AS foundation portfolio checklist

The majority of the items on the two lists are covered in the timetable. Copy this to your blog and cross them off as you complete them.


Video

1. Juno opening titles swede
2. Analysis of film opening from Youtube
3. Analysis of student opening
4. Prelim task and evaluation
5. 25 word pitch
6. Make a company logo and Ident
7. Nine frames moodboard sheet
8. Titles timeline from art of the Title
9. Storyboard and animatic
10. Recce shots and photos on the shoot
11. Screengrabs throughout editing
12. Rough cut for feedback


Print

1. re-make a cover with your own pictures
2. analyse the relevant four pages from different magazines
3. analyse some student magazines
4. prelim task and evaluation
5. pitch your new magazine within the market
6. make your banner
7. magazine moodboard
8. breakdown of institutional features
9. flatplan and photo-flatplan
10. recce shots and rehearsal shots; photos of group in action
11. Screengrabs throughout of photoshop and DTP
12. Draft version for feedback

G321: AS foundation portfolio

G321 Course Outline Dec 2009 to March 2010

Film title sequences

A selection of film title sequences that i've compiled on YouTube to help with inspiration. They are not choices you would necessarily gravitate towards, however they should provide an enlightening alternative to the many sequences you may have already viewed. Click on image above to access the playlist(you will need to sign in to youtube - you can use your google account login details - then click on playlists and the icon on the top right)

Magazine covers-flatplans

Examples of a flatplan and other very interesting ideas to help you with the creation of a magazine cover, contents page and indeed, a double page spread. It is worth attempting to find similar sites yourselves to gain insight from the pov of other media creative types.

Brainstorming app.

Courtesy of Hannah Skidmore. A pretty decent looking app. to add some interest to those brainstorming sessions you are no doubt contemplating. Click on image above.

Magazine terms glossary

Click on the picture of Zac Efron to find a rather useful magazine terms glossary. For those of you attempting to create your own magazine covers this is essential reading.

Foundation Portfolio

As Media Coursework 1

View more presentations from fordford.

Year 12 coursework

Unit 1 G321: Foundation Portfolio in Media (worth 50% of the marks available at AS)

The Foundation Portfolio is a Coursework Unit, consisting of either 2 video productions or 2 Photoshop constructions and an online blog. The first video piece will be a short sequence produced to demonstrate basic technical ability and understanding of continuity technique. The second is a fully developed production produced to demonstrate skill development, consisting of the first 2 minutes of a fiction film, based on an original idea developed by the students. The first Photoshop element will be a cover and contents page for a school magazine. The second is a front cover, contents page and double page spread for a music magazine. All images and text must be original. The students will work in groups but will be assessed individually on their work in the following stages:

*Pre-production: research, planning, development of ideas, scripting, storyboarding, magazine mock-ups, layouts,colour schemes

*Production: shooting, lighting, working with sets, actors and scripts,photography,working with models

*Post-production: editing, special and sound effects, music,photoshop effects,applying text

Evidence for the different stages will be presented via an online blog. Students will be expected to evaluate the finished film production according to specific theoretical criteria and this will also be presented through the blog.

Assessment: Marking is out of 100 (20 marks for research + planning, 60 marks for practical work, 20 marks for the evaluation).

Interesting blogs

This is the link to the group blog.

This is the link to the individual blog.

Example AS Blog

THIS is an example of an excellent AS blog. If you look at the range of technology employed you'll notice that we are encouraging you to do more than these students have. What technology can't do however is hide any lack of effort or knowledge. Planning (aka preproduction) is essential, you cannot take short cuts or assume it will all turn out fine in the end. Nothing has been left to chance, they check weather forecasts, create animatics, analyse other film openings, recreate other film openings, describe their target audience by creating profiles, produce rough cuts of their film and get feedback from their peers which informs future decisions, spend 12 HOURS filming in one day, work in their spare time over half term. I could go on.

There is no excuse for not having an exemplary blog, this is one area where all students can achieve top grades and where time is not an issue. EVERY member of TEAM FORD is expected to have a C grade blog at worst.

Finally this blog also demonstrates how all areas of the course are intertwined, their practical is clearly based on representation issues (specifically youth) as well as some of the theory you have covered (narrative).

This post originally appeared in Mr Smith's blog.

Inspiration-Colour and Visuals

Colour Lovers is a very interesting site that will help you with colour ideas. Have a look at the palettes on display and post some in your blog as inspiration for your own colour choices. It is really important that you make informed decisions about colour, don't just leave it to chance.






Creative Review is a brilliant website that will help you with your visual ideas. It is worth taking the time to explore it fully. As i showed you with the Guinness Surfer presentation, inspiration can come from unlikely sources.

Click on logos to go to websites (also see link list).

The Flaming Lips-Do You Realize??

This song stands as one of my favourites because of the contrast between the upbeat, optimistic nature of the music and the startling lyrics that highlight how insignificant we are. To be reminded that everyone we know will one day die (which is obvious, but not something we would like to spend too much time contemplating) in such a way makes me realize how short and precious life is and reminds me to focus on the good things.



Do You Realize - that you have the most beautiful face
Do You Realize - we're floating in space -
Do You Realize - that happiness makes you cry
Do You Realize - that everyone you know someday will die

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes - let them know
You realize that life goes fast
It's hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn't go down
It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

Do You Realize - Oh - Oh - Oh
Do You Realize - that everyone you know
Someday will die -

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes - let them know
You realize that life goes fast
It's hard to make the good things last
You realize the sun doesn't go down
It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

Do You Realize - that you have the most beautiful face
Do You Realize

The End of Music

By GLENN BRANCA

We seem to be on the edge of a paradigm shift. Orchestras are struggling to stay alive, rock has been relegated to the underground, jazz has stopped evolving and become a dead art, the music industry itself has been subsumed by corporate culture and composers are at their wit’s end trying to find something that’s hip but still appeals to an audience mired in a 19th-century sensibility.


For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music. In this case the paradigm shift may not be a shift but a dead stop. Is it that people just don’t want to hear anything new? Or is it that composers and musicians have simply swallowed the pomo line that nothing else new can be done, which ironically is really just the “old, old story.”

Certainly music itself is not dead. We’ll continue to hear something approximating it blaring in shopping malls, fast food stops, clothing stores and wherever else it will mesmerize the consumer into excitedly pulling out their credit card or debit card or whatever might be coming.

There’s no question that in music, like politics, the bigger the audience gets the more the “message” has to be watered down. Muzak’s been around for a long time now but maybe people just can’t tell the difference anymore. Maybe even the composers and songwriters can’t tell the difference either. Especially when it’s paying for a beach house in Malibu and a condo in New York.

Of course, we could all just listen to all of our old albums, CD’s and mp3’s. In fact, nowadays that’s where the industry makes most of its money. We could also just watch old movies and old TV shows. There are a lot of them now. Why bother making any new ones? Why bother doing anything new at all? Why bother having any change or progress at all as long as we’ve got “growth”? I’m just wondering if this is in fact the new paradigm. I’m just wondering if in fact the new music is just the old music again. And, if that in fact it would actually just be the end of music.

New York Times

The death of uncool

Brian Eno — 25th November 2009

It’s odd to think back on the time—not so long ago—when there were distinct stylistic trends, such as “this season’s colour” or “abstract expressionism” or “psychedelic music.” It seems we don’t think like that any more. There are just too many styles around, and they keep mutating too fast to assume that kind of dominance.

As an example, go into a record shop and look at the dividers used to separate music into different categories. There used to be about a dozen: rock, jazz, ethnic, and so on. Now there are almost as many dividers as there are records, and they keep proliferating. The category I had a hand in starting—ambient music—has split into a host of subcategories called things like “black ambient,” “ambient dub,” “ambient industrial,” “organic ambient” and 20 others last time I looked. A similar bifurcation has been happening in every other living musical genre (except for “classical” which remains, so far, simply “classical”), and it’s going on in painting, sculpture, cinema and dance.

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.

This article first appeared in the December edition of Prospect magazine

Dangermouse-Encore

The Black Album and The White Album mixed equals The Grey Album (mixed by Dangermouse of Gnarls Barkley fame). The video is an unofficial mash up of The Beatles and Jay-Z.

Bunny and the Bull-Trailer

Bunny & the Bull, the feature film debut from writer/director Paul King (The Mighty Boosh) released in UK cinemas on the 27th November.
Bunny & the Bull is a road movie set entirely in a flat. Stephen Turnbull hasn’t been outside in months. Living with a painfully restrictive routine, he refuses to interact with the world or think about the past. When a sudden infestation of mice forces him to change his ways, he finds his mind hurtling back to the disastrous trek around Europe he undertook with his friend Bunny, a womanising, gambling-addicted booze-hound. Unable to stem the flood of memories, Stephen’s flat becomes the springboard for an extraordinary odyssey through landscapes made up of snapshots and souvenirs, from the industrial wastelands of Silesia to the bull fields of Andalusia. A story of love, disillusionment, stuffed bears and globalised seafood,Bunny & the Bull is an offbeat and heartfelt journey to the end of the room. The fifth film on the Warp X slate, Bunny & the Bull stars Edward Hogg (White Lightnin', Brothers of the Head), Simon Farnaby (The Mighty Boosh, Jam and Jerusalem) and Veronica Echegui (El Patio de mi Carcel, Yo soy la Juani). Julian Barratt, Noel Fielding and Richard Ayoade also appear in supporting roles.

Institution and audience introductory activity

Before we start to look at Warp (our institution) i want you to start to think about how you engage with music. Structure your ideas using the following bullet points:

• what type/ genre
• artists
• where
• how

Compose a powerpoint if you wish to show your findings. Make a wordle as well to illustrate this work.

I then want each of you to pick one music track (your favourite) and explain why you like the song. Make a short powerpoint for this activity.

Vampire Weekend-Cousins

Vampire Weekend have just released a video for their previously announced single "Cousins," following last month's release of "Horchata." The track is available from XL digitally now, and will be available on 7" December 15th. It will also appear on their highly anticipated new record Contra, available January 12th. The Garth Jennings-directed video is a low budget but creative piece filmed in what appears to be a New York City alleyway. There's a brief moment about halfway in that references Bob Dylan's classic "Subterranean Homesick Blues" cue card video clip, and the track ends on a defiant note: regular bell is the new cowbell.

Grizzly Bear-Ready,Able

As a taster to the work we will do on Warp as an institution this is the lastest video for the American indie band Grizzly Bear (who are by no means representative of Warp as a label). Stop motion is used to great effect in this video.

Camera angles and editing task

Find a definition of each of the following shots and post in your blog:

• long shot


• medium shot


• close up


• shot reverse shot


• high angle shots


• low angle shots


• tracking shot


• pan


• tilt

Then do the same for the following styles of editing:

• continuity


• montage


• montage Hollywood


• transitions


• cross cutting/paralell editing


• dissolve


• wipes

Decide on a film clip and analyse with reference to types of shot and editing used. Make sure you include the clip in your post. You may if you wish use tubechop to highlight the use of particular shots or editing techniques that you think are noteworthy.

Deadline for this is next Wednesday (on completion I will post comments on your blog).

Risk Assessment

Your risk assessment needs to cover any hazards you may encounter:

1. falls (of crew and equipment)?


2. temporary structures?


3. tripping hazards?


4. vehicles?


5. special effects?


6. weapons?


7. burns from lighting?

For example:

Hazard: falls of men and equipment?

Answer: Yes

Severity: Medium

Likelihood: Medium

Persons at risk: all actors and crew (3+). All equipment.

Precautions: minimise all risks that would cause people to fall and ensure all equipment is stable and secure whilst in use.

Some hazards will simply require a 'No' response.

Section A:Question 1-Skills Development

You need to begin to gather evidence of your skills development. Post evidence on your individual blogs (link this blog to your group blog and vice versa).

Key Areas:

• digital technology
• creativity
• research and planning
• post production
• using conventions from real media texts

Question will refer to 1 or 2 of these areas

You can refer to productions worked on outside the media course

EARTHQUAKE STEMS by LittleBoots

EARTHQUAKE STEMS  by  LittleBoots

Mixmag

Lies by Fenech-Soler

Dazed & Confused

Competition

Spin

Interview

BBC Blast

BBC Blast is a creative learning space where you can develop your skills and confidence by:

• Sharing and discussing your work with others
• getting inspiration and ideas from peers and professionals
• getting involved in workshops across the UK, as well as big-prize competitions
• applying for creative opportunities at the BBC.

Details of the latest competition below:

Watch The Titles

Another great website for film title ideas and inspiration. Click on the title above for access.

Institution and Audience-assessment criteria

Explanation/analysis/argument:
1.understanding of the task
2.knowledge and understanding of institutional/audience practices
3.clear and developed argument with refernce to case study
4.relavant to set question

Use of examples
1.frequent evidence and relevance from case study
2.examples which are relevant and accurate

Use of terminology
1.use of terminology is relevant and accurate

TV drama-assessment criteria

Explanation/analysis/argument:
1.understanding of the task
2.knowledge and understanding of institutional/audience practices
3.clear and developed argument with refernce to case study
4.relavant to set question

Use of examples:
1.frequent evidence and relevance from case study
2.examples which are relevant and accurate

Use of terminology:
1.use of terminology is relevant and accurate

Where The Wild Things Are

A screenprint based on the cover for the latest editions of Little White Lies magazine and Huck magazine.

Film Distribution

Click on the image for an excellent guide to film distribution. The BFI screenonline page includes articles on: licensing, marketing, advertising, the logistics of distribution and digital distribution.

2012 and how good viral marketing can go bad

Disaster movie 2012 inspired panic in the States with Nasa having to reassure Americans that the world wasn't about to end. Is movie viral marketing getting too clever for its own good?

2012, and the Earth finally crumbles. Relax, it's just a movie. Photograph: Columbia Pictures

When Columbia Pictures launched a marketing campaign for 2012 – the latest disaster movie from serial Earth molester Roland Emmerich, where the planet, played by America, is set for impending doom – they didn't do it by halves.

First, there was a teaser trailer showing a tsunami crashing over the Himalayas. The Earth was going to end in 2012, it said, and the world's governments aren't doing enough to prepare us. Search "2012", it said, for "the truth" (the "truth" turned out to be over 1,000 real websites and 175 real books obsessed with 2012 as the end of time).

Then, there was a fake website – the "Institute for Human Continuity" – which consisted of a screen stating that for 25 years they'd been assessing threats to the continuation of mankind, and the results were in.

The "odds of global destruction" in 2012 had been confirmed at 94% (goodbye mortgage) and "to ensure your chance of survival, register for the lottery". In other words, it was a web campaign that seemed to say: "Look, the end of time might actually be coming, so enjoy a film about it why you still can, yeah?"

Many didn't get the joke. Tens of thousands from all over the world panicked, called Nasa, wrote letters – couldn't they do some saving of people too?

'People are really, really worried about the world coming to an end. Kids are contemplating suicide. Adults tell me they can't sleep'

Photograph: Columbia Pictures

"I think people are really, really worried about the world coming to an end," said David Morrison of Nasa. "Kids are contemplating suicide. Adults tell me they can't sleep and can't stop crying."

Indeed, Nasa got so many queries, they set up a specific site to deal with them. Yet perhaps even more worryingly, 2012 is not alone. Following the success of Blair Witch, nearly every film worth its celluloid now has its own teaser campaign, web mystery, and viral marketing push, and even the simplest promotional campaign can have unexpected consequences.

For the independently made 2008 animated fantasy Delgo – featuring the voices of Freddie Prinze Jr and Jennifer Love Hewitt – they hit upon the idea of launching "Digital Dailies", where a crack team of animators would whet the public appetite by posting their handiwork as they went. It seemed to work: the videos were getting up to half a million hits a month. Yet, sadly, it seemed most of those were in the industry; they liked what they saw, and began poaching the film's best talent. The director, Marc F Adler, was forced to resort to hiding their identities with aliases.

"It was brilliant as viral marketing," says Adler, "but terrible for making a film."

The "brilliance" of the viral marketing also proved questionable. On a reported budget of $40m, the film's box-office taking was one the worst ever for widely released film (it opened on 2,160 screens), taking just $694,782. According to Yahoo Movies, that works out as roughly two viewers for every screening.

To be fair, their teaser trailer – "From a Studio Nowhere Near Hollywood … From People You've Never Heard of … Comes a Myth for the New Millennium … Delgo" – probably didn't help either.

Yet if that was unexpected, some campaigns just cry out for trouble. Take the case of 2008 indie horror film A Beautiful Day. Set for its debut at an independent film festival in Muskogee, Oklahoma, the makers posted a teaser on YouTube, which featured a sinister synthesized voice saying: "People of Muskogee. Open your eyes. April 25th is a day you'll come to remember", including the message "the end is coming". But 25 April was also the prom night for the local high school. The scared students called the Muskogee police, who assumed it was a terrorist threat, and called in the FBI. Outcome: their film was swiftly booted out of the festival.

And in the world of suspect virals and dodgy publicity stunts, it seems terror threats can come from anywhere. The Cartoon Network's guerilla marketing for cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force saw them install LED displays depicting the show's "Moonieites" – 2D aliens from the moon – in 10 major cities across America. In Boston, however, they didn't get the gimmick. Authorities considered the Moonieites suspect devices, which sparked a major bomb scare, caused the closure of roads and posed the question: would al-Qaida really plant bombs that glowed in the dark?

"It had a very sinister appearance," said Attorney General Martha Coakley, adding "It had a battery behind it and wires."

'There are always going to be problems with unbranded campaigns; people may not get the connection to the film, and people fear the unknown'

Photograph: Joe Lederer

Of course, ill-judged glowing figurines are one thing.

But even ill-thought-out poster campaigns can wreak havok. To promote Forgetting Sarah Marshall, unbranded posters were put up all over the US, saying things like "You suck, Sarah Marshall", and "My mother always hated you, Sarah Marshall". Which sounds like great fun – unless your name is Sarah Marshall of course, many of whom assumed they were the victim of a hate campaign.

As student Sarah Marshall, of Fort Worth, Texas, told the LA Times: "I got a lot of emails and phone calls asking if my boyfriend and I were OK." Some Sarah Marshalls even struck back with posters of their own: "You suck, Judd Apatow," they responded, citing the film's producer.

Even the obviously fanciful bus-station posters for recent sci-fi hit District 9 – featuring a crossed-out alien, text saying "Bench for humans only", and a request for alien sightings – saw the marketing team get more that they bargained for. Tens of thousands called the hotline with sightings, assuming it was a real request.

"There are always going to be problems with unbranded campaigns," says Dan Koelsch, managing editor of MovieViral.com, "because people may not get the connection to the film, and people fear the unknown."

Yet with studios looking at ever more innovative ways to market films, it inevitably leads to more innovative ways to cock up.

"Sometimes studios try too hard, to the point where people can smell the desperation," says Sean Dwyer, editor of filmjunk.com. "That's when it doesn't really work."

The desperation ponged when 20th Century Fox, looking for a way to market this year's rom-com I Love You, Beth Cooper, paid a high school student, Kenya Mejia, $1,800 to profess a secret passion for a classmate during her graduation address (which she did, bellowing: "I cannot let this opportunity just pass by. I love you, Jake Minor!").

The idea was that Fox would video the moment – which recreates a key scene in the film – post it on YouTube, and create viral buzz that the movie was inspiring copycats. It didn't work due to a) Mejia blabbing to the Wall Street Journal, b) Her already having a boyfriend, who wasn't Jake Minor, and c) The film hadn't even been released when she was supposed to have copied it. The film bombed, and a month after the video was posted, it had attracted less than 2,000 views.

If that was treading on suspect moral ground, it didn't come close to New Line's marketing push for 2006 adult crime drama Running Scared starring Paul Walker – a tale of the Russian mafia, bent cops, paedophiles, hookers and men being chased around with really big machetes. What did they do? Made a promotional online game from it, of course, in which players re-enacted not just the film's main action scenes ("A man points a .38 revolver at another man's crotch and fires it, blowing his crotch apart," notes the Parent's Guide section of IMDb of said action, in a list that goes on for six pages) but the more intimate moments too, including Walker's character performing oral sex.

Needless to say, conservative America wasn't too happy when they realised little Timmy was performing online cunnilingus, and pressure from the National Institute on Media and the Family saw the site swiftly shut down.

Still, a really good teaser campaign, well judged, and executed, should work wonders, right? Not always. The campaign behind Mike Myers comedy The Love Guru was brilliant, spot-on, did everything right.

"It was a fully fledged effort to position Myers's character as a real guy, or at least flesh out his backstory," explains Chris Thilk, editor of MovieMarketingMadness.com. "But it wound up being funnier than the movie".

Stuart McGurk
The Guardian Saturday 14 November 2009

Napoleon Dynamite title sequence images

Fader

i-D

Vibe

Complex

Coraline title sequence images

An example of a title sequence (Coraline 2009) from the website recommended earlier.

The Art Of The Title Sequence

This is a brilliant website dedicated to the art of the title sequence (the clue is in the title). Click on image.

The Male Gaze Lesson

Find definitions for the following looks:

chocolate box
invitational
super smiler
romantic or sexual

(Marjorie Ferguson)

seductive
carefree
practical
comic
catalogue

(Trevor Millum)

Working in pairs choose an advert and analse apply the gaze theories (Laura Mulvey et al). Apply one of the looks (listed above) to your advert where appropriate.

The Male Gaze presentation

Representations

View more presentations from hammonda.

Postmodernism-another definition

"A general explanation is that postmodernism is a contradiction in terms, as post means after and modern means now, it is impossible for anything to be after now. The term itself is supposed to be deliberately unexplainable.

In terms of literature and media it is generally considered to be anything which makes little attempt to hide the fact that it is not real, it wants you to know that its been created and it wants you to recognise elements from elsewhere (i.e. that they have 'stolen' ideas from other sources), that there are no new or original ideas and that everything is in someway connected. Importantly it doesn’t want you to view it as being any more or less valid or important than a text which pretends to be real, postmodernist want everything to be equal, they want to remove binary opposites and start again. Students are often criticised for being post modern as they tend to like 'naff' things and think they are cool precisely because they aren't cool (thus removing binary opposites)"


Michael Smith (2009)

The Male Gaze-homework

Find and analyse a film clip or advert that shows the male gaze.

The example is from The Mask (1994)



Thanks to Vicky Packwood for finding the clip.

Eva Mendes Calvin Klein advert

Freddie Ljungberg Calvin Klein advert

Fight Club trailer

An introduction to film studies By Jill Nelmes

Memento (pages 87-89)

Memento-a theory (2)

The split self, in Memento, becomes supremely postmodern, for there is no dominant, no objective, no ‘real’ self that constitutes identity. Leonard chooses his own subjective identity, that of the detective, and his final speech of the film indicates the necessity of this choice for everyone in the postmodern world – man must create himself – ‘We all need memories to remind ourselves who we are. I’m no different.’The space of a fictional world is a construct, just as the characters and objects that occupy it are, or the actions that unfold within it. Typically, in realist and modernist writing, this spatial construct is organized around a perceiving subject, either a character or the viewing position adopted by a disembodied narrator. (McHale 45)
McHale goes on to say that in postmodernist fiction, ‘space…is less constructed than deconstructed by the text, or rather constructed and deconstructed at the same time’ (McHale, 45), and this is a result of the complication in the presentation of the narrator figure, which in Falling Angel and Memento is the detective. The theory that in postmodernity, identity is subjective and self-constructed, a text of thoughts and language to create an image of oneself, suggests equally that the textual worlds these characters narrate are also subjective and fluctuating constructs, likely (as in both the film and novel) to prove as unstable and ultimately ‘false’ as the detectives’ identities. McHale refers to work by sociologists such as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, who believe that ‘social reality is a fictional construct,’ a ‘jigsaw puzzle of “subuniverses of meaning”’ (McHale 37) all jostling for position as the dominant world-view. These concepts work perfectly in our analysis of Memento as a postmodernist text, for the textual ‘world’ created in the film is forced, through the narrative’s reversal, to be constantly erased, reconstructed and revised. Each new segment of linear narrative action (lasting only a few minutes) successfully alters the audience’s perception of the previous segment, and is erased in its turn by the next. Throughout the story, each ‘objective’ reality is called into question almost as soon as it is created, and the audience is left wondering whether anyone can be trusted as giving the ‘truth’. We are forced to suspect Teddy, Natalie, and finally Leonard himself, and though the narrative sections are interspersed with a seemingly more constant reality (scenes shown in black and white and usually with Leonard on the phone), even this ‘truth’ is finally undermined when Leonard reads one of his own tattoos which tells him to ‘never answer the phone.’ Our faith in this particular world, which has lasted thus far, is broken as Leonard slams down the phone.

Memento-a theory

Critic J. Hoberman has described MEMENTO as a "meta-noir," rather than "neo-noir," a fitting term for a film that initially places us in exactly the same position as its lead character, coming far closer than Mike Figgis' TIME CODE to being genuinely interactive. Whether intentionally or not, MEMENTO reeks of the influence of watching films on TV, interrupted by commercials, and on video, where they can be interrupted and restarted at will. For its first third, the black & white and color scenes even follow each other with the rhythm of a TV show and its commercial breaks. Most of the color sequences begin with Leonard trying to get his bearings. In one, he finds himself with a bottle of booze in his hand, trying to figure out if he's drunk or not. In another, he's in the midst of a chase, but he doesn't know whether he's its object or the pursuer. His quest progresses hand in hand with the audience's attempts to make sense out of a convoluted text. Eventually, we know far more about Leonard than he knows about himself, but the final third's speedy pacing and dense plotting attempt to position us again in his drift and uncertainty. Without overtly criticizing the media, MEMENTO echoes postmodern theory about the loss of reality under the weight of images and words.

Andy Warhol-15 minutes of fame

"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

The expression is a paraphrase of Andy Warhol's 1968 statement: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." In 1979 Warhol reiterated his claim: "...my prediction from the Sixties finally came true: In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."
Becoming bored with continually being asked about this particular statement, Warhol attempted to confuse interviewers by changing the statement variously to "In the future 15 people will be famous" and "In 15 minutes everybody will be famous."

Josh Harris: The Warhol of the web

"Andy Warhol said that, in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," Harris told me. "But I think he misunderstood what was happening. I think what people are demanding is 15 minutes of fame every day. And mark my words, they will get it. That's where we're heading, whether we like it or not."

The Guardian, Wednesday 4 November 2009

Shameless-representation homework

How are the characters of Steve, Fiona, Lip and Ian represented in episode one of Shameless?

Consider how different elements are used to construct the representations eg. : mise ene scene, sound, camera work.

Make detailed references to the text to illuminate your points.

Deadline Wednesday 11th November.

Advertising on flies

A company at a German trade show tied tiny banner ads to flies as a promotional stunt.



The banners, measuring just a few centimetres across, seem to be causing the beleaguered flies a bit of piloting trouble. The weight keeps the flies at a lower altitude and forces them to rest more often, which is a stroke of genius on the part of the marketing creatives: the flies end up at about eye level, and whenever a fly is forced to land and recover, the banner is clearly visible. What's more, the zig-zagging of the fly naturally attracts the attention because of its rapid movement.

One marketing creative's stroke of genius is another person's animal cruelty.

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has died

The man widely considered to be the father of modern anthropological study has passed away at 100 years of age. NYT, Bloomberg, Wikipedia, AFP.

"Among the more striking conclusions of his work was the idea that there is no fundamental difference between the belief systems and myths of so-called 'primitive' races and those of modern western societies."

Memes-groups 2

Laura and Amy-Where the hell is Matt?
Jamie and Theo-Scary maze game
Nat and Rhys-Potter puppet pals...
Sam and Robyn-Charlie bit my finger!
Emily and Stu-300
Caitlin and Jess-fatkid on a rollercoaster
Charles-Greatest freak out ever

Memes-groups

James-lolcats
Chris and Tom-Chuck Norris facts
Ash-Crazy Frog
Hollie and Sarah-badger badger badger
Heather-Dramatic Prairie Dogs
Laura and Lauren-Where the hell is Matt?
Beth-Daft Hands...
Connor and Josh-gospel

Memes-the lesson

In pairs make a powerpoint presentation of a meme of your choice.

*See the relevant entries on my blog to help you with this.
*There must be some negotiation between all groups as to which meme you present.
*No duplication allowed (write your meme on the board as soon as you've decided).
*Detail the genesis of the meme and how far it spread in the media eg.: when did it begin and how successful was it?
*What other media did it crossover into:tv/radio/advertising/music video

You will present your memes to the rest of the group on friday.

Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live

Pulp Fiction essay

I've changed the title to the essay:

"Pulp Fiction is a perfect example of a postmodern text."
Discuss

You will need to decide whether you agree or not with the statement.
You must acknowledge any counter arguments in your essay.
Refer to Strinati and Baudrillard.
Use detailed references from the text.
At least 1000 words.

Memento trailer

Levi's 'Go Forth' advert

Fever Ray-When I Grow Up

Postmodern Theory

Postmodern theory challenges the modernist’s beliefs or “master narratives” associated with “progress,” “truth,” “human improvement,” “high art,” “science,” “technology” — the assumption that these “narratives” will lead humans to a greater sense of happiness and fulfillment. Postmodern perspectives are evident in much of contemporary art, film, architecture, fiction, and music, that challenges and even parodies traditional forms. For example, the Wiseman Art Museum uses alternative designs to spoof traditional forms of box-like buildings.
A leading theorist of postmodernism is Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard posits that we are living in a word of “hyperreality” constructed largely of surface media images that challenges and undermines modernist notions of reality and truth. Douglas Kellner summarizes his thinking.
Baudrillard’s analyses point to a significant reversal of the relation between representation and reality. Previously, the media were believed to mirror, reflect, or represent reality, whereas now the media are coming to constitute a (hyper)reality, a new media reality — “more real than real” — where “the real” is subordinate to representation leading to an ultimate dissolving of the real. In addition, in “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media,” Baudrillard claims that the proliferation of signs and information in the media obliterates meaning through neutralizing and dissolving all content — a process which leads both to a collapse of meaning and the destruction of distinctions between media and reality. In a society supposedly saturated with media messages, information and meaning “implode,” collapsing into meaningless “noise,” pure effect without content or meaning. Thus, for Baudrillard: “information is directly destructive of meaning and signification, or neutralizes it. The loss of meaning is directly linked to the dissolving and dissuasive action of information, the media, and the mass media .... Information devours its own contents; it devours communication and the social .... information dissolves meaning and the social into a sort of nebulous state leading not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy” (SSM, pp. 96-100).
Baudrillard cites the example of Disney World as an artificial construction of reality:
At Disney World in Orlando, they are even building an identical replica of the Los Angeles Disneyland, as a sort of historical attraction to the second degree, a simulacrum to the second power. It is the same thing that CNN did with the Gulf War: a prototypical event which did not take place, because it took place in real time, in CNN’s instantaneous mode. Today, Disney could easily revisit the Gulf War as a worldwide show. The Red Army choirs have already celebrated Christmas at Euro Disney. Everything is possible, and everything is recyclable in the polymorphous universe of virtuality. Everything can be bought over. There is no reason why Disney would not take over the human genome, which, by the way, is already being resequenced, to turn it into a genetic show. In the end [au fond], they would cryogenize the entire planet, just like Walt Disney himself who decided to be cryogenized in a nitrogen solution, waiting for some kind of resurrection in the real world. But there is no real world anymore, not even for Walt Disney. If one day he wakes up, he'll no doubt have the biggest surprise of his life. Meanwhile, from the bottom of his nitrogen solution he continues to colonize the world — both the imaginary and the real — in the spectral universe of virtual reality, inside which we all have become extras [figurants]. The difference is that when we put on our digital suits, plug in our sensorial captors, or press the keys of our virtual reality arcade, we enter live spectrality whereas Disney, the genial anticipator, has entered the virtual reality of death.
The New World Order is in a Disney mode. But Disney is not alone in this mode of cannibalistic attraction. We saw Benetton with his commercial campaigns, trying to recuperate the human drama of the news (AIDS, Bosnia, poverty, apartheid) by transfusing reality into a New Mediatic Figuration (a place where suffering and commiseration end in a mode of interactive resonance). The virtual takes over the real as it appears, and then replicates it without any modification [le recrache tel quel], in a pret-a-porter (ready-to-wear) fashion.
If this operation can be so successful in creating a universal fascination with only a tint of moral disapproval, it is because reality itself, the world itself, with its frenzy of cloning has already been transformed into an interactive performance, some kind of Lunapark for ideologies, technologies, works, knowledge, death, and even destruction. All this is likely to be cloned and resurrected in a juvenile museum of Imagination or a virtual museum of Information.
Click here for more material on Baudrillard.
Michael Real (1996) outlines some of the basic qualities of postmodernism:
Pastiche — combining together different styles and content from different periods within the same text, creating unusual combinations of borrowed styles from different eras. Music videos use a montage of images n from classic films, advertising, television, or rap, and filmed with unusual, non-traditional techniques.
breakdowns of master narratives featuring the final triumph of good over evil through science or human problem-solving, as well as a clear distinction between reality and fiction. This is evident in much of contemporary fiction by DeLillo, Carver, and Atwood, as well as films: Blue Velvet, Pulp Fiction, Mulholland Drive, Run Lola Run, and Memento, and the television series, Twin Peaks. The texts continually elude definitive interpretation of “true meanings,” by parodying and playing with alternative narrative development and assumptions about the meaning of images. The seemingly tranquil town in Blue Velvet is anything but tranquil. Pulp Fiction plays with three different versions of a crime story as borrowed from detective novels and B-crime films. Mulholland Drive, Run Lola Run, and Memento create alternative narratives around the same events, challenging audience assumptions about “what really happened.” Mulholland Drive portrays one version of events based on the traditional story of the innocent female who arrives in Hollywood to become a successful movie star, only to juxtapose that story against a darker version of the same events. Run Lola Run portrays three different versions of the same event. And Memento shows events occurring in reverse, dealing with issues of memory and time. Challenging traditional narratives or ways of knowing conveys the important role of the media in shaping perceptions of reality — that experience as mediated through media images and discourses.
the ways in communication technology creates mass reproduction of texts, creating copies for which there is no original, what Baudrillard (1983) described as a “hyperreality” based on simulation of reality. Much of contemporary art plays with the idea of endless copies or parodying of texts that only create a simulation of reality that focuses on the image or surface of reality. The sculpture, Jeff Koons, creates glossy statues of pop stars such as Michael Jackson, that parody the constant reproduction of pop star images.
the domination of conspicuous consumerism in which everything is commodified or commercialized; to some degree, postmodernism both celebrates and parodies consumer products, as evident in Target ads portraying multiple images of consumer products.
the fragmentation of sensibility and the plurality or multiplicity of perspectives evident in the often random juxtaposition of images in music videos or contemporary art. Films such as Pulp Fiction parodies different versions of reality by using a lot of references to images from previous films, including the image of John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever. This fragmentation and focus on surface images creates self-reflexivity — the need to reflect on the lack of coherent meaning, as well as an ironic humor.
The Po-Mo Page: discussion of different aspects of postmodern theory
Introduction guide to postmodern theory [Dino Felluga]
The Postmodern Turn: Paradigm Shifts in Theory, Culture, and Science
Postmodernism and the Media, Andreas Saugstad
The Simpsons as a postmodern text
Postmodernism and Science Fiction Films
The journal, Postmodern Culture

Dominic Strinati quotes

"Postmodernism tries to come to terms with and understand a media-saturated society. The mass media, for example, were once thought of as holding up a mirror to, and thereby reflecting, a wider social reality. Now that reality is only definable in terms of surface reflection of the mirror" (1995)

"Media images encourage superficiality rather than substance, cynicism rather than belief, the thirst for constant change rather than security of stable traditions, the desires of the moment rather than the truths of history" (1992)

"Postmodernism is sceptical of any absolute, universal and all-embracing claim to knowledge and argues that theories or doctrines which make such claims are increasingly open to criticism, contestation and doubt" (1992)

Pulp Fiction final scene

I've included this clip as it's a very important part of the film. Jules delivers his Ezekiel 25:17 speech again. This time he knows what it means. Interesting to note that we end the film with Vincent still alive. Why did Tarantino end the film in this way?

Kung Fu

In Pulp Fiction's final scene in the coffee shop a reference is made to Jules wandering the earth like Kaine from Kung Fu. The clip shows Kaine (David Carradine) meeting with Master Po.

Superfly trailer

Shaft trailer

Blaxploitation posters

Examples of the promotional posters from three of the most famous blaxploitation films: Shaft, Foxy Brown and Superfly.