Where can I find Digipaks to analyse?

Answer: discogs.com.

Search an artist or album:

In the list presented, search for ‘gat' or ‘dig'.

Hopefully, you will find that the entire packaging has been scanned and added.

Wes Anderson - #Pomo or not #Pomo?

As we are going to be looking at the concepts of 'quirky sensibility' and 'new sincerity' through the work of Wes Anderson, this video (once again shared via 'FilmSchoolRejects') was very timely:

You can see more videos about Wes Anderson's films here, here and here.

We will be asking the question: Is Wes Anderson's work postmodern or does his work represent something that might be considered post-postmodernism, metamodernism or is it not postmodern at all?

Editing: The 'Match Cut'

A fantastic compilation of match cuts from various films... useful for editing revision and inspiration for your practical work. :)

Art of the Title: Stranger Things

Another fantastic breakdown and analysis from 'Art of the Title'; this time for 'Stranger Things' (my fave show of 2016).

As you continue your coursework research, you must make use of the site 'Art of the Title'. They have covered some of the most iconic title sequences in significant detail, including:

• Dial M for Murder
• Alien
• Twin Peaks
• Blade Runner
• Fargo
• Se7en
• Trainspotting
• This is England
• Moon
• Oblivion

Narrative Analysis in Media Studies

The 30 Best Movie Posters of 2013

Flavorwire has published their list of thirty great movie posters from 2013. The selection demonstrates a diverse range of styles and genres. Definitely worth checking out, especially if you are working on the 'Short Film' brief.

The Pixar Theory

I know I shared this with most of you in class, but I am adding it here for posterity. Be sure to check back in to see how the theory has continued to evolve.

cc. @JonNegroni

Reading and annotating an article [Screencast]

After today's revelation, that some of you are not actively reading and annotating articles as part of your preparation for the Audiences and Institutions section of the exam, I decided to create a screencast to show you how I expect you to read and annotate an article. It's a bit rough and ready but it does the job!

Link to the original article: http://www.economist.com/node/21556635

AS: Group Writing on Editing / Sound

Currently working on analysis and quality of writing, here are the paragraphs that you wrote in small groups... please use them to critique and reflect on your own writing.

Some key points:

• Ensure that you open paragraphs with a clear point, referring back to the area of representation that you have been asked to write about
• Avoid run on sentences - clear grammar and punctuation adds to the clarity of your analysis
• Avoid description; ensure that there is evidence of technical analysis in every sentence
• Use key terms frequently and accurately
• Make sure you know the difference between 'dentotation' and 'connotation'
• Try to make links between the different technical features. This demonstrates a deeper level of understanding.

Blogging and Research

Melissa emailed me and asked if she was on the right track with her blog. I was happy to oblige and found that she was making good progress. I felt that it was also an opportunity to impart some advice and guidance about what she should do next, particularly in relation to the research she is doing into the Thriller Genre.  As I was finishing up the comment I realised that this was useful advice for everybody, so here it is...

"Some advice... 

The post above looks like the result of 'Secondary Research', e.g. you looked things up on the web? Am I right? If so, then you should reference the websites that you drew the information from. 

This research is a great start. Now, I would recommend that you watch some openings and analyse them technically: camera, editing, sound, mise-en-scene. This is another area where the two sides of the course cross-over. :-) 

Also, aim to be 'completist'. I liked that you posted about camera techniques, including examples. You could tie this into the task above. Watch 4 clips. For each one, analyse one area. E.g. watch the opening sequence of 'Lost Highway' by David Lynch and analyse the use of camera work. Then watch the opening of 'Se7en' and analyse the mise-en-scene. And so on. It will help you develop both an understanding of the technical codes and conventions of thrillers while also helping you to develop your skills of analysing specific features."

To summarise:

• Reference sources
• Complete textual analysis of thriller openings
• Break that analysis up into specific areas to focus your learning/understanding

Sandwich Video

Adam Lisagor fell in to video-based viral marketing... his company 'Sandwich Video' produces some of the most engaging ads for apps and services. Go check 'em out!

Link: http://sandwichvideo.com/

Music Video: 2 Presentations and 1 Essay

For those of you considering the Music Promo Brief, the following two presentations and one essay provide a wealth of material to get your research started.

This first presentation provides a detailed guide to music video, applying key concepts including genre, narrative, representation and audience to a wealth of music videos. I recommend for this and the following presentation to have YouTube at the ready, as I would watch the videos that are discussed as you work through the presentation. I would also recommend that you begin to create a glossary of key terms, there are a lot of new concepts that will have to come to terms with.

The second presentation delves deeper into the technical construction of music videos, considering camera work, editing, representation and construction of 'star image'.

Finally, follow this link to read an essay titled: What is Music Video? Audiovisual Poetry or Commercial Salad of Images. It is a highly critical response to the purpose and nature of music videos.

Link: http://www.filmsound.org/what_is_music_video/

AS Media: Revision this weekend!

Over the long weekend, DL this doc... it covers all that you should know and more.

Media language

Find a text or two and contextualise!

See you next week.

Mr. M.

"The Big Lebowski" as Postmodern Posterboy (or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Baudrillard)

Please read the following article in preparation for tomorrow's ILP Day.

"The Big Lebowski" as Postmodern Posterboy (or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Baudrillard) by David Larson

We will be in Room 82.

It is an important day, we will be completing the following activities:

1. A review and round up of our analysis of the works of the Coen Brothers
2. An analysis of advertising as a form of postmodern media
3. An analysis of music video as a form of postmodern media (including a particular focus on Gorillaz)
4. An analysis of the Mighty Boosh as postmodern media

There will be related reading material provided throughout.

Also, there will be a follow on homework activity, in which you will begin your preparation for assessment.

Part of this will be to collaborate on a revision source for the unit. This will be created as a wiki within the VLE.

The following adverts and music videos will be used during the day:

Advertising:

Volkswagen

Google

Music Video

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Gorillaz

The first post-modern film?

Once Upon a Time in the West: Is it really the first post-modern film?
To understand post-modernism in its simplest forms, return to your notes on Genre from the start of Year 12. The first lesson focused on those ideas of “familiarity, repetition and variation”. This led to an exploration of hybridisation and regenrification, with a brief exploration of stars becoming synonymous with genres of films and types of characters.


Throw in intertextuality


Philosopher Jean Baudrillard has been credited with claiming alternately that Sergio Leone was the first post-modernist director and that Once Upon a Time in the West was the first post-modern film. Either seems like a specious claim, in that the French New Wave fairly lived in Hollywood’s history. But it may not be hyperbolic to say that the film was the first post-modern Western.

Its post-modernity lies almost exclusively in the tenet of self-reflexivity, the ability to recognize that a work lies not outside its history, but is, indeed, a product of it. Sergio Leone, along with Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, who helped him fashion the treatment for Once Upon a Time in the West, repeatedly watched their favourite old Westerns during the story process, then consciously cribbed and quoted those films to lay the groundwork of familiarity against which the plot of the film would be set. In this way, they honoured the conventions of the Westerns of their youth, while using them to deconstruct the Western itself.


Character
The most striking use of this technique is in the casting. Henry Fonda, whose career had featured a long-line of heroic and morally-upright characters, including Abraham Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, Mister Roberts, JFK, and Teddy Roosevelt, Jr., was cast as the evil, amoral Frank, a fact which was hidden from the audience until after he and his men had massacred an entire family, and just before he gunned down a child. The audience’s expectations for the character, then, were completely shattered, giving Frank full reign to be as brutal as he needed to be.

Also familiar to Western fans was Charles Bronson, who had appeared in Vera Cruz, Jubal, 4 For Texas, and Guns of Diablo. But it was his role as the wood-whittling Bernardo O’Reilly in The Magnificent Seven that made him the perfect choice for the role of Harmonica. What was, in The Magnificent Seven, a sweet and generous gift of music became a totem of revenge in Leone’s film.


The Western Genre and Intertextuality
Beyond this, there are many scenes or sequences in the film that refer directly or obliquely to previous Westerns. The beginning of the film is similar to that of High Noon, where three men wait for a single passenger at a train station. The person they are waiting for is a bad man named Frank. The massacre of the McBain family at Sweetwater was influenced by a similar sequence in The Searchers, where the Edwards family is setting their places for dinner, as the anticipation of an attack by unseen Indians mounts. The massacre is conducted by five men in dusters, including Frank, much the same way that the stagecoach is robbed by five men in dusters, including Liberty Valance, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

The funeral scene is borrowed very closely from the Sonewall Torrey funeral scene in Shane. The character of Jill McBain bears close resemblance to that of Joan Crawford’s Vienna in Johnny Guitar, in what Bertolucci called “one of the more explicit references in Once Upon a Time in the West.” Henry Fonda, working the dark side of his personality in Warlock, wears clothes similar to what Frank wears here. His character also kicks a crippled man off his crutches, much as Frank does to Morton near the end of the film. And, of course, the entire concept of the colonization of the West, and the role of the railroad in it, is a common theme in Westerns. Veteran writer Frank Gruber calls it one of the seven basic Western plots. But in Leone’s interpretation, it bears closest resemblance to John Ford’s The Iron Horse and Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific in its affectionate close-ups of the trains.


Filmic Hybridity
But the references did not stop at Westerns. Leone pulled from all of film history, including a reference to the final scene of film noir Farewell, My Lovely, in which Marlowe says “She made good coffee, anyway,” echoing Cheyenne’s views on the beverage. In the gangster film Murder, Inc., there is a shot of someone taking over the strop and razor from an Italian barber, as seen in this film. And Frank’s line “How can you trust a man that wears both a belt and suspenders. Man can’t even trust his own pants!” is taken almost verbatim from Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. And even beyond film, Bertolucci claims that Brett McBain’s name is a combination of crime writers Brett Halliday and Ed McBain.

Jorge Luis Borges once wrote that “every writer creates his own precursors.” Filmmakers are no different. Rarely are they as apparent in Once Upon a Time in the West, but we all live with a collective past, a collective memory, that exists to shape our perception of what is to come. Whether what is to come agrees with or contradicts what has passed is the choice of the artist.

Plot Device

Great demonstration of narrative (plot) devices!

A2: The Breakfast Club

Below are the questions you need to complete for Tuesday's lesson, based on your viewing of The Breakfast Club:

1. How do the characters deviate from their normal roles during the detention session? 

2. What is the status of each character prior to the detention session? How does this change during their detention session?

3. Who exhibits power, and how is it conveyed in the movie? 

4. What factors contribute to the group's cohesiveness? 

5. Discuss the role that stereotyping plays in this movie.

Extension: Consider what you learned about audience theories and how you might apply those apposing ideas to this film. For example how might an analysis of the film based on 'Reception Theory' differ from a 'Structuralist' analysis?