Fantasy genre for film tasks.

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

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...

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

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.

DISQUS

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.

the 1% rule

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?

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).