience to people who could pay for it. Television is ruled out because I don't watch it and dislike the fact that it locks the audience into a schedule rather than allowing them to watch when they choose. In my opinion the internet is the best possible distribution method, and the two platforms I mentioned are Machinima.com and Mininova. First to discuss Mininova, it is a peer-to-peer file sharing site so far I think this is the best way of distributing video online as the cost of bandwidth is shared, even the BBC iPlayer windows application used to run on a p2p distribution platform. I checked out the sci-fi category and the torrent with the most seeders in there is one called "Ghosts - A machinima adaptation of Nine Inch Nails' music", which is fantastic because mine is also a machinima. Mininova was restricted from distributing pirated content, so the site at the moment is quite bare, with only a few people willing to step forwards to distribute their works. I believe that given time and content the site could grow back to it's former glory.
Me and Jonny were originally wary of asking Machinima.com to host our content because they have a tendency to stick overlays on videos and play adverts to gain money from them. This can be seen as a win-win situation where the artist gets publicity/promotion of their work and Machinima.com get new content and advertising money. However it can more commonly be seen as 'selling out', and that is why I am reluctant to do it. It was picked because it was the most relevant institution I could think of.

The character on the spaceship (me) was named 'cosmonaut', this is because it sets them apart from the traditional 'astronaut' which I wanted to distance myself from. Somehow the Less futuristic... retro.

What have I learnt?
How to deinterlace video using VirtualDub.
That uncompressed 1080p High Defenition video is too big to edit with the equipment I currently have.
That bluescreens work better with neutral bright lighting (the Drama studio was very useful for this and I will use it more in future).
That it's always better to save games on the Halo Theater even if at the time they might not appear useful.
Never to have two characters speaking at the same time.

EDIT01: Jonny kindly sent me the evaluation sheet we were given, so I will answer the questions on it here:

> How does the text use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of film/film openings?
As I've sort of explained the text challenges conventions of science fiction by using a new film technique to make an old film. The three conventions of the genre included were the alien saying "take us to your leader", the reference to the beginning of Star Wars: Episode IV with the hornet spaceship flying above the camera, and the last convention is that it's set in a future in which humans have developed spaceflight.

> How does the film opening represent particular social groups?
This is an interesting one because the Halo universe in general tends to see humans from earth as one species united without reference to their race. I was surprised when playing Halo 2 to suddenly hear some australian soldiers pop up out of the generic north american voices. The advantage of the spartans in halo is that they are effectively empty characters, their only distinguishing feature is their armour, which we modified to show differences. The Captain has totally white armour with a rounded left shoulder plate. Nick has a standard set of green armour with grey highlights (which you can't see because the entire film is in greyscale). I used our standard procedure of using a '5' emblem for Nick and a '6' emblem for the Captain (again, you can't see it in the video). Nick's armour consists of a Hayabusa shoulder with a Mark V helmet. The clue that the Captain is of higher status is that he's got white armour. The only other way of distinguishing his character is by his voice. The reason I'm talking about how to disinguish characters is because the empty character shell needs to be filled out with personality and background which begins with putting characters in social groups. I suppose the only stereotype we really set up from the start was the girlfriend who stays at home and worries about the brave male protagonist who's gone off to fight in space. From there we've represented women as 'housewives' who prefer to stay away from the action, and that men are action-oritented and full of macho posturing. The line 'baby, I'm going into space' is a form of bragging, a declaration of supremacy. Even the word 'baby' is patronising. These representations are very conventional, and I think looking back give a negative representation of the social groups involved.

> Who would be the audience for your media product?
As I explained in the video our audience was very broad and we had no specific target in mind. As a very general idea we thought 15-35 year old males would be the predominant audeince, partly because they are the target audience of most videogames and because the two realms of film and interactive media do merge a little bit with machinima. The idea that you can reach into the virtual worlds you live in and create a new adventure is quite an attractive proposal and would appeal to gamers.

> How would you attract/address your audience?
We started with the film technique/genre and then worked out what the target audience would be. Effectively we are a representation of our own target audience. So what we did was make a film that we would enjoy. Whenever we filmed there was some motivation to show something we knew we would want to watch ourselves.

> How did we progress from our pre-lim task?
The main task was technically more demanding and we were forced to use a more advanced editing suite than the ones in school. I can't really say we learnt a large amount of new things in filming as I had already done machiniuma before and know all the basics, I think it's really just experience in using the technique. Our pre-lim task was kept to 30 seconds and as I explained it had to be simple, oly include the necessary shots and no more. In this main task we experimented with adding shots which weren't central to the story but which helped 'pad out' the general atmosphere. For example there was more than one shot of Nick running, the extra shots did not help the progression of the story, but they did help to show off the setting.

Again if I've missed anything please feel free to ask in the comments and I'll reply.

Storyboards

2010-04-29T10:03:00.001+01:00

Storyboards are avaliable on Jonny's blog, cross-posted here:
All the images are hosted on Jonny's blog so if they go down it's his fault.

We started off with a basic guide of shots to include in the film, then through the steady process of shooting, re-shooting and re-re-shooting we added extra shots. This is why the film we ended up with is wildly different from what we originally envisaged. This is by no means a bad thing, our approach to production was that if we spotted a good angle, we would film it, and if it turned out to be useless during editing we didn't include it; virtually nothing was deleted. Our production was not guided by a strict storyboard. The Halo Theater is partly responsible for this as we could see the same scene played out from a multitude of angles, it's an advantage of machinima.

Final task and credit list.

2010-04-15T16:35:00.001+01:00

This morning I uploaded the final task to YouTube:

And this is the list of credits:
1. At Launch by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons "Attribution 3.0".
2. Gmod by Garry Newman and Team Garry. Also the Source Engine by Valve.
3. Aoi No Kaze (Blue Wind) by Rosemary O'Reilly.
4. Freesound. File ID: 16503 Description: atmospheric sound effect User: Jovica
5. Freesound. File ID: 30935 Description: laser User: aust_paul
6. Freesound. File ID: 50725 Description: man walking User: rutgermuller
7. Freesound. File ID: 57808 Description: WW2 British siren sound User: guitarguy1985
8. Freesound. File ID: 26474 Description: digital alarm User: osivo
9. Freesound. File ID: 47252 Description: bomb noise User: nthompson
10. Freesound. File ID: 93078 Description: rocket launch User: CGEffex
11. Freesound. File ID: 46078 Description: running staircase User: HerbertBoland
All Freesound files are licensed under Creative Commons "Sampling Plus 1.0".
I will try later to get the links to the original files or users on freesound.
12. Conor Whitehouse - voice actor for the Captain.
13. Claire Aselford - voice actor for Lucy.
14. Ben Hubbard - voice acting for the alien.
I narrated the beginning, and played the comonaut, Jonathan narrated Nick Romero.
It was created under Microsoft’s “Game Content Usage Rules” using assets from Halo 3, © Microsoft Corporation.

Final task complete.

2010-04-14T19:15:00.003+01:00

Jonny came round yesterday and went over the changes I made, he didn't like the running scene and I wasn't entirely happy with it myself so we re-shot it again with our protagonist running slower and with different camera angles (that's a temporary whiteboard in my office, ignore the writing on the top left). We saw that we might have broken the 180 degree rule during the conversation between Nick and the cosmonaut, so thought it best to add in a previous shot for no other purpose than to ease the 'flow' of the conversation and stop the audience getting all confused.

Jonny didn't like the music playing over that last conversation, I justified it because although the music isn't necessarily appropriate it's flexible enough to be used to give the scene emotional impact.
All that was left was to add in some music at the start, after this Jonny went off and found a site which has some royalty-free music. I picked two songs and after having spent ages listening to them with the film playing decided that I didn't like either of them, I left in the last piece of one song at the end. I now consider the film finished and will upload it to YouTube after I've done my evaluation because it's in that I intend to credit everyone who contributed to the film.

All that's left to go over now is to review the film and Jonny's old storyboard and the whiteboard above and some other jottings I have on loose sheets of paper and from them draw up a final complete storyboard with all the shots included.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, we changed the fonts of the film credits to make them more in-line with the whole 'black and white' genre of the film, I now also realise that I forgot to change the font of the date at the very start, I might just leave that mistake in because, as with the music, I kind of like it.

Machinima setup

2010-04-10T09:09:00.000+01:00

I was looking through my camcorder and found a picture of Jonny recording some machinima in my kitchen:

It shows what our machinima setup looks like. Also some good news is that the final render worked and I'm uploading it to an external server right now. From there Jonny will review the film and make comments. I joined his Xbox LIVE Party last night and he said he'd be free next week, then we'll go through what would be the 'final edit'. In the meantime I might try a machinima montage in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Matthieu seems incredibly keen on trying it.

Editing update 02

2010-04-08T09:05:00.000+01:00

I 'animated' the Gmod models, it took a while and I had to make a few attempts before I got the perspective right.
The timeline now looks like this:

A noise filter has been added to every individual clip, video track 5 contains an overlaid border, I've even started adding some text for the credits. I asked lutragem nicely whether we could use her music and she accepted. And I downloaded some sound effects from freesound (it was me who got them because I have an account there).

These are the file IDs, descriptions and the users who uploaded them:
16503 atmospheric sound effect. Jovica
30935 laser. aust_paul
19105 ship damaged. Jace
22862 men running. victorcensua
50725 man walking. rutgermuller
57808 WW2 British siren sound. guitarguy1985
26474 digital alarm. osivo
47252 bomb noise. nthompson
93078 rocket launch. CGEffex
I backed up the entire project onto my networked hard drive, it's 4.3 gigabytes big and contains 133 files, this is because I was encountering some problems with exporting to one file. What I want to do is to render the film in small parts and then stitch them back together in a seperate editing program. It also occured to me that the filters could be applied retrospectively, this means our editing process takes two steps: First to frame and arrange all the clips in order, apply any transitions and make any manual special effects (greenscreen, seperate tracks). Second to render those clips in small parts and apply any filters, sound effects and music.
Jonny approved all of it, and contributed some things, he might come round sometime so we can review it together and film our evaluation.

In other news the third and last reading of the Digital Economy Bill (#debill) went through parliament yesterday, my twitterfeed ('Digital Economy Bill' is trending in the UK at the moment) went into overdrive with people commenting on it as it was being debated. Today is a sad day for the internet, I will continue to fight the tyranny of copyright by distributing films for free, despite the corrupt ramblings of this uncaring capitalist government. /rant

How are we making machinima?

2010-03-28T16:32:00.002+01:00

Last lesson Ms. Parish said something like 'I like what you've done but I have no idea how you've done it'. Here I'll try to put that right by explaining what machinima is and how to use it as a film technique. If you look at the URL of the last post you'll see that was what I originally intended to slip it in there, I decided it's worth a full post. I'll also try my best not to be patronising.

We play Halo 3 and act out the scenes using the in-game models, the scenes take place within the locations of the game. It's crowning advantage is that you're simply using an existing stage to tell a different story, it bypasses the normally tiresome animation process by using the game-engine and all the content which is already available. We 'film' the shots in the Halo 3 Theater, the camera allows us to view the events of our match from almost any angle. I record the HDMI output of the Xbox 360 as the events play out on screen. I'm able to re-wind and fast-forward to any point in the game so I can see the same action from any number of actions. There's a whole other bunch of options, if I have time I'll post screenshots of the menu, for now though here's the timeline of the editing so far:

This morning I added the last scene of the spaceship taking off. Jonny supplied the background on his file-share. The map used there is Standoff. I recorded the spaceship in Gmod, which I'll come to now. Gmod is a sandbox game which allows the player near-complete freedom to do what they want in the virtual world. You've no doubt heard of the Grand Theft Auto series, it's like that but with no story or plot and a far greater freedom to experiment. However they share the gameplay mechanic that allowing the player to do what they want is fun. It's useful for us because I can go into the inbuilt map gm_construct, make all the walls green, build a spaceship, attach thrusters to it, go into camera mode, spawn a camera to track the spaceship then turn on the thrusters and use FRAPS to film it as it shoots across the room. The green walls are important because I can then use them as a green-screen in editing. Two tips when making machinima which I've picked up over the last year:

Never have two actors talking at the same time, or if you do be very careful that the audience doesn't get confused.
To lower the weapons in Halo press the Left-Button, Right-Button, the Left Thumbstick, down on the D-Pad and then the A Button. And if you were raised on Street Fighter that should be a doddle. You must be in a local or LAN match for this to work.

And here's an exceptionally good example of machinima, made by Rooster Teeth, that's my favourite episode of their Reconstruction series.
If you have any questions please comment. I'm a bit thin on comments here.

Editing update

2010-03-27T16:43:00.003Z

Firstly for the update of what we've been doing, we've been editing well and encountered few problems. My laptop was restored. I delegated most of the things we wanted to include to the editing stage, so now that we're here the film has changed drastically, so much even that I asked for scene 3.1 (or 2.2, Jonny has the storyboards) to be re-shot because we're going to add a new model from Gmod. I know this'll be the third time we'll have re-shot the same scene but that's how we're working at the moment. Having started with a storyboard, script, scouted out various locations in-game, and Jonny's research, we then made the first film which I suppose would be the draft, then I re-shot the scenes and that would be the 2nd draft, what we're working on now is far from the final piece, we still have some things to sort out:

Music. George is composing some for us but it might be good to get some from elsewhere.
Voice-acting. I have to stress that this is a majorly important thing and we need to get it right otherwise the effect of the film will be lost.
Sound effects. Can be found here, and I already have an account. It's at the bottom of the 'priority list' and we can leave it until later.
Gmod models. I'm really keen to do this because it gives variation to the characters. I aim to get them done by Monday (so that we can edit them in together in the lesson).

We also made our pitch to the class, I don't know when we'll be able to upload that. What we didn't mention in the pitch was that the entire film project was, and still is, a calculated risk. There was very little way of telling if we could create a realistic Sci-Fi film until we got to the editing, now it's clear that if we haven't managed to create one yet it's at least possible to do so.

We're still working on the 'copyright issue' with machinima as a film technique. It's probably not a secret to classmates that I'm opposed to copyright, I mean, last lesson I was handing out leaflets for the Pirate Party UK. That aside I did actually ask Garry Newman (Creator of Garry's Mod) if he was okay with us using it to make our film. He replied:

Sure I am, I encourage it :)

There, and now it gets more complicated because Garry's Mod uses the Source Engine, owned by Valve. Source originates in GoldSource which in turn is a modification of the Quake engine. The Quake engine is owned by ID Software. I'm not going to to follow that chain of whether something's legal by ID software as one of the reasons the Source engine exists today is because ID software didn't object to the Quake engine being modified. Valve also encourages people to build on their work and protects a strong modification community. Valve even release the Source Software Development Kit with every game based on the Source engine (it's under 'tools' on the Steam menu). If you've made it down to here you'll realise that by being lenient with their copyright both Valve and ID Software encourage innovation. And that's a good thing. I'm not here to argue for Internet Piracy, I'm pointing out that we don't need to get permission to use the Source engine for our machinima.

I also sent an email to the Bungie webmaster, reproduced here:

Dear Bungie webmaster,

We are Media Studies students using the Halo 3 Theater to make a machinima for our film project.

It is non-commercial but the exam board (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations) requires us to ask for permission when using copyrighted material.

The final work will be submitted to YouTube.

Are we permitted to use the Halo 3 Theater to make our machinima, and if so how would you like us to credit you?

Pierre Marshall and Jonathan Nesbitt.

I got an auto-reply saying that I'd reached the email address for reporting bugs and that they 'may not respond to every email'. I haven't got the wrong email address, it just might be a long time before I hear anything back.

Moar research

2010-03-21T15:39:00.002Z

If you must know I'm doing this now instead of my film because my laptop died, it's currently sitting on the kitchen table while I back up the hard drive, and it will be on the kitchen table for the next 6 hours or so. In the meantime I re-recorded the shots we needed (and added some more) in compressed MotionJPEG format. We now have 24 shots and they're coming out slightly sharp and pixelated but apart from that they're much easier to work with than before.

On Thursday Ms. Parish said we needed more research, Jonny had already done this piece on black & white film, and the commentary for these films, we needed to do more, and it had to be analytical. I have decided to analyse the opening to Perfect Dark Zero. One could make the argument that despite it really being an 'espionage thriller' game it's also a sci-fi game because it's:
Set in the future.
and
Features many futuristic gadgets which could occupy the realm of 'science fiction'.

What's conventional?
Silhouettes establish that the main character is a woman, she's also mysterious because from the opening all we see is her eyes and the silhouette which demonstrates her woman-ly figure. The 'femme fatale' character is a recurring theme in the espionage thriller genre. The most obvious parallel being the opening to the Goldeneye James Bond film. There's probably more to it than that because Rare (the developer of Perfect Dark) also made Goldeneye (the game, it's considered to be one of the best) so would have had some substantial experience in the genre.
Guns and specifically bullets, the camera follows the bullet as it shoots from one gun into another, the gun swivels and shoots the same bullet across and it disappears off-screen, the trail of the bullet forms the horizon for a new platform upon which a hovercraft appears. The imagery lingers briefly on those symbols because they represent the genre. Hovercrafts as objects aren't particularly exciting or futuristic, it's the way in which one is displayed as some sort of holograph which then explodes into a sharp blue mess which gives it those properties.
There's a blue explosion which follows the bullet, it anchors the atmosphere of the trailer as fast-paced and of course because explosions are conventional.

What's unconventional?
The very fact that such an opening sequence even exists, I'm writing this behind my brother who just bought and is playing Splinter Cell: Double Agent, it's still part of that espionage thriller genre but it's very different because the focus is on stealth, not explosions and clichés. Splinter Cell drops the player right into the game as early as possible, the narrative and the world becomes interactive from the start. Perfect Dark introduces the genre upfront with that video. And both games have that 'helping guide', in Splinter Cell it's Lambert in Perfect Dark it's Daniel Carrington (I think), either way the spy always has someone behind them speaking to them through an earpiece or radio or whatever. This character would be Vladimir Propp's 3rd character type - the helper who aids the hero.
Title sequences don't happen often in games, I know Fable has one, though I don't think it's a feature unique to British games.
The techno soundtrack is fast-paced to keep with the atmosphere, but for an espionage game I would expect it to be subtle, possibly classical music.

I'll upload a better, high-definition version of the Perfect Dark opening sequence when my laptop is better, after I've edited the main task. The sequence I've already uploaded has bad sound.

Filming update

2010-03-21T07:39:00.001Z

On Friday lunchtime (when everyone else was doing Sport Relief) we set up a bluescreen in the drama department and began filming the first bit of footage, there was some problem because our actor was busy (at Sport Relief, probably) but I stepped in and acted instead:

If one uses the blue as a chroma key, the resulting alpha mask you get is this, from within the editing software:

Yesterday Jonny came round at around lunchtime and we 'acted out' the scenes we wanted on the Halo 3: ODST multiplayer disk, before he got here I had the opportunity to mess around in Gmod and built a rocket, it's a useful asset for later on:

The acting was massively time-consuming, but it went well in the end. The filming however did not. We took the decision at the start to record in uncompressed 720p HD. Every other time I've done this on another computer and it's played at a slow framerate but at least it played it. This time every media player either refused to play the video or just showed one or two frames. The editor refused to edit it until I installed the proprietary codec included with the capture card, only then would it let us edit with virtually no audio and broken video:

All in all we captured 9.56 gigabytes of video, before Jonny arrives this morning I will record it all again in a compressed format.

I should also note that DivX brought out a new codec pack last week and I bought it yesterday. That tweet has a picture of the new converter.

Script for sci-fi main film task.

2010-03-17T07:09:00.001Z

Our film begins with a long establishing shot of space. Our narrator speaks.
"In the year 2058 Human Civilisation developed the ability to travel among the stars".
Then we have a grand orchestral score as a hornet floats across the top of the screen [reference to beginning of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope].
"They didn't like what they found."
The hornet is hit by a lazer [reduce the damage enough to make it insignificant].

SCENE 2
We are at 'Earth base' where the captain is recieving a distress signal, he shouts to our protagonist Nick to patch it through.We then see from behind his shoulder as a distressed person appears on the monitor [film this person as live-action].
Captain: "Private Romero, patch through the distress signal." [Captain live-action too? Bluescreen?]
Nick Romero: "Doing it now, captain."
Person on screen: "FSHHHT They came at us fast, we didn't have time to respond, we need help, anything, everything, we won't be able to hold out much longer, mayday, mayday!"
Nick: "Wait, who's attacking you, respond!"
The screen goes buzzes and goes black. There's a pause, then suddenly an alien appears [back to machinima now].
Alien: Hello species of Earth, we are the Ginkart, and we want your planet, take us to your leader. We are waiting.
The screen buzzes again and cuts out.
SCENE 3
In the corridors of the industrial base we have an exchange between Nick Romero and his handsome young fiancé [who will be filmed in Gmod against a greenscreen background].
Nick: "Baby, I'm going to go to space"
Nick's fiancé: "I heard the news, promise me you'll be safe out there okay? I love you, and I don't want you getting hurt."
Nick: "I promise. And I love you too."
And then the titles, in true old style they appear majestically zooming out from a central point, cantered at an angle, and screaming: SPACE ADVENTURE 2: THE FIRST ENCOUNTER.
At this point we could also film a fourth scene in which Nick gets into a spaceship and it takes off. We just don't have many spaceships available... I suppose I could build one in Gmod, but that would take time, this scene is up for debate.

Research for main task.

2010-03-15T18:01:00.001Z

I should explain this post to start off with, during today's lesson Jonny voted that we try a science-fiction black and white silent machinima, I agreed. After the lesson we both met on Xbox LIVE and messed around on the Forge for about 45 minutes. We played on the maps we would use and messed around with the inbuilt filters. You must understand that this is great because it includes actually playing through video games... for educational purposes! I settled on the map Orbital and forged it with an inbuilt colour filter (that means the filter you're seeing in these screenshots was added in real-time as part of the Bungie game engine). I should probably mention here that the Orbital map is only available as part of the Mythic Map Pack 2 as included in the Multiplayer disk with Halo 3: ODST (you have no idea how much I'm enjoying this). Without further ado, here's the research:

Also I watched Metropolis last Summer, does that count?

Preliminary task and it's evaluation

2010-03-15T16:11:00.004Z

The preliminary task was edited and uploaded on Jonny's account, here it is:

And here's my evaluation:

I missed a few things in that evaluation which I'll go into more detail here.
It was filmed on a Flip Video Ultra HD pocket camcorder. A limitation of this was that it looked quite sanitised, digital. We wanted a grainy image which mimicked more easily the film effect we wanted. And the advantages were was that the film was easy to get off the camera and it shoots in higher resolution.

It doesn't really have any specific audience. If I had to pick one I'd say it appeals to the arty-bohemian bourgeois type.
Class: probably middle class
Age: young, perhaps in their thirties
Gender: seeing as it's only men represented in the film I'd be tempted to say that it appeals more to men, and then I don't think that makes much difference, so it appeals to both genders
Ethnicity: same as above, we're both of the British ethnic group (because we live in Britain) but that makes no difference because the same film could have been made in the USA and nobody would have noticed that the characters there are of the American ethnic group. Actually do they do grades as letters in America? Must look that up sometime...

Music for pre-lim task cleared.

2010-03-14T09:45:00.002Z

This is an intermediary post to say that I've finished my evaluation, as a Vlog, if that's okay, it's uploading at the moment and will be on my channel in 5 hours or so. It's better than my previous vlogs because I went back to my previous practice of meticulously editing out all the 'um's, 'ah's and anything else I didn't want. This was because I also returned to my previous practice of converting my video from my camcorder in MP4 format to DivX format as soon as I got them onto the computer (I have the DivX converter, and more surprisingly I got it totally legally and paid for it with actual money). MP4 files don't work well with MoviePlus X3, I might download the 3ivX codec to fix that sometime.
We've finished the preliminary task and that'll be on Jonathan's channel soon-ish, I know he hasn't posted it to his blog yet (I subscribe to it, and I've been checking my feeds periodically all weekend). I've got a memory stick now so I'll get it off the school computers on Monday.
I've sorted out the music, finally I decided to contact Joseph Carmichael (the musician whose music we're using) through a friend request on Facebook (seriously he has almost no contact details, unless you want to get a MySpace account, which I don't).
This is the message I sent him:

Hey, this is Pierre Marshall from Oxford, UK. This seems to be my only way to contact you, it's not a real 'friend request'. I used one of your songs (Farewell to a Season2.mp3) in a Media Studies task, I got it off your page on MusicFromMusicians.com. We're supposed to ask for permission, do you mind me using it?

I also realise the irony of not including my own contact details in the message *facepalm*.

Before going, I said earlier that the BBC was changing it's website, well they launched their beta site. This is what it looks like in chrome (full resolution, but zoomed in):

EDIT: Blogger keeps resizing my photos so they don't come out at full resolution, I should probably fix that too.

You slipped on a banana! Lol!

2010-03-08T12:29:00.000Z

You might have read a few months back that we did a filming task in school, well on Friday I was able to get it off the Macs and onto YouTube.
I've also got a vlog-review of Prince of Persia: the Two Thrones on the Wii uploading at the moment, I'll post it on Twitter when it's done and and I'm back from this afternoon's lesson, or you could subscribe to my channel and watch it while YouTube's processing it.
I'll add captions to it, after it's done.

Prelim task filming.

2010-03-08T12:01:00.000Z

On Thursday 4th of March we went to a pub to film our historical drama. I had costumes and a camera and a bike to take us there. What I hadn't researched was whether a pub would be open on a weekday morning. I thought it would be easy to film because the pub would be virtually empty of customers, so it was closed. As a last ditch attempt we went to a church around the corner (churches are good for historical setting because they're old and sort of generic). The church too was closed.

Tired and annoyed we returned to school, on the way we improvised a simple setting and story which we could act out easily with no fuss involved. We settled on a school situation, found a free room and filmed it according to the storyboard we'd already written for the historical drama. It wasn't ideal but otherwise we'd have run out of time.

Person 1 (Jonny) enters and brandishes an exam sheet. Their friend: Person 2 (me) asks them how they did in the exam, Person 1 replies that they got a B, then Person 2 smiles and declares that they got an A grade, they hold their result aloft triumphantly. Seeing that they have been beaten Person 1 makes a sour face, their rival has won. Fade to black.

I will always fade to black, mostly it's the easiest way to end the film.
The short story including the dialogue fits comfortably into 30 seconds. We still filmed it as a silent black and white film because that's what we were prepared to do in the first place. I suppose it fits into silent black and white film, while at the same time fitting into 'social drama', which basically describes stuff which happens in normal life.

On Friday I took my camcorder to the editing suite and edited the footage with iMovie which is an absolutely terrible program, Jonny wasn't there so I put up the footage as a zipped file on my hosted server. He'll make his own edit and we'll come to some consensus which aspects to include in the final edit. The illustrative shots I've included in this post are from my edit. On that same topic I still have the footage on the server so if anyone wants to remix it contact me and I'll send you the link. Btw we're still looking for copyright-free music, any ideas?

I don't know what we'll do for our main task, I have a media lesson last period so we'll agree on that then. I rather like the silent social drama, and we'll have more freedom to introduce a proper story in 2 minutes, after all that's the purpose of the main task anyway.

Storyboard for prelim task.

2010-03-02T21:40:00.001Z

This is the storyboard for the prelim task that me and Jonny made:
EDIT: It won't upload. Will re-try at home...

2nd EDIT: Wahey! Tried at home and it's done.
We decided to go with the Victorian historical drama, because we don't really watch or like Romantic films.
3rd EDIT: Jonny put up his storyboard too, it's the precursor to this one.

Historical genre for film task.

2010-03-02T07:58:00.001Z

Historical
It is 1884 and young master Filpott is meeting his friend Neville Baker at the local Tavern after a long day ploughing the field. He enters, the room is thick with smoke from the roaring fire, men drink and wenches dance [we don't have to film this, just get the sounds]. Filpott crosses the tavern and sees Neville, whose face is smeared with factory grease. Neville raises his tankard of ale in greeting.
Neville: How be the Harvest this season?
Filpott: Poor.
Neville: Aye, it's hard times.
And they stare sullenly at their glasses, take one long swig and then the world fades black.

Notes: We would add a monochrome filter to this as an effect and make the video look older.

Fantasy genre for film tasks.

2010-02-26T10:41:00.001Z

Fantasy.
Mighty Thungrin the fierce warrior returns from his epic quest. He unloads his weapons and tells his great tale. While he describes how he slew the fearsome dragon of sirdahon his wife 'hum's and 'ha's. He declares he shall drink until he is unable to stand. His wife then turns to him and asks him if he could put out the milk *loss of dramatic tension*. He takes a swig of ale and declares he will do it that very moment, he then yawns and lies down snoring on the table.
Thungrina whispers "sleep well good husband". The next day Thungrin wakes up, goes outside bare-chested and strokes his scraggly beard while gazing at the sunrise. Then a messenger approaches him and says that last night the town three leagues away was had been cursed with a terrible black spell. The inhabitants were eating one another's brains and shuffling slowly towards the surrounding villiages. Thungrin accepts themessenger's pleas for help and turns to the camera and roars... it's
THUNGRIN AND THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE.

And that was what I did in my Film Editing class.

Research on opening credits of at least 5 films

2010-02-25T10:35:00.002Z

District 9 [IMDB link]

300 [IMDB link]

Police Academy 2: their first assignment [IMDB link]

FullMetal Alchemist: Conqueror Of Shamballa [IMDB link]

the Shawshank Redemption [IMDB link]

~~COMMENTARIES ARE FORTHCOMING.~~
~~Jonny will do them.~~

Commentaries are done, well done Jonny.

Also, this is a trailer for a film featuring the musician 'Jay-Z', it was linked on the Guardian PDA Media Blog under the caption:

Not exactly the world's first grainy chiaroscuro music documentary, of course, but it should be a big hit with Jay-Z fans and media studies departments everywhere.

So I'm doing what Jack Schofield says to and publicising it, stop frowning like that, you know it's relevant!

Cover lesson shot-reverse shot and other things...

2010-02-25T09:41:00.000Z

Find the defenition of shot-reverse shot and find an example.

Says Wikipedia:

Shot reverse shot (or shot/countershot) is a film technique wherein one character is shown looking at another character (often off-screen), and then the other character is shown looking "back" at the first character. Since the characters are shown facing in opposite directions, the viewer assumes that they are looking at each other.

Used in conversations. Our example (I'm working with Jonny) is here from YouTube, apologies if the sound is somewhat obscene. We have no sound here, and anyway if we did it would be a little rude to use it and none of us have headphones. Next we have to look at the details of the preliminary task and see where it would be appropriate to use this type of shot and why:

A continuity task involving filming and editing a character opening a door, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character with whom he/she exchange a couple of lines of dialogue.

They exhange lines of dialogue, shot reverse shot would be appropriate to use there.
We'll publish the next task as a seperate post, keeps things nice and tidy.

Various important things of note

2010-02-20T14:24:00.002Z

I'm aware there are numerous things I've got to go over when I've got the time (the two days before the return to school). Things to mention: ~~Battleship potemkin and HTML5 video. BBC website redesign? Justification for width increase. Astro Boy, XBLA, Moar internet-people on Twittr, 140 characters? Include Machinima video.~~ This is going to be quite a heavy and disjointed post so bear with me.

Battleship Potemkin
Currently available to view on my personal blog. I tried out HTML5 video and it works fine in Google Chrome. It doesn't work in IE because Microsoft are pushing Silverlight and are always behind standards anyway. If it worked in Firefox you could watch it in full screen but it doesn't work in Firefox because I tried adding the MIME types for Ogg video to my apache server and it hasn't recognised it so I'm stuck. The reasons for my enthusiasm in hosting old russian films came out of my realisation that I paid for 1,500 Gigabytes of bandwidth and I've barely used any of it, and that I think Eisenstein's films are just great because they're easy to understand and I liek teh Communism and Lenin and Che Guevera. If you don't have Google Chrome (and you should because it's awesome) here's a direct download link. I'll probably soon dismantle that archive and rebuild it so don't count on those links after a month. I encoded those videos in ogg format because it's not encumbered by any patents. I support internet Piracy and think patents suck so it's only fitting that revolutionary cinema is shared in an open, patent-free format.
The BBC website got redesigned, here's some of the story behind that redesign, it's doubly interesting to me because I also study Graphic Design.

I increased the width of the blog, the total width is now 1,000 pixels instead of 660 (or whatever it was before, I've forgotten). I apologise to anyone with a screen resolution with less than 1,000 pixels width, I know what it's like, I had a 2nd generation 7-inch EEE PC with a 480x640 resolution. On the other hand though I have a full HD 1080x1920 resolution on my laptop and the wasted space around the edges on blogs annoys me, I suppose it annoys everyone else too and 15-inch CRT monitors give you a maximum of 1024x768 and most people have more than that anyway. This problem could be fixed with a fluid layout. I wrote some more about layouts in an earlier post.

I watched Astro Boy at the cinema and enjoyed it more than Metacritic who gave it a 53 aggregate score.
I bought, played Serious Sam HD, 'Splosion Man and Battlefield 1943 on the Xbox LIVE Arcade. I'll probably follow this up with more detail/screenshots on my personal blog.

Some fellow Sixth-Formers are starting to use Twitter, this comes after my experience at #Oxtuttle. I've also got this 140 characters book which I've finished and in the spirit of Piracy think I should probably spread to others who're interested in Social Media. I don't actually know if any of the Media Studies teachers use Twitter at all.

And if you've got down this far here's a treat, remember I said I was going to make another machinima test? Well I did, and finished editing it before the holidays. Here it is embedded for everyone who doesn't subscribe me on Twitter or YouTube:

DISQUS

2010-02-16T16:26:00.003Z

This post is about the DISQUS commenting system I've stuck on here. I originally saw it on @garrynewman's blog, then on @graemehunter's blog. Seeing as it's a new trend I'll get ahead while I can before the major blogs kick into action.
It took me about half an hour to set up and I can already see the advantages:

Anyone can post a comment, be they on Twitter, Facebook, OpenID or Google Account (which is basically OpenID).
When I created a profile it took my Gravatar which I created on my Wordpress account. How neat is that? It's always a bit unsettling when I comment on a site which recognises my OpenID and prematurely displays some of my profile information.
It has loads of features, threaded conversations, responses, trackbacks. Actually that's all I can think of off the top of my head, it's more features than Blogger's default commenting system.
Moar bonus points for when some exam board person comes and grades this blog for my AS Media qualification.

Disadvantages:

I doubt 'adding the next new innovation in commenting on the internet' is on the OCR checklist of things that get you points.
This kind of thing has been around for a while, it's only now that it's been brought together in one popular service that everyone will (probably) use.
Matt Mullenweg (one of the people working on Wordpress) complained about it. He claims the comments aren't searchable by Google. There's some ambiguity over this, I personally don't mind.

Keeping all this in context there's only been 4 comments on this entire site in the whole 5 months and 38 posts since it's existence. One could argue that implementing a new commenting system and writing all about it is a futile and pointless act. I would reply that I have nothing to do on a lazy afternoon in half term and the only alternative is completing a fiendishly hard level of Serious Sam HD, which I shall do as soon as this post is finished. Right about... now.

the 1% rule

2010-02-08T16:56:00.001Z

I came across this article while perusing the Guardian Media Blog the other day. It explains the 1% rule, and here it is:
If you have 100 people online at any given moment, 1 of them will create a piece of content, 10 of them will interact with it (comment, vote up, rate ect...), and the other 79 will passively view it without contributing.

Want more statistics?
5% of Twitter users are responsible for 75% of the site's tweets.

I'm probably not part of that 5%, I do tweet an awful lot though.
Right, that's me done for media today :)

How are hospital staff represented in the opening episode of Bodies?

2010-02-03T21:06:00.003Z

An underlying theme I've noticed so far of the Bodies series is that things regularly go wrong. It's not the kind of drama where they just 'examine hospital life' there has to be constant unexpected events to keep up a story. There are some shots through blinds which give the audience this feeling of spying on the hospital. I think the word to describe it is 'voyeuristic'. The fact that the audience has to observe the events as thought they are unwelcome guests implies that there's some secrecy and gives the hospital a sinister air (this representation is passed down to the hospital staff).

There's some usage of high-contrast lighting, mostly white light. While this is typical in hospitals, the 'clinical' effect is over-emphasised. The pastel colours sometimes give the images an under-saturated effect. These factors contribute to the representation of hospitals as cold, calculating places. The hospital staff are therefore the ruthless emotionless robots who operate in the hospital. This view is supported by the narrative, and then it's contradicted by the emotional outbursts of the new doctor. For example when he tried to save the choking woman's life his character was clearly shaking and his face expressed genuine sadness.
The exaggerated echoes of people walking down corridors brings attention to the silence of the hospital and throws the audience off balance. The isolated footsteps create a sense of unease among the audience and keep up the negative representation of hospitals as inhospitable places.

The accidents where 'no-one is to blame' show a systematic fault in the hospital staff, each has their own weakness and instead of working to smooth them out they're collectively overwhelmed by failure.
So in conclusion hospital staff are negatively represented.
It's useful to keep in mind though that this is only the opening episode, perhaps throughout the series the characters develop and improve their skills.

Analysis of the Guardian website.

2010-01-29T09:44:00.003Z

Take note that because this is at school I'm viewing the website on Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 6 is an 8 year old browser that is incapable of displaying much of the rich media content on Guardian.co.uk
Despite this liability I can see that the main stories are organised into short blurbs which lead the audience on to the full article. Below that it resorts to just listing headlines. This leads the audience quickly on to the most important content. The front page of Guardian.co.uk is similar to the front page of the physical paper, it's function is to draw the audience on to specific stories, like a channel to content.
Here's the top of an article:

As you can see the content is on the left, with various controls on the right, and an advert. The picture at the top is typical of the Guardian website.
At the top there's the article history which says that the article was

Published on guardian.co.uk at 01.26 GMT on Friday 29 January 2010. It was last modified at 01.27 GMT on Friday 29 January 2010.

It's all very well organised to present information. I suspect it may have been put together by a graphic designer.

Hum, so that's my half-hearted analysis.

EDIT: I came back with the Chrome browser and grabbed a better image of the Guardian front page:

News narratives

2010-01-29T07:44:00.002Z

When the Haiti earthquake hit it was widely reported in the news. I've recently come into contact with the idea of a 'news narrative'. Some news stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. They conform to certain conventions that make them easier to report. The events are sometimes predictable. There's a hero, possibly a victim, and an evil villain.

For example: Celebrity A is seen courting Celebrity B. Celebrities A & B declare undying love for one another. They marry, Then they either have a child, or they divorce, or do both. It's easy to follow and the romantic theme holds the attention of the audience.

Little girl is lost on holiday in Portugal, parents are distraught. There's a huge emotional outcry. Then when everything seems hopeless people report sightings (due to the increased media attention). Conspiracy theorists theorize and the renewed interest sparks the curiosity of the audience. Eventually the police investigation ends, the case is archived and the inertia runs out.
Episode 2, series 2 of Newswipe explains this a bit better (video later, perhaps).

Anyway, the commenters on 'Enemies of Reason' have drawn parallels with the reporting of Hurricane Katrina and that of the Haiti earthquake. For starters there's the relief effort (more on that later). Emotional pictures of children (see below), and the Prime Minister's speech stressing how we have to help out the distraught nation. We get headlines like: 'Disaster earthquake in Haiti: 2 British people feared dead' which illustrates how some sectors of the media aren't interested in the dead Haitians (btw that's not a real headline, I made it up).

And here's my second analysis: reporters constuct their stories and have certain camera angles in mind. I'm going to focus perticularly on one camera angle because it has a lot of evident meaning. There's one scene in a report where the cameraman stands inside an aid truck and films behind the western aid worker who passes down supplies to the people of Haiti. The reason this is important is because the view of the 'lens' and therefore the view of the audience is of a western saviour. The audience is made to sympathise with the aid worker and his action of giving to the earthquake victims. The cameraman would not position themselves within the crowd of hungry Haitians because they do not want to relate the audience to the victims. Again, Newswipe S02 E02 shows this, but in a more general sense.

In addition to all that I went yesterday evening to the #Oxtuttle Social Media meetup. I brought my Flip Video and should put up photos later on.
And I remember needing to analyse the Guardian website, I've got a free period today so I'll do that then.

PCC editor's code of practice.

2010-01-19T17:02:00.001Z

I've 'done the rounds' on my feeds for today and noticed this came up twice. It's a petition to change the PCC editor's code of practice, here are the proposed amendments:

Like-for-like placement of retractions, corrections and apologies in print and online (as standard).
Original or redirected URLs for retractions, corrections & apologies online (as standard).
The current Code contains no reference to headlines, and this loophole should be closed immediately.
Sources to be credited unless they do not wish to be credited or require anonymity/protection.
A longer and more interactive consultation period for open discussion of more fundamental issues.

Incidentally I still have the PCC code of practice in my room somewhere, not quite sure where in my room but I remember that I didn't throw it away.

1 hour timed essay on whether local papers fulfill a more important social fuction than national papers.

2010-01-18T19:42:00.002Z

The local press is at the grassroots and closer to the people it's reporting about. The content is much more relevant to the audience. The social value of locally relevant news is higher than that of national, generally relevant news. This is because people need to know what's happening around them. The events occurring nationally or overseas may not be as important.

The relationship with the community is shown by the usage of local papers as an advertising platform for local businesses. The adverts are well targeted as they're relevant to local people (because both the thing being advertised and the people being advertised to exist in the same area). They effectively create a no-fail situation: the local people see relevant advertisements, the paper gets advertising revenue and the local businesses are promoted. Promotion of local businesses stimulates the local economy which eventually feeds money back into the community. You can see how this cycle repeats itself. The role of local papers in the process is useful to society.

The small readership of local newspapers often means that they need to rely on this advertising revenue (in some cases advertising revenue overtakes sales revenue). This means the papers are reliant on advertisers more than their readers. This begs the question: are local papers serving the people... or are they serving their advertisers?

New journalists can use the local press as a step on to working for a national paper. Local papers educate new journalists and give them the skills and experience needed to develop and carry on their career.

But underneath this there's the counter-argument that because local papers use new journalists they're often underpaid and overworked. These junior journalists have less time to research sources and facts, their output is generally poor and lacking in depth - it's bad journalism.

My last argument for local papers is that they have less of a political bias than national papers. National papers deal with general issues and events that can be seen from multiple viewpoints. The national papers try to cater individually for each of these viewpoints. The local papers have a much more localised political agenda, they deal with local issues, and they tend to represent a range of viewpoints in their reporting.

Now for the social functions of national papers. For a start they have a higher readership and more money behind them. They can command more influence and have a bigger impact when they break stories. They're brilliantly efficient at disseminating information and exist as a useful tool for society. National papers also elevate local events to national conscience.

In conclusion I think the national press fulfils a more important social function than the local press.

Done in under 1 hour.

For anyone wanting to read more, here's a pretty good article by George Monbiot on local newspapers.

The power of the press release and two-tier social media.

2010-01-17T18:36:00.002Z

Our lesson on Thursday was about local and national newspapers. I made the point that local newspapers are (I'm making a huge generalisation here based upon no evidence) underfunded, and have underpaid journalists. These journalists have little time to check sources and tend towards just re-writing press releases. This bad journalism actually can work in the favour of certain groups.
For example, in December last year I was involved in a movement which sought publicity about an event, to achieve this they sent a press release to the Oxford Times and the Oxford Mail. The Oxford Times dutifully printed the main details about the event in their following edition.
On Thursday evening I went to another meeting with a different group who also proposed using this tactic. I've now recognised that press releases are a powerful tool and when combined with a lazy journalist can be used to achieve free publicity.

Second interesting thing was the comparison between my audience on Twitter and on Facebook. The people who follow me on Twitter follow me primarily because of my content. A perfect example is that when I complained about a BBC Have-Your-Say debate relating to gay rights I was followed by Attitude magazine. But when I tweet I don't just tweet for my followers on Twitter, my message is re-published on Facebook as a status message. It's on Facebook that the conversation grows in detail with comments under each status. This means my social media is a two-tier system. My Facebook audience follows me because they know me in real life.
Here's some information about the two audiences:
Of my 44 followers on Twitter 10 of them live in Oxford.
Of my 174 'friends' on Facebook 88 of them go to the Cherwell school.

Conflict between the two is clear when I want to post something relevant to Cherwell and I know it would be inappropriate to post it to Twitter because it's not relevant to the audience.
Also most activity I see on Facebook takes place outside of school times. On the other hand the tweets by people I follow carry on pretty evenly throughout the day (and night) because of the differences in time zones.

From that I can conclude that Twitter is a global network and Facebook is a local one. Then again that was probably obvious from the start.

Now I think I have a 1 hour timed essay to do for Tuesday (on the local/national thing) which will be up here shortly.

Lola Rennt

2010-01-03T08:32:00.001Z

Last night I watched run Lola run, it's a German film, and it's significant because it blends perfectly the hermeneutic and proairetic codes (from Roland Barthes's book S/Z). The base story is a fairly simple one: a girl called Lola must deliver 100,000 marks to her boyfriend Manni before 12:00. From there it branches out before the eyes of the audience into the events which occur as Lola tries to procure this money and cross town to reach her boyfriend in time. Each of these events has their own sub-plot, sometimes they're completely unrelated to the base story, sometimes they return later in bizarre twists. Some of the pivotal characters involved in these events are hinted at in the opening 4 minutes.

This chain of events is repeated three times with different outcomes each time. It becomes boring because the audience is made to watch the same pieces of film 3 times over. And my second criticism is the near-constant 'Dumdumdumdumdeedeedumdumdumdeedeedum' techno music used to emphasise the urgency of Lola's journey. It got so bad that I considered turning off the volume and just reading the subtitles.
Despite all that, I carried on watching out of curiosity over what happened next. I'd liken it to playing 'the Secret of Monkey Island' just to see how the story progresses. The story goads on the audience with interesting twists and by linking some of the sub-plots together until it reaches a 'happily ever after' perfect outcome.
It's a story about a journey and in that respect it's similar to the Lord of the Rings, the story is not the outcome, but the events that lead up to it.

In hindsight, I greatly enjoyed it and learned a bit about how narratives work.
In other news, I stalled editing some of the machinima until I had dialogue because I'll construct various shots around the dialogue, and not the other way round. I did however have chance to put together the initial sequence of shots which relies mainly on dark slapstick humour and has very little dialogue.

YouTube account launched.

2009-12-31T15:37:00.002Z

Before the winter holidays I set up a YouTube account knowing that it would come in handy. Well it has, and I've put up 2 videos:

A vlog on Piracy.
A 2 minute montage of Dave Ward announcing the postal worker's strike along with footage of Postman Pat. It juxtaposes two very different images of the same postal service. The first clip subverts the meaning of the second and makes it ironic.

I also got presents, my parents supplied funding for a HD capture card. And gifted me this book all about Twitter.

I spent about an hour this afternoon 'acting out' a machinima in the Halo theater with my brother. Hopefully I'll have finished editing it by the time school starts again.

To what extent is the dual narative in Atonement used to give us different versions of the story?

2009-12-16T18:13:00.001Z

Explore how this is created by analysing technical details.

Briony and Cecilia's both have different experiences of the first scene where Cecilia gets into the pond. The disparity between the points of view is made clear by Briony's point-of-view shot and the physical gap between the two observers. The scene plays into Tsetsam Totorov's theory of equilibrium by disturbing the balance of Briony's life. Admittedly the 'point of conflict' does come very early on in the film but that's because it's the starting trigger which sets the events of the film in motion.
Briony's character is explained very quickly at the beginning of the film. One of the techniques for this is to associate her with a typewriter sound which denotes writing, and sometimes has a hurried pace to it to make the film seem exciting. This sound is used to great effect in a scene at a hospital where only the sound is heard and Briony is not seen but the link is made and the audience knows she will appear. She's also portrayed throughout the film as an observer, and one of the techniques used was to include lots of close-ups. Extreme close-ups of the eyes also denote an observer.

Cecilia isn't associated to anything and so isn't subject to any symbolism through film techniques.
There's some good use of lighting in the library scene where Robby and Cecilia kiss. On the one hand it's warmth and dimness and adds to the romantic atmosphere of the scene. But when Briony arrives the same lighting casts a different meaning onto the scene; the comparative darkness of the room becomes conspiratorial and suspicious.
Roland Barthes's hermeneutic code is used for the plot elements leading up to Robby's arrest. Yes, the plot is used primarily to advance itself but it also leads on the audience in guessing what's to happen next like a good thriller should do. The guessing becomes easier the closer to Robby's arrest and it becomes predictable. This is when the hermeneutic code is taken over by the proairetic code. The scene of Robby's arrest is where both Briony's and Cecilia's narratives merge and more interesting lighting is used to highlight the importance of the scene. There's a close-up shot in which the cold outside lighting and the warm lighting coming from inside are both visible on Cecilia's mother's face.
After Robby's arrest, two new narratives created: Cecilia's life as a nurse and Robby's life as a soldier. They are both fairly stereotypical roles to play and contrasts with their previous roles (Robby was training to be a doctor and Cecilia was an independent noble-woman). Briony's separate narrative does not arrive until later and the other man's abuse of the ginger-haired girl is largely forgotten or ignored until near the end.
There's some juxtaposition in showing the horrors of war from Robby's POV. A tracking shot follows him in a forest and shows his face slowly turn all sad, it then breaks off from him and shows what he's looking at - a lot of dead people. The calm and peacefulness of the wood is blended with the morbidity of the bodies. This causes some shock in the audience. At Dunkirk a beautiful beach and some typical fairground rides is juxtaposed with scenes of destruction. That beach scene is particularly interesting because it features a tracking shot that continues for over 4 minutes.
War is then shown from the 'home front' point of view with Briony at the hospital, she must sit by a man who's skull is broken, leaving his brain exposed. The surprise factor also shocks the audience as the scene leaves them unprepared for seeing it [the brain]. The mise-en-scene of Cecilia's apartment also shows how her circumstances have changed, it's smaller and more utilitarian. Her costume is plain and she wears the clothes of a working woman. This is different from the well-furnished mansion she lived in and the fine clothes she wore at the start of the film. It tells the audience that Cecilia's narrative and point of view of the war has changed.

How is ethnicity represented in 2 episodes of Spooks? Compare them.

2009-12-09T21:54:00.001Z

The two episodes of spooks I've decided to compare are Spooks series 8, episode 3 and episode 2. To summarise briefly episode 3 features a stunt by a group of Marxist revolutionaries who capture some businessmen and hold them on trial. Episode 2 was about diplomatic struggles as a central asian nation wants to assassinate a dissident in London.
The stereotypical representations of ep 3 are that the 'bad guys' consist of a russian woman and a french man. The american diplomat is heavy handed and represents a 'gung-ho' style of intervention. He dominates the english home secretary and gets his way. The representation of russian and french people as the bad guys is right out of the history of english spy thrillers - look to the villains of the James Bond films for examples. There's also a scene where an english businessman is being tried and he sticks to the attitude of keeping a stiff upper lip and dying with as much dignity as he can muster. This is a stereotypical representation of the english people.

By contrast ep 2 was careful not to name any actual nation, instead referring to a fictional one called Tazbekstan. Presumably it was inspired by asian nations as a whole and in keeping with english spy thriller tradition it ooses of cold-war tensions, right down to the over-pronounced accents of the Tazbek representatives and frequent references to historical events (such as the russian bolshevik revolution).
When it becomes apparent that the UK government will have to trade with the russians they take a long time arguing over it and it's presented as not an easy decision. This represents a long-standing dislike of russia by western governments, which has thawed slightly in recent years.
I think the producers didn't want to name an actual central asian nation because it might actually cause a real-life diplomatic incident and that they didn't cover up for russia because it's somehow more politically correct to display them as the enemy.

the 10 news values

2009-12-08T22:15:00.003Z

Here in no particular order are the 10 news values:

Unexpectedness - highly unpredictable events.
Unambiguity - events whose implications & meanings are clear.
Personalisation - events portrayed as the actions of individuals with human interest.
Continuity - events that are part of a running story.
Reference to elite nations - the cultural proximity of events to the audience.

Reference to elite people - the media pays attention to high-profile people.
Composition - this also comes under frequency, stories compete for space.
Visual imperatives - events which are covered with images and have good visual cues.
Negativity - bad news is good news.
Logistics - whether reporters are on the ground to report an event.

How are the various social classes represented in Candleford?

2009-11-30T07:47:00.002Z

The social classes of the time in which Candleford was set were defined by different social parameters than they are today. Candleford does much to clarify the distinctions between classes. But it also explains the unrest which was happening at the time. Britain was making a slow shift from a feudal society to a capitalist one. The view from Candleford is very much that of the feudalistic society.

Most interesting is it's portrayal of what we would call today the 'chattering classes'. Folk who have a modest income, a house and some fine clothes, enough to show their status. This class retains some social rules, this is particularly obvious in the old widow (damn and blast I have forgotten her name!) who insists on maintaining these rules. At the same time she is forced to accept the friendly newcomer (forgotten his name too) and his forward manners.
The nobility are represented as decadent and malicious. Cold colours are used to denote the Lady's detached manner. When she interviews the young serf for a job the camera angle awards her higher status and the mise-en-scene creates an imposing atmosphere (the marble floor with a high roof lit by ambient white light). The dialogue betrays the Lady's dishonest intentions when she confides in her butler that she would not have educated servants because they would threaten her authority.
This leads me on to my next point about the representation of the educated serf. This documents the creation of a literate, educated working class who are only just coming about in the age. The nobility (simply represented here as the bad guys) reject them, and in doing so paint them as the opposite (the good guys). This serf wouldn't ascend to the rank of the middle class of the time, as evidenced by their need to scrape for a job as a servant.

Favicons & labels

2009-11-29T10:56:00.004Z

Admittedly this doesn't come under schoolwork because it wasn't actually set. I spent the last hour or so messing around with the favicons on both blogs. They're hosted on my rented server and here they are in 96x96 PNG format:

Pirate favicon. Represents my commitment to piracy. It's also a bit of fun.

Cherwell logo favicon. Different from the one actually used on the school website. I made it as a backup in case teachers don't like the pirate one.

Hammer and Sickle favicon. Used on my personal blog. It was the first thing I thought of, and I might change it later.

I forgot that I wasn't tagging any of my posts (in blogger they're called labels) so I went round organising my posts into neat categories. This makes it easier to search for them.
Lastly I added a search bar on the right.

Is Rupert Murdoch is the most divisive figure in the history of the UK newspaper industry?

2009-11-26T19:35:00.010Z

Divisive - adjective meaning "having a quality which divides or separates".

Murdoch is a well-known figure in the UK newspaper industry, or at least he's the first person who I think of as a personality in the UK newspaper industry. His being well known is a result of his influential stance in the newspaper industry.
To give this some sense of perspective he's the owner of the Sun - the newspaper with the highest average daily readership in the UK (7,986,000). These readers are 'swing voters' and the Sun is influential over them. More on that later. Rupert Murdoch is the founder, chairman and CEO of NewsCorp: a media conglomerate with net assets of $53 billion. Rupert Murdoch's own net worth is estimated at $4 billion.

Here are some of famous spats which Mr. Murdoch has taken part in:

Murdoch versus Google
Recently Murdoch tried to block Google News from using clips from his websites. This comes as he tries to monetize his internet news-outlets. I first heard about it from a tweet "Angry old man doesn't understand the internet".

Murdoch versus ZaNuLiebore
The Sun with it's huge readership switched allegiances from supporting Labour to supporting the Conservatives after the Labour Party Conference. They also drove up and down Brighton beach in lorries with placards saying "Don't you know there's a war on?" in front of pictures of dead servicemen. The lorries weren't picked up by the rest of the media, however Murdoch's new support of the Tories caused Labour to denounce him as a crook. Which leads me neatly on to my next story...

Murdoch versus Tax
To be fair this wasn't actually Murdoch's doing, it was NewsCorp, but it was wrong nonetheless and he was implicated in it. Through the usage of offshore tax havens it managed to avoid paying net corporation tax for 11 years.

Murdoch versus the Neo-Luddite Trade Unions
6,000 workers went out on strike in 1986 over the bosses trying to negotiate a no-strike clause, flexible working, the end of a closed shop and the adoption of new technology without a guarantee that their jobs would be secured. Murdoch's response was to follow Thatcher's example and sack all the workers involved with the dispute. This made him something of a hate figure.

These disputes have polarised opinions on Murdoch from being a champion of free speech (and free enterprise) to him being the modern-day equivalent of Joseph Goebbels. In this regard he is definitely controversial. He provides cheap news (the Sun and the Times have recently been reduced to 10p). On the one hand this is brilliant as it makes the news more accessible. But on the other it does this through bad journalism that undercuts quality newspapers and hurts the newspaper industry as a whole.

Compare Murdoch's notoriety with another figure in the UK newspaper industry: Jan Moir (I could have picked any columnist but she's the most well known atm). Her article was worthy of a good scandal, but she just has the one scandal to her name. The same is true of Andy Coulson (former editor of the News of the World, director of communications for the Conservatives) accused of hiring private investigators who tapped John Prescott's phone.
Murdoch has a full history of spats which define him and make him popular. Nobody will remember Jan Moir or Andy Coulson by next year, but Rupert Murdoch, he'll always be there.

UPDATE: I don't like double-posting 'internal links' because it irritates me a bit when I see it being done on other blogs. However I think this is relevant, I wrote a follow-up post explaining in more detail my thoughts Rupert Murdoch's news empire.

How are women represented in Sex and the City?

2009-11-25T19:07:00.003Z

I don't normally watch Sex and the City so I'm basing my entire analysis on this short clip and my own prejudices. In this clip the women discuss how all men are unfaithful and compare them to dogs "licking their balls" because "it's part of their biology". Looked at objectively this exposes women as ignorant sexists. However the TV show promotes this idea strongly in it's (mostly female) audience so it's considered normal.

In balance they also discuss the fact that women also cheat but this too is presented as normal because when one of the women points out that this attitude is hypocritical she is opposed by the 'normal' view. In this way the media text represents both points of view in a fair manner and doesn't condemn women as hypocrites.
One thing I do take issue with is the fact that their costumes represent their subservience to fashion. A lot of thought has gone into the dressing, the well dressed lady has higher status. An adherence to clothing as a sign of status objectifies women by judging them by what they wear and not what they are.
On the same theme the setting for that clip is a market where the women browse for trinkets, they place a high importance on material goods. This propagates the stereotype that all women enjoy going out shopping together.
The story also represents a limited view of women. The plot revolves around romantic affairs with men and stereotypical activites such as shopping (as evidenced above). Although it explores those specific topics in great depth it's field of representation is very shallow. It builds up an old illusion that women's thoughts are dominated by men and fashion. Of course women don't just think about these things, the media text expliots that perception of women and exaggerates it.

How are women represented in the first 20 minutes of Atonement?

2009-11-23T13:54:00.001Z

By 'women' in the first 20 minutes I'm going to use Keira Knightley's character as the main example. The girl writing the play doesn't count as she's not a woman.

In the first scene we see KK strip to her (modest) undergarments and climb into a pond. The implication from the first point of view is that there's something sinister as a young man is with her and he appears to leer at her when she comes out. The roles are then reversed later on and we see that the young man is innocent and that KK is angry at him.

In the second scene we see that Keira Knightley is sunbathing while engaging in pleasant banter with two aristocrats. The idea that she's conforming to being a genteel proper lady is shown. Doing ladylike things like sunbathing. The camerawork also helps to sexually objectify her by bringing attention to her body.

From the story KK is shown to be independent with a strong personality. She isn't shown to be simple either. So this reverses the stereotype that rich ladies of the time were stupid.

It's useful to keep in mind the fact that her character doesn't represent all the women, it represents a group of women at the time.

Director's commentary of 'Courage'

2009-11-15T11:09:00.003Z

Courage is a short film I wrote and shot in the half-term holiday. After one week of editing I posted it on Facebook. To save you the hassle of following the link I've embedded it here:

I wanted to replicate a scenario where an authoritarian government has just clamped down on the people and the sparks of a resistance movement have just been lit up. I originally came up with the (far better) idea of explaining this through the atmosphere. I even thought of including Valve's famous graffiti. Unfortunately this was dismissed and the setting/backstory was explained though short pieces of dialog. I realize now that was a mistake because it breaks up the story.

Nick's acting was brilliant and I've already set my mind on including him in other films we do in the future.

The attempt at a double narrative was slightly forced (I did write it in, but didn't intend it to look like it did) because Nick and Matt both came at different times so I couldn't film them together.

Both costumes were improvised in the hour before filming, I had planned to get hold of some from a costume rental shop but they were either shut, very expensive, needed a week's notice or a combination of the three.

I was unable to find a suitable cockpit background for the pilot so opted just to have sky. Thankfully this was anchored by the sound of engines. On that note the sound from the freesound project was incredibly useful and I'm very grateful for it. What I did miss was some royalty-free music; there's loads of techno bleeps and ambient synthesized soundscapes on freesound but I needed something more like an orchestral score.

Thoughts on representation lesson and research on Vladimir Propp

2009-11-09T13:35:00.002Z

We had a lesson on Media Representation, I was asked to explain Marxism to the class, I remembered that. We also had a group discussion which was fun.

Now to the research, this is the stuff I found out from Wikipedia:
1. Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp was born in 1895 and died in 1970.
2. He analyzed folk tales to find their most basic elements.
3. Apparently after the initial situation is depicted stories follow a sequence of 31 functions. Absentation, Interdiction, Violation of Interdiction, Reconaissance, Delivery, Trickery, Complicity, Villainy, Mediation, Beginning of Counter-Action, Hero's Departure, First Function of the Donor, Hero's Reaction, Receipt of a Magical Agent, Guidance, Struggle, Branding, Victory, Liquidation, Return, Pursuit, Rescue, Unrecognized Arrival, Unfounded Claims, Difficult Task, Solution, Recognition, Exposure, Transfiguration, Punishment and Wedding.
4. He also categotized all characters into 7 types: Villain, Donor, Helper, Love interest and their Father, Hero/Victim, False Hero. These characters are applicable to almost any story.

He is credited as having influenced Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes with his book 'Morphology of the Folk Tale'. He was also a faculty member of the department of Russian Literature until his death.

Gutenberg's press

2009-11-04T19:11:00.002Z

This is a post expanding upon our lesson of the 03/11/09 about the evolution of mass media. In the lesson we went through a timeline of the changes to mass media; I got Gutenberg's press. After some guessing around at historical dates I concluded that it was made sometime in the 15th Century. To the surprise of my classmates: I don't study History, nor do I study English (why would I, I speaks the language)

The little knowledge I did have of the Gutenberg press was gained from a documentary on it by Stephen Fry. And the historical background of piracy (yes, I do mean the kind of piracy that involves downloading music 'illegally') the term originating in smugglers who distributed 'illegal' prints to presses around Europe.

Wikipedia confirms that Gutenberg's first press was set up and in operation by 1450 and that he produced 40 bibles printed on vellum (animal skin) and 135 bibles printed on paper until 1455. His press was one of the contributing factors to the renaissance period which took place at the time. Books were cheaper and faster to produce which led to a increase in the sharing of information which in turn led to a great expansion of the knowledge of the time.
Gutenberg also invented a new type of oil-based ink which stuck better to his metal types.
The British Library has an online copies of two Gutenberg Bibles.

Media Diary

2009-11-04T18:35:00.002Z

It's worth mentioning that in addition to the odd film I read the Guardian (and sometimes the Independent) about 4 times a week every week. I also check my feeds once a day, as shown by my usage statistics over the last month:

I check Twitter once a day, and occasionally play half an hour of video games.

19/10/09

14:00 - 16:00 Played Halo 3 with Connor (Halo 3 doesn't really represent religion well at all, but for some unexplained reason it's played in church groups in America)

16:29 - 16:56 Listened to Revolting People Season 4 Episode 1. A radio sitcom set during the American Revolution.

21/10/09

14:00 - 15:00 Played Halo 3 with Jonathan (to expand on Halo's anti-religion theme: the aliens have a religious covenant who believe that exploding the universe will take them on a 'great journey'. As the player you have to stop them.)

24/10/09

20:00 - 21:00 Watched Question Time (did it's job of representing Nick Griffin as a racist and a fascist)

25/10/09

13:30 - 14:00 Watched Porridge on the BBC iPlayer (Represents prisoners as normal people who happen to find themselves in a bad situation)

14:20 - 15:00 Played Call of Duty World at War with Matthieu (make special note here that Call of Duty represents a very traditional stereotype of World War II)

28/10/09

19:30 - 20:30 Watched half of 'Why we fight' with Andriy

20:30 - 21:30 Played Call of Duty World at War (nazi zombies) with Andriy.

4/11/09

18:00 - 19:30 - Played Counter-Strike: Source with Caleb at the same time as listening to Hut 33 Series 3 Episode 4.

editing on a Mac

2009-11-04T18:23:00.000Z

Last-last week I had my first experience of editing on a Mac. I understand that most professional video editing and indeed most creative stuff (Photoshop, music editing) is done on Macs due to a generally held common belief that they're better at that sort of thing.
The program we used was iMovie. Originally I was confused at the lack of a timeline, and am still wondering how people edit video properly without one but we found a method of cutting/splitting/trimming clips so were able to make do. The film we turned out after 2 hours was (IMHO) pretty good with music and credits.

script for short film

2009-10-29T17:18:00.002Z

Act 1 - Our hero Currage finds himself cowering under a bridge at night, here he recounts his story.

Currage: It was the government, always the government, we never knew they could turn on their own people but they did, and they were cruel. It started with the Muslims, scared of a terrorist attack the police had them all carry ID cards with tracking devices. [Cut to footage of Nick Griffin on Question Time]. People wouldn't have it, said it was unacceptable. That's how the trouble started.

Suddenly we hear marching boots above, Currage makes frantic 'shush' gestures and turns off the torch. After the tension has died down Currage yawns, nods to the camera and says "we'd best get some sleep".

Act 2 - The next morning [Just to make it absolutely clear, show the sun rising] Currage crawls out from under the footbridge. Once he's taken a few steps a plane roars overhead [film this in the Il-2 Sturmovik engine] "Get out of the open!" he shouts and jumps to the nearest wall. The pilot in the plane radios out "Golf Tango India, nothing to report, over", he then looks up into a bright light and screams "aargh, the sun's in my eyes I can't see" and crashes into a forest.

Act 3 - Cut back to Currage walking down a path and saying "It was last week they came from house to house. Ours was searched and then demolished, I made it out through a window in time but my son might not have been so lucky. We're going to the forest, it'll be safer there".
Cut to Currage trampling through a forest, at one point he trips over something and exclaims "blasted log". He stands up and inspects what he tripped over further - it is a foot sticking out of a bush. He exclaims "by the maker what have we found?" he then looks up to see the crashed airplane and drags the body of the pilot out of the bush. The pilot is clearly dead, there is blood coming out of his mouth. Suddenly over the radio crackles the voice "short-haired teenager with grey hoodie spotted at co-ordinates 376, 892 in your sector, keep an eye out". "That could be my son" cries Currage, immediately he sets off to look for him.

Act 4 - Currage walks to the spot where his son was last seen and looks around. He is hailed by a person in a window who motions for him to come inside. Inside the building are a motley group of Anarchists and Comunists. One of them speaks out "Hail Citizen, what to you seek?". Currage speaks in a raspy, desperate voice "Have any of you seen a short-haired male teenager with a grey hoodie?". Suddenly from out of the crowd steps his son who exclaims "thank the Maker you're alive!", hugs him and the group cheers. Fade to black.

Notes on allisonmedia.net's booklet on representation.

2009-10-19T21:37:00.003+01:00

All media is 'mediated': it's been censored and changed in some way and everything we see is deliberate. When reality is mediated it becomes a representation of reality.
There are 3 types of representation:
Reflective representation - in which the media attempts to replicate reality as accurately as possible. The news is a good example of this.
Intentional representation - in which a preferred reading is imposed on the text by the creator to represent their view of reality to the audience.
Constructed representation - halfway between reflective and intentional representation. A media text cannot accurately represent reality because it will always be mediated, influenced by something. It cannot represent the creator's individual reality because the audience project their own reality onto the media text, they view it in the context of other factors so they mediate it themselves.
Copied-ish from the booklet is what makes up a representation. It's any mixture of:
The thing itself
The opinions of the people creating the representation
The reactions of the audience to the representation
The context of the society in which the representation is taking place.
Stereotypes are what the brain comes up with when it blocks people into groups to easily recognize them later on (also known as Grokking). You see a pattern such as turbans being consistently linked with Islam and the next time your brain recognizes a person wearing a turban you count them as a Muslim. This can lead to problems (such as Sikhs being mistaken as Muslims). Some of these Stereotypes arise naturally and some are promoted by the Media. For example French people are consistently represented as skinny beret-wearing types riding bicycles with a baguette under one arm and a ring of onions around their neck. Going to France one would be hard pressed to find such a character, however each one of those features I mentioned represent France in the media.
The media definition of Hegemony is that the media in general is dominated by a single culture and ideology. The media represents the world corresponding with that culture and that ideology. Because this culture and this ideology dominates it slowly becomes considered normal by the audience. See also cultural imperialism - where the culture of one society invades and dominates another.
Secondly the media definition of pluralism is where the media is composed of a wide range of ideas all of which enjoy equal representation.

Technical analysis of 'The Pursuit of Happyness'

2009-10-15T08:02:00.001+01:00

Following my first analysis of the pursuit of happyness, here's the second one based on the mise-en-scene and shot types used in the second half of the film. It has occurred to me that this is going to be little more than a summary of my notes, that's fine as long as it's well formatted.

~~MISE-EN-SCENE~~ SIGNS

In the scene in the subway Christopher tries to bring to life the metaphor of the bone-density scanner as a time machine by using it to prompt young Chris's imagination. This is important because he explicitly refers to it as the time machine and invites the viewer to marvel at the magical moment in which imagination manages to make light of such an awful situation. Later on they're locked into a toilet and the mood of the scene changes to become very melancholic, this is because the music changes and the viewer is reminded that the magical moment has passed and the reality of Christopher's situation emerges more heavily than before.
EDIT: doesn't really fit in Mise-en-scene, probably more appropriate in signs.

The ray of light from Christopher's machine as it illuminates the dorm is a powerful index because it already exists in society. I think it's a religious thing like the ray of light from Heaven, but I'm not sure [Could anyone reading check this and comment before tomoro?]. The 'ray of light' is supposed to be his salvation and it does mark a turning point in the film when things get better for Christopher.
2nd EDIT: I'm renaming this category 'signs'.

SOUND

The most effective sound used (in my opinion) is the non-diegetic sheet music [EDIT: Is it really called sheet music?]. It marks every high and low of the film by mixing between fast/slow notes and high/low-pitched notes. It's quite simple and that's why the viewer instantly recognizes the clue.
The gospel music at the hospital was well done, it managed to emphasize the unity of voices singing as one, yet due to the mise-en-scene both Chris senior and junior were singled out as apart from the group (not standing up, not singing, not looking happy like everyone else there).

EDITING

I confess I didn't write anything for editing, mostly because I didn't know quite what to write. This'll be easier when I learn about editing techniques. From memory I can only think of one special transition between shots: when both Chris senior and junior are on the bus there's a fade between a shot of Chris junior leaning against Chris senior's shoulder and a shot where Chris junior is asleep on one side of the bus and Chris senior is staring out of the window. It condenses the time of their bus journey, a clue to this is the fact that Chris junior has fallen asleep.

SHOT TYPES

The continuity in shot types can be well explained by the bus scene (again). The camera is always placed right in the middle of the alley facing towards the back of the bus with both father and son in shot. The camera also pans away from the subject occasionally in street scenes to explain the wider setting. Another example of the subject moving out of shot are the various elevator scenes in which the camera lingers for about a second on the empty elevator. I have some good diagrams written in my book but haven't the time to scan them. There's good use an upwards-tracking shot between father and son when they're in the subway toilet, it starts off with the son asleep and reveals the exhausted father holding him in his arms. When both father and son are facing each other there's one quite good side-on close-up shot of them. This serves to emphasize the special moment because both subject's faces are fully shown staring at each other.

Lights. Camera. Action.

2009-10-12T21:53:00.004+01:00

This is a short film from RoosterTeeth, a company well known among the internet community for making execllent Halo machinima.

Because it's just dialogue between two static subjects in a single scene the shot types for the first 34 seconds are restricted to mainly just close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots. One shot at teh start does pan a little as a way of introducing one of the characters. The camera also physically swivels between which subject it's pointing to. This gives the viewer the effect that they're physically following the dialogue as it bats back and back and forth between the characters. At the end the viewer focuses on the cup as the subject because the camera tracks it instead of the original two characters.

It has been edited with quick cuts, each shot follows on to the next with no transition. Even the beginning and end are simple cuts to black.
The set design is the RoosterTeeth office so they were working with what they had, this is still useful as it's they wanted to portray an office scene anyway. The room is well lit with natural light. There's a halogen light above but it doesn't show because the set is all equally lit with no major imbalances.
In terms of costumes the character of the manager wears a shirt (it's smart, befitting of an office manager) whereas the laid-back employee has a t-shirt (casual clothing). Each character's costumes anchors their role.
The sound is sometimes non-diegetic as the character dialogue continues when shots change but otherwise it's mostly diegeitc. The volume stays constant and there are very few sound effects and no music to keep the dialogue clear as the main focus. The sound doesn't seem distant, perhaps it was captured with a shotgun microphone on a boom above the conversation. The sound stays the main focus because the dialogue is important to the story of the short, the producers want nothing to distract from it. There's also normal 'atmospheric' sound included to smooth out jarring periods of silence.

District 9 information

2009-10-12T07:57:00.002+01:00

Studios:
WingNut Films
QED International
Key Creatives
Wintergreen Productions

Distribution:
Tri-Srar pictures

The audience demographic was 64 percent male and 57 percent people 25 years or older.
The film's production cost $30 million and this was entirely funded by ~~Peter Jackson (the producer)~~ QED International. It was made instead of a film based on the Halo video game franchise.

Xenophobia, Private Military Contractors, slum housing and forced evictions thereof are all represented as the film explores and condemns the conditions which give rise to them in it's imaginary setting. It uses this setting to great effect in alluding to past problems. As a perfect example the film is set in South Africa (a country which suffered apartheid and the segregation of black people into ghettos, such as District 6) and it concerns the apartheid and segregation of aliens into ghettos, such as District 9.

The film is a Science-Fiction film but it does not conform completely to this by being set very near in the future (2010), and it's on Earth as opposed to another planet/in space. One could easily liken it to 2008's film Cloverfield. Apart from that it does have other things which define the sci-fi genre: aliens and advanced alien technology.

Essay plan.

2009-09-28T14:52:00.004+01:00

How are institutions and ideologies represented in the film "The Pursuit of Happyness?"
(each bullet point is one paragraph/a couple of sentences)

Institutions:

The Chinese nursery is badly represented but it shows the film's multicultural aspect.
Traditional view of hospitals as caring places is reversed as Chris is continually rejected.
Stockbrokers presented as elitist to begin with but as they accept Chris for an interview and onto the internship programme their image changes as the Chris's saviours.

Ideologies:

Regan's ideology referenced in his speech. Added sense of background to the film.
The Pursuit of Happiness as defined by the American Constitution, the meaning of the title.
Unequal American Society in general.

I could also write about some of the values which are quite similar to ideologies. For example Chris's insistence on giving his son a good education and how Linda's role as a working mum is represented.

Juxtaposed and Anchored image

2009-09-26T20:35:00.005+01:00

The source of this image is a photographer called Martin Argles (google him, he's a photographer for the Guardian). Nick Clegg is just gesturing with his hands, however his position allows me to give meaning to that by suggesting that he's demonstrating the size of the fish he caught last weekend. Instead of anchoring the original meaning, I have subverted it for the purposes of humour. This is actually juxtaposition so I'll name it as such.

I came back a bit later and anchored the original meaning of the image:

2009-09-26T20:35:00.001+01:00

Forgot that I haven't posted the 5 media products homework yet. It was in my book and I never got round to typing it up until now:

Internet - Arby n' the Chief web series. Audience is mostly passive young people with an interest in internet memes and video games.
Radio - A series of psychotic episodes. Audience is active, young people. Probably middle class.
Film - Any James Bond film. Audience is mostly passive insecure young men who hold the same values as the film.
Printed Media -Morning Star. Audience is mostly active, working class.
TV - The Lost series. Audience is active and middle aged.

Framed image

2009-09-26T16:42:00.003+01:00

I haven't been so active in writing over last week. This is because Halo 3: ODST came out on Tuesday. I have since been playing it at every opportunity. For the information of people who don't know, Halo 3 is the best selling game on the Xbox 360 with 10.17 million copies sold to date. ODST is an expansion of sorts which follows the same story as Halo 3 except from a different perspective. A bit like the expansions for Half-Life.

Anyway, enough of that, my homework task was to create an image which I crop to widen the amount of possible interpretations. All models in the images were posed by myself in Gmod.

The first view:

This shows only an old sad/worried man. He's dressed in a turtle-neck jumper and jacket. There are many possible interpretations:

He looks sophisticated, he could be a salesman who's down on his luck.
The lines on his brow show the long hours he might have worked at the office. Perhaps he's at a bar and just needs a little cheering up with a drink or two.
Maybe he's just cheated on his wife and is experiencing a moral dilemma.
Is he looking at something, or is he just lost in thought. What could he be looking at?

The second view:

Now our man has his arm around another man, this second person seems to be on the verge of sobbing. Their stance is friendly and supportive. This seems to confirm most of the interpretations I came up with for the first view. They're at a bar because something depressing has happened and they're going to drown their sorrows.
However looking more closely at the brick wall behind them makes me think that perhaps they're at home. When is this scene set? What is his relationship with this new person?

The third view:

Now we see that the thing the first man was staring at is in fact a coffin. My final interpretation is that these two men are at a funeral parlour. The man on the left is probably a friend who dressed up for the occasion. What is not explained is who is in the coffin or when the scene is set.

PS. Clicking on the images should bring them up to full size. (I actually rendered them at 1920x1080 resolution but I think blogger reduces them to 1600x900 resolution).

Newspapers

2009-09-20T18:07:00.006+01:00

I shot this Vlog sometime last week but can't quite remember, anyhow, here it is:

2nd EDIT: Peter commented that the autoplay was getting annoying and seeing as it doesn't play on school PCs there's not much point it being here. Therefore it has been removed, if anyone really wants to see it I'll keep it in the video archive of my (personal) blog and might upload it to YouTube whenever I get an account.

It's come to my attention that the DivX web player doesn't work so well on the browser we have at school. It's not surprising really because the school browser is the 9 year old Internet Explorer 6. Internet standards have moved on and they need to upgrade.

Another possibility is that the school hasn't installed the web player... With no way of letting me install it. This annoys me.

EDIT: I just read the web player documentation and apparently it supports down to Internet Explorer 5. This means that the problem lies in the fact that the school doesn't have the player installed. It doesn't really matter though because we need to have YouTube accounts.

Also the video plays as soon as it's started buffering. I anticipate this could become annoying but I don't know what to do about it. I'll look for a way to fix it.

The best of radio comedy.

2009-09-18T16:04:00.002+01:00

I recently found a bunch of torrents of radio shows. My views on piracy aside, it's a great opportunity to re-listen to fantastic radio comedy I've listened to since I discovered that non-visual gags are also funny.

Here's the list of what I consider to be the best modern radio comedy:

A Series of Psychotic Episodes - The best contemporary comedy I've found yet. It's a sketch show full of weird jokes and witty references. There are only 4 episodes in the series, but they're good.
Cabin Pressure - Haven't listened to all of it but it's a sitcom about pilots on long journeys. Each character manages to retain an identity and personality which shows throughout the episodes.
Miranda Hart's Joke Shop - Another sitcom, it's about a woman called Miranda who opens a joke shop with a friend. She has a crush on a man and her mother is desperate to 'marry her off', it offers a brilliant satire of society with a few gags included.
Electric Ink - Sitcom about a newspaper, the main character is a cynical journalist called Maddox, it's a funny (although probably wildly inaccurate) insight into the world of journalism.
Play and Record - Sketch show with a compilation of generally amusing (if slightly mainstream) sketches.
The Bigger Issues - A bunch of actors host an amateur radio programme which discusses 'Big Issues' such as homophobia and homelessness. In the process they expose their own prejudices. It's difficult to listen to but you can think of each episode as one very long, very clever joke.
That Mitchell and Webb Sound - Far, far better than Mitchell and Webb's TV sketches, although it's probably best to watch the TV ones first because you need to get used to the voices associated with which character.
Any one of either the Mark Steel Revolution/Lecture/Solution - Stand-up comedy... on the radio. I like it mainly because it's subtly political and biased to the left.
Revolting People - The radio equivalent of a costume drama. Set in some town in America during or before their war of independence it follows the antics of a shopkeeper who has to house 2 soldiers in his home. It's especially good for it's use of sound effects to greatly enhance the setting.

Now that's finished I'm off to play Perfect Dark Zero with my brother.

Eastenders commentary

2009-09-17T07:12:00.015+01:00

I'm missing breakfast to post this but I'm anxious as to whether it'll work properly, so here it is:

EDIT: Peter commented that the autoplay was getting annoying and seeing as it doesn't play on school PCs there's not much point it being here. Therefore it has been removed, seeing as it wasn't that good I probably won't reupload it to YouTube unless anyone specially requests it.

Layouts

2009-09-16T17:18:00.002+01:00

I've spent the past few days piddling around with blog layouts (on new blog) after having bought server space and a domain and trying to get stuff to work. I have drawn up the following observations:

Over-use of glossy images makes a site look cheap and nasty. It's obvious but so is the rest of this list.
Fixed width layouts are always too small. This is because I have abnormally large resolution on my monitor and all the white space on the left and right of central columns look like a colossal waste of screen estate. Text will also look too small and images exceeding the maximum width will protrude into the sidebar like bricks through a window; shattering the perfect image and drastically lowering the credibility of the blog.
Flexible width layouts are unpredictable and will mess up all your careful line breaks or reduce a neat wall of text into a drawn out crawl destined to deter even the most enthusiastic readers.
'Experiments in Typography' are just that: interesting experiments which we learn a great deal from but which fall a few steps from actually becoming a proper layout.
Simple, minimalist themes are brilliant and I love them. Some however are too simplistic and result in a sort of ugly white-blue high contrast look which probably would have been easier to read on an 8-year old CRT monitor.

This morning I recorded a short commentary about Eastenders along with captured video of one of the episodes. It doesn't look like it'll be on here for a while so here's the condensed values which Eastenders represents:

Big, close knit families.
Traditional family stereotypes.
Working families.
Frequent affairs.
Multiculturalism.

I'm going to try to use the DivX web player to show off this video, it should be up within the next two hours by tomorrow, if not I'll find another way of hosting videos.

First!

2009-09-14T15:07:00.003+01:00

This is my first post on the new Media Studies blog. As asked I have replaced the image of George Kerr that was my earlier profile picture with an illustration I made on my proper blog. The reference to the practice of commenters to post 'First!' on any new thread may be continued in the comments here... But I doubt it somehow as this is a 'adult friendly' blog and to narrow it down even further it's a 'teacher friendly' blog.
To explain; we learn about audience theory in Media Studies, the content here is adjusted to be appropriate for it's audience (teachers and exam moderators).

In other news I watched 'Land and Freedom' by Ken Loach last night. In fact I sort of re-watched it because it's such a completely amazing film. Disregarding the huge overtones of Politick which are impossible to ignore it's a super-cool film just based on it's portrayal of the life of the revolutionaries of the POUM.

Last thing to note is that I made a Machinima with Halo 3 which was uploaded to Facebook instead of Vimeo due to Vimeo's upload rules which ban any machinima which is basically just game footage. I don't think this has gone beyond the stage of just messing around with game footage so it's on Facebook. Or it's embedded below. If you can't see it then well I'm sorry.

While you're on there feel free to check out the footage of last Tuesday's Counter-Strike match I hosted with a couple of friends. I'm hosting another one tomorrow, in which I will also spectate and capture some cool footage.