YouTube account launched.

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?

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.

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

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.

the 10 news values

Here in no particular order are the 10 news values:

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

How are the various social classes represented in Candleford?

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.

Favicons & labels

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.

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

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.

How are women represented in Sex and the City?

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.

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

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.

Director's commentary of 'Courage'

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:

Thoughts on representation lesson and research on Vladimir Propp

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.

Gutenberg's press

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)

Media Diary

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.

editing on a Mac

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

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.

Notes on allisonmedia.net's booklet on representation.

1. 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.

Technical analysis of 'The Pursuit of Happyness'

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.

Lights. Camera. Action.

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

District 9 information

Studios:
WingNut Films
QED International
Key Creatives
Wintergreen Productions

Distribution:
Tri-Srar pictures

Essay plan.

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

Juxtaposed and Anchored image

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.

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

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.

Newspapers

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.

The best of radio comedy.

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.

Eastenders commentary

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

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:

First!

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).