Ohhhhh......I love Adrian Leicester! Check out Hustle in readiness for the TV Drama exam.

This drama is extremely slick even filmic in its construction with its exaggerated postproduction work and highly stylised cinematography and choreography. The editing is fantastic and helps to make the implausible - plausible! Look out for how the character 'Mickey' breaks the fourth wall and consider the impact this has on audience engagement with character and narrative? If you like this Drama....have a look at Hotel Babylon too.

Good Night and Good Luck

Leanne, Alan, Gerry and I would like to wish all our Year 12 Film students lots of luck with your Film exam this Wednesday. Obviously you will have spent this weekend re-watching your focus films; reading your notes and revising in readiness for the big day. To help you out a bit further, here is a treat of a report on the future of emerging NMT platforms within the film industry that explores in great detail the current and future relationship between film audiences and institutions. A great read in preparation for Tuesday's FM2 exam (Section A):

http://www.bsac.uk.com/reports/filmconferencereport006.pdf

My Space, Arctic Monkeys and Contemporary Trends in Music Consumption

Patrick Goldstein, writing in Sunday’s LA Times suggests that our elite, top-down culture is now being supplanted by a “raucous, participatory bottom-up culture in which amateur entertainment has more appeal than critically
endorsed skill and expertise”. “The era”, he says, “when studios, networks and record companies were tastemakers is long gone. Ask kids today where good music comes from and they’ll say iTunes or Myspace.com, not Warner Music. The best brands are being built from the bottom up”. Goldstein’s view is echoed by Rupert Murdoch, who last year paid $580 million for the MySpace.com site, saying “Young people don’t want to rely on a Godlike figure from above to tell them what’s
important…They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it”.

Like it or not, MySpace is a promotional tool that musicians, especially unsigned bands cannot ignore. Today’s band must be web-savvy and must be on MySpace. As a multimedia-rich environment, bands have unparalleled access to their fans on both a social and musical level.

Prior to the Internet and MySpace music promotion was sketchy at best and was all about connections, fitting into an industry “mold”, luck, and more connections. It was often left up to the chance of being in the right place at the right time. It was an old boys’ network and the chances of an unsigned band breaking out and getting noticed were all up to politics, insider connections and chance. With the exploding popularity of MySpace music promotion, the power has shifted to the fans and the rewards are going to the bands who know the best way to reach their fans. Never before has there been a better chance for unsigned bands to get distribution for their music and to promote your unsigned band.

MySpace has given music fans the biggest coup, by literally giving them the power to choose and the voice to express that choice in a way that the music industry establishment and musicians cannot ignore. This gives indie bands and unsigned bands a tremendous advantage they have never had before.

Despite noise and griping about how crowded MySpace is with people trying to promote their unsigned bands, spamming other MySpacers with friend requests and using all kinds of software to make them appear more popular than they really are, at the end of the day, MySpace music promotion is the best thing to happen to independent artists since Napster. There is no question that MySpace and MySpace music promotion is the best unsigned band resource available today.

MySpace music promotion has changed the game and in doing do has put a damper on many of the traditional methods to promote your unsigned band. The old way to promote an unsigned band involved using posters, fliers, playing the local club scene and hoping to get discovered by an industry suit.

MySpace has completely revolutionized music promotion in these ways:

• Allowing unsigned bands to reach an audience they never could before.
  
• Allowing unsigned bands a global opportunity to sell their music and promote their music directly to their fans.
  
• Giving unsigned bands access to a global fan base.
  
• By allowing unsigned bands to connect with other bands and musicians to create a strong network.
  
• By allowing unsigned bands the ability to reach out and touch their fans (and let them touch back) in a highly personal way that has never been available before.
  
• This ability to reach out and touch their fans and let them touch back is probably the biggest advantage unsigned and indie bands can gain from MySpace music promotion. It may be a huge network, and the competition may seem fierce, but MySpace music promotion, when done right and consistently, gives bands the best advantage in the history of the music industry. When an unsigned band can create a global fan base with a grassroots effort and cut out the middle man, chances of getting noticed by the suits and getting signed by a label are no longer left to luck, chance, connections or politics. Thanks to MySpace, it is all about the fans and all about the music.
  
  Arctic Monkeys Case Study
• http://www.myspaceshowdown.com/blog/making-it-myspace-case-study-arctic-monkeys.html
  
• http://www.arcticmonkeys.com/
  
• http://www.facebook.com/pages/Arctic-Monkeys/9520450966
  
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/jan/30/arts.artsnews
  
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/5391258.stm
  
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/oct/25/popandrock.arcticmonkeys
  

KEY WORDS / VOCABULARY:

AUDIENCE, INSTITUTION, FANBASE, PERSONALISATION, INTERACTIVITY, CONVERGENCE, PROLIFERATION, MOBILITY, PLATFORMS, SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP, 

Year 13 Media and Film Cover Work for Thursday

Good evening everyone. I won't be able to teach your lessons tomorrow as I am busy all day interviewing the 'Head of Media and Film' candidates. Sorry! However, I have lots of work for you to do so please read on to discover what I have planned: 

Year 13 Media:

I want you to break into groups of no more than four people and work collaboratively on a 500 word essay response using the 'Horror' reader on my front desk + your knowledge and understanding of the four films studied to create a team essay. Here are 4 questions to choose from with basic structures: 

How important is Genre to film audiences and the film industry?

1. Define Genre- a blueprint of conventions, useful for Audiences and Institutions alike. 

2.Industry:

Think about it logically, its useful in, pre-production, Production- directors working with the same actors and crew- they know they work well together. Post modernism, inter textuality, directors and producers influences, auteur theory, etc. Post - Production, Marketing and distribution- via genre- trailers, press, TV interviews etc- all aimed at the target audience. mass or niche. 

3. Audience:
Genre is a contract between I & A - marketed in a certain way to appeal to a particular audience who will have expectations of a film and be prepared to 'suspend their disbelief' to take part in this process of consumption. 
They bring their own cultural & post modern references and experience to the film and may consume it on different levels. Roland Barthes theory of 'plaiser' & 'Jouissance'- audiences feel gratified that they have been intelligent enough to recognise these references and they also enjoy the film both on a visual spectacle level and also on a more challenging intellectual level. 

“Generic conventions provide a basic structure, but that is all. Every film is unique” Discuss this view.

The following issues may be referred to by candidates:
•Generic conventions
•Case study analysis
•Auteurism
•Audience pleasures
•Hybrid, cross genre films
• Sequels and prequels

Explain how and why certain films combine the conventions of more than one genre.The following issues may be referred to by candidates:
•Audience pleasures and expectations
•Success of certain formulae and paradigms
•Industry preferences
•Promotional issues and strategies
•Hybrids and sub genres
• References to and comparisons with literary genres

How do you account for the growing popularity of Horror?

PLEASE PRINT YOUR TEAM EFFORTS AND LEAVE ON MY DESK! HERE IS SOME GENRE THEORY TO SUPPORT YOU:

Genre Theory

• As audiences become acquainted with particular genres, they come to expect a specific type of viewing experience from films of that genre.

• Genres typically have a life cycle, progressing from uncertain beginnings to stable maturity and parodic decline.

• Though generic similarities between films have existed since the beginning of cinema, it was the advent of semiotics and structuralism that gave scholars a sophisticated methodology with which to analyze film genre (see Film Theory).

• Jim Kitses defined genre in terms of structuring oppositions, such as the wilderness-civilization binary found in westerns.

• Rick Altman divided genre into the semantic (iconographic elements such as the cowboy hat) and thesyntactic (structural and symbolic meanings).

  
  
  
  Uploaded on authorSTREAM by hurtwoodhousemedia
  
  
  
  
  YEAR 13 FILM: PLEASE WATCH 'CITY OF GOD' - IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT YOU WATCH THIS FILM THIS WEEK PLEASE! ENJOY. X

Film Distributors Association 2008 Report - A super resource for A/S Media and Film Students

The following resources are brilliant in enabling you to better understand the 'DISTRIBUTION' processes involved in Film Production in the UK in particular. We are going to be studying these resources as part of our exploration of Working Title Films in Media and for all you lovely A/S Film students busy preparing for the A/S Film exam next wednesday, these will really aid your learning too. Go on....dive in! This is the FDA Micro site with some excellent clips from industry professionals:
http://www.launchingfilms.tv/

http://www.britfilms.com/
fda guide 2008

Publish at Scribd or explore others: guide user

Here is an example of the type of question you will be faced with in the Media Section B exam:

Section B: Institutions and Audiences 

Answer the question below, making detailed reference to examples from your case study 

material to support points made in your answer. 

2 Discuss the issues raised by an institution’s need to target specific audiences within a media 

industry which you have studied.  

[50] 

 

Fight Club - American Disillusionment, subverting the 'Dream' and Masculinity in Crisis

A few goodies to support exploration of The American Dream and masculinity in fight club:

Brilliant thought provoking analysis of thematics:

http://www.criticism.com/md/fightclub.html

A very interesting essay that explores both American Beauty and Fight club:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/FightClub

Another credible critique of both films:

http://webdrive.service.emory.edu/users/mrindge/Cinematic%20Critiques%20of%20Culture.htm

Here is a nice extract exploring the subject matter entitled:

Purging the Male Soul: Why Fight Club is no Easy Rider 
By Russell Brown, Jan 1, 2000. 

Feel free to extract quotations to use in the exam: 

" In this film, the American Dream is corrupted by the addiction to mass-merchandised material goods, the craving to stuff our empty lives with products. And underneath this is a common theme in art - an attack on conformity, its present incarnation being stores like the Gap and Ikea. For Fincher, the American Dream has become not just about having kids, but being able to dress them in leather (this season).

It sounds good on paper. And while I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with asking an audience to question the values it promotes by shopping retail, there is a flawed philosophy behind this film. It's an arrogance that stems from a cynical view of human nature, and it robs the film of achieving real depth, a true portrait of America in the 1990s. The main characters are Tyler Durden, the anti-establishment sadist played by Brad Pitt, and Jack (Edward Norton) the prototypical corporate drone. Tyler believes that the only way to experience the vibrance of life is to break the shackles of your desk job and return to the roots of your nature - for men, that would be experiencing the primal instincts of survival and war.

Jack's life at the start of the film is the quintessential and oft-portrayed existence of urban drudgery. He lives in a cramped apartment ("a filing cabinet for widows and young professionals"), spends his time shopping in mail-order catalogs ("I'd flip through catalogues and wonder what kind of dining set defined me as a person") while his days are filled pushing papers in a menial and grotesque job (evaluating the cost of settling with victims of car malfunctions vs. the cost of ordering a recall). These actions are portrayed with a sense of despair, the type of mind-numbing, robotic behavior that we have seen in earlier films such as Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Jack, under Tyler's influence, abandons his jail-cell job and antiseptic apartment and helps him form an underground fighting society, a place where men can purge their souls. The central argument of the film stems from this juxtaposition: Ikea-Boy (as Tyler calls Jack) breaks his addiction to products and, in doing so, finds redemption. 

This, hypothetically, could be a scathing attack on middle-class values, a critique of our addiction to comfort, a rebuke of the contemporary incarnation of "keeping up with the Joneses." But, in reality, does it really serve any purpose to present day-jobs and shopping at Ikea as morally corrupt ? (As a side note, isn't there something incredibly offensive about a well-paid group of Hollywood hot-shots telling us that we should be buying more distinctive furniture instead of that plain - albeit affordable and dependable! - Ikea product? Hey, Brad, if I could afford an Eames chair, I would buy one.) And really, is there something inherently more noble in living in a dilapidated old house with crummy electricity and dripping water? I don't believe it. Living as a recluse and rejecting society in your ramshackle shack is just as much an affectation as living as a corporate hack in an apartment complex - they're both caricatures. I don't buy either as telling the whole story of how real people feel about their work and lives.

If the artists (and, granted, Fincher has a unique visual style; and Pitt and Norton share some of their best moments) behind Fight Club truly harbor such a disdain for the lifestyle of Americans, I think it behooves them to present a less juvenile alternative than freeing oneself by pummeling your fellow man into a bloody pulp as cathartic release. The fury of the first half of the film is, in an interesting reversal, not earned by the solution of the second. And it is this fury - this palpable sense that Fincher really feels that we are living miserable lives - that turned me off Fight Club. His vision lacks any basis in reality. It's a pretentious, wannabe-artist's view of the world.

Fight Club has conveniently glossed over the details of individuality in its attempt to make a statement. It sounds really good to make a movie saying we are all sucked in by corporate America's evil advertising schemes - but that's just not the way it is. If you walk into the apartments of the "common man,"yes, you may find an Ikea desk, and maybe a Pottery Barn lamp, and probably something from Hold Everything. But you will also see that person's photographs and that cool table he found at a garage sale and a hard to find one-sheet poster of his favorite movie. I don't think anyone in America defines himself by his Ikea barstool. Sure, I have some Gap T-shirts in my closet; but really, would that groovy Grateful Dead concert shirt with the holes and shredded collar really seem so special if it weren't for the dependable, reliable plain Gap T? Probably not. You need the plain to make the extraordinary, well, extraordinary. Like that wonderful scene in Harold and Maude - when Maude says to Harold, in a huge field of identical looking flowers, that all daises are not the same, that they may look to be but some have longer stems than others, some have more petals than others - people may share qualities, but to condemn society based on certain shared home products is both naive and immature."

The Ring - Some Mythology

"The story of 'Ring' would seem at first to be rooted firmly in the 20th century, with its central urban-legend theme of a cursed videotape which kills anyone who see it within 7 days; however, the mysterious main character, Yamamura Sadako, is definitely based on a very traditional Japanese character: the vengeful female ghost. Long in Japanese art and theatre (certainly since the Meiji period), as well as the hannya (female demons) of ancient folktales, evil female spirits have been popular figures. In kabuki and noh, there are stories such as Oiwa (the tale of a woman poisoned by her husband who returns to kill him) and Okiku (about a female servant killed and thrown down a well which she then haunts every night). However, the real secret of the video-curse, a virus part-smallpox and part-Sadako's DNA, is again defiantly 20th century, ensuring that the story is relevant to contemporary issues as well as ancient mythology."

To see more on the mythologies of Japanese Horror, have a look at the following site:

http://www.mandiapple.com/snowblood/theringcycle.htm

What fears and anxieties are metaphorically explored in the film? Some food for thought.