What should I be doing?

Music Video:

1. Research in to Music Video styles: Concept, Performance, Narrative, Hybrid.
2. Research into existing media: 10 x Music Videos; 10 x Digi Packs (4 and 6 panel); 10 x Adverts

Short Film:

1. Research into existing media: 10 x Short Films; 10 x Reviews; 10 Websites or Posters
2. Detailed research into Genre.

Trailer:

1. Research into existing media: 10 x Trailers; 10 x Film Posters; 10 x Film Magazine covers
2. Detailed research into Genre.

There should never be an idle moment.

Mr. M.

A2: 'Star Wars Is A Postmodern Masterpiece'

Detailed article by Forrest Wickman, exploring the postmodern make-up of Star Wars.

It will further your understanding of pastiche and bricolage. If you know the original trilogy well it could also serve as an additional case study.

'May the force be with you, always.' ;-)

Genre: Film Noir

Useful article looking at the use of low-key lighting and black and white in the Film Noir genre.

http://petapixel.com/2015/07/04/a-look-at-the-striking-low-key-black-and-white-style-of-film-noir-cinema/

Han Always Shoots First!

Four Rules to Make Star Wars Great Again (Via Josh)

If this made no sense to you, I have no words... Go watch the Star Wars Episodes IV, V and VI now! 

While we're on the subject, I was reminded of this piece of YouTube awesomeness. Enjoy!

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

Student Presentations

Your presentations have been up loaded to Vimeo. (Click on the link below.)

To embed them on your blog:

1. Find and click on your groups video from "Student Presentations" on Vimeo.
2. When your video has loaded, go to the top right of the player, where the "Share" button is, click on it.
3. A dialogue window will appear, on the right there is the code for embedding the video.
4. Copy the code, (if you want to customise the video player e.g. the width and height, click on the blue text at the bottom "customise embed options")
5. Now go to your new blog post where you went to embed the video, click on the HTML tab at the top.
6. Paste the code into here and then go back to the "Compose" tab to see your video within your post.

AS 2012 Student presentations

The First Days of Spring

Short Film? Music Video?

The Suburbs by Spike Jonze

Music Video? Short Film?

Take a look through the 'Keyhole'...

Guy Maddin's latest film, 'Keyhole', looks as avant-garde as ever... in Cinema's from 14th September.

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/

Student Presentations (A2)

Genre presentation

Narrative presentation

Representation presentation

A2: Theory of Genre

Please read through slides 1-17 and make notes.



via: robertclackmedia

And some more explanation from Mr. Ford including some helpful activities you can complete:

Postmodernism: Chris Holmlund on Miller's Crossing

Please read the section about Miller's Crossing, from the bottom of page 39 to the end of page 31 and make notes.

The reference for the text is as follows:
HOLMLUND, Chris., 2008, American cinema of the 1990s: themes and variations, Rutgers University Press.

• How does this add to your understanding of 'Miller's Crossing' as both a 'genre' piece and an example of postmodern filmmaking?

GCSE Media Studies: Re-sit Revision Sessions

The following revision sessions will be available to those of you who are re-sitting your GCSE Media Studies exam on Wednesday, 25 January.

• Friday, 13 January - 8:20-9:10 - Media 1
• Monday, 16 January - 4:00-5:00 - Media 1
• Monday, 23 January - 4:00-5:00 - Media 1

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.

AS: Group Presentations (22.09.11)

Group Presentations from today's lesson have been compressed and uploaded to YouTube. You can find them here:

Group 1 (Averielle, Alice and Danielle): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77S_OnCEe88

Group 2 (Lucy, Amy and Nicole): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSjWFkpswIo

Group 3 (Josh and Hannah): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG3TnMJhzdA

Group 4 (Rhiannon and Alice): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R992V-pQbOM

To add them to your posts you need to click on the "Share" button below the posts and select "Embed". Copy the code in to your blog post.

AS: Key Concepts and the Language of the Moving Image

Thanks to our friends at Ringwood School for the following excellent resources about the key concepts of Media Studies and Moving Image Language.

Key Concepts: http://mediastudiesringwood.blogspot.com/2010/11/key-concepts-basics.html

Language of the Moving Image: http://mediastudiesringwood.blogspot.com/2010/11/film-terms-techniques-shots-lighting.html

Enjoy!

A2: Sample Questions for Q1a and 1b

Sample Questions 1a

Sample Questions 1b

A2: More Media Theory (Courtesy The Latymer School Media Department)

Media Theory

GCSE: Getting Prepared For B323: Textual Analysis (Print Topic)

My Year 10 students used Flip cameras today to make videos about what they need to remember for their exam which is coming up on June 25th.  Here are a couple of them:

Please feel free to share and use.  If you have any questions about how the videos were created please comment, email me or tweet me.