Parodys dont have to be movies.

They can be songs to.

Meme - Scream vs Scary Movie.

In Class we have being looking at Meme "An Idea or creative item that is passed on virally from person to person, to the point where lots of people know about it and are talking about it" this could be anything. In this case it is the mask from Scream. I think that meme can be used to describe the symbolic mask from scream (shown left) Scream is a horror movie in which a murderer uses the mask to conceal him self, in the film their are enormous amounts of people wearing the mark making it hard to tell who the murderer is. The mask being shown in large quantity's makes the audience uneasy, they recognise the mask and relate it to danger.
This classic mask comes from the painting Scream by Edward Munch (shown right)
which is parodies in lots of things e.g the Simpson's.
Scary movie is a Parody, it uses typical stereotypes and ideology's that audiences are used to seeing in film e.g Blonde ditzy woman and exaggerates them to the extreme.






The two trailers to compare. :D as you can see the second video is a complete parody

An example of post morderness

I love scrubs. And this is POST MODERN. Zack Braff looks at the screen ;) I love scrubs. Scrubs is very post modern in other ways to, we are often entering the world of J.D its is HYPEREAL.

The Coen Brother

The Big Lebowski

Post modernist elements: Man gets punched, day dreams and appears to be floating in the sky following a magic rug, a shot from within a bowling ball, camera spinning round and round the same elements are used in The Hudsucker Proxy, these dream-like sequences happen more than once. These techniques disorientates the viewer and makes them aware that they are watching a film. The use of an actor talking directly to the camera makes the audience again aware that they are watching a film.
Below is an extract from the film :D

Mo' Coan brothers

Blood Simple

Scared witless.

The Coen Brother

The hudsucker Proxy

Postmoderinist film by the Coan brothers. Starts Tim Robins. There are many things that make this film postmodern, one is the emphasis on characters, their clothing exaggerated everything is so clean it becomes hyper-reality. Another is that the film starts with the end, we know what is going to happen we just don't know how, the narration over the footage talks to us and tells us that we are being told a story, and then finally the narrator turns and talks directly to the audience breaking the 4th wall.

Analysis of The Boat That Rocked

The Target audience for the film is quite wide, I would say it is for teenagers in Britain however there will be many older people willing to see this film from the 60's as that was the time they were teenagers. The fact that the film is a Richard Curtis film will also widen the target audience as he has been writing films for years now and people who are familiar with his films will wish to see them.

The film uses stereotypes to gain the audience it wants to get, people wouldn't go and see the film unless there were characters they can relate to. Nick Frosts Character for example is a stereotype of the "average Joe" his character is called Dave and is somebody that most people would recognise we see him as the slob, lazy and fat. British actors that we recognise such as Bill Nighy will also influence us to go and see the film as he is commonly used in Curtis films.
Gemma Arterton is a principal stereotype, she plays a character named Desiree which is exactly what her character is, desirable, she represents females as sex objects, they only come onto the boat for party's. Dave and Desiree are very British, Dave has a very Cockney accent and Desiree a very upper class one, they both dress British (for the 60's) and so the audience feels comfortable watching them.

Richard Curtis and the team can be said to be appealing to the mythological tendecies of the audience.

Hot Fuzz

Helena and I have created a powerpoint presentation about the film Hot Fuzz. I feel that the presentaion has helped us learn more about the way british films are made.

Get Carter vs The Italian Job

Get Carter and The Italian job are both film staring Micheal Caine. My reactions toward the two films are very different, The Italian Job being a film which has an almost positive approach to crime whereas Get Carter is quite shocking, very violent, it doesn't make crime seem glamorous like in the Italian Job, it is very different, Micheal Caine plays Jack Carter, a character who is set out to kill people as revenge for the death of his brother, he is heartless and kills anybody who gets in his way. The film was made more shocking perhaps after watching The Italian job as The Italian Job is a soft friendly type of film, Caines character in the film is humorous and lovable. The opposite is said for Jack Carter. When Get Carter was first released it got very bad reviews, people found it very shocking as it was made in 1971, it was a one of a kind gangster movie that people were not used to. "soulless and nastily erotic...virtuoso viciousness", "sado-masochistic fantasy", and "one would rather wash one's mouth out with soap than recommend it" are all examples of what people thought of the film at the time. As the film has been re-reviewed it has been noticed as one of the best British gangster films of all time. "Possibly Caine's finest hour in one of the grittiest, most suspense-filled crime dramas of all time." and was given 5 stars from Empire magazine.

Iweb Experience

My iweb experience has been very enjoyable, I have learnt a lot from this lesson about how to make a web page how to hyperlink and how to upload content onto the page. In the same Lesson I learnt about key Internet terminology such as Netiquette (The etiquette on the Internet) and what cyberspace is. The lesson was very use full as we will be using the iweb program to make our web pages for our coursework, the program was very easy to use and I picked up the tools fast, I still need to learn things such as how to make content on the page down loadable. I have also been looking at the option of pod casting for updating my blog, it could be much simpler to do a podcast for my blogs and very existing. Overall the iweb experience has really helped me to understand the Internet a lot better and I feel that when making my web page I will have the skills I need.

UGC

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

User-generated content (UGC), also known as consumer-generated media (CGM)[1] or user-created content (UCC),[2] refers to various kinds of media content, publicly available, that are produced by end-users.[3]
The notion of free content has been central to the media sector for decades. Consumers have been willing to receive free content, via commercial radio and television broadcasts, in exchange for advertising.

Examples of UGC:

www.Yahoo.com

www.youtube.com

www.ebay.co.uk

Exploration of British Film- Working Titles

http://www.paramountpictures.co.uk/romzom/ Shaun of the Dead

http://www.workingtitlefilms.com/trailers/obrother.htm O Brother Where art thou

http://www.theboatthatrocked.co.uk/site/index.html The Boat that rocked

The three films above are all films that are produced by the British film production company Working Title Films. The company is based in London and was founded by Tim Beven and Sarah Radclyffe in 1982.
I have chosen to explore the Shaun of the Dead website as it goes very well with the trailer, the layout of the website is made to look like the inside of a pub, just like the one in the film, it is very state of the art and people who have not seen the film with get the general idea from the website and the trailer.
The same goes for The Boat that rocked website, the theme of the website goes with the film, the background looks like the floor of the boat and retro symbols appear when you click on certain areas of the site. Looking at these two websites has given me an Idea of how my website should look for the film trailer that I will make. For instance, if I was making a horror movie I would make the website dark and horror like.
Looking at trailers, especially the one for O Brother where art thou, which I have not seen has helped me get an idea of what needs to be included in a film trailer, for instance whats important to put in, the audience needs to get to grips with the general plot in order for them to want to go an see it. The trailer included personality's of characters and showed us the time period of it's setting.
Overall looking at the three films have helped me to understand what I need to do for my own project.

Michael Caine British Actor

In Class we have started watching "The Italian Job" and have been asked to research the actor Michael Caine who stars in the film, Caine is famous for his Cockney accent; especially in this film with the line "you're only suppose to blow the bloody doors off" and also for his way with women in films; films such as "Get Carter" and "Alfie" which made him a success. Michael Caine was awarded a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours List, for his contribution to the performing arts in the year 2000. His film "Get Carter" is usually rated one of the top British films of all time despite it having bad reviews when it was first released.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzJxVRBq0uM - The Italian Job film Trailer

Start of A2!

Second year of media studies has begun and this year we make our very own teaser trailers and a website to upload it onto! We are also learning about what makes a British film British, is it the actors that have to be British? Or does it have to be produced by a British film company?
We discussed the film Slumdog Millionaire and whether of not it was British, having a British cast and Director but being set in Mumbai.

Evaluation of Max Kill

For my media project I wanted to create a piece of film which caused suspense in the audience and tricked the audience into thinking the film was one thing, but finding out that it was another.
The very beginning of our film shows a woman getting ready supposedly for a date; we have a mini montage of clips and cross cutting from the woman to a man also getting dressing up smartly. This suggests that the couple are both getting ready for a date. Our montage was inspired by “Legally Blond”, a complete opposite to our thriller themed film but we felt that this all built up to the mysterious ending where the woman (Claudia) comes face to face with her killer Max Kill, appropriately the name of out film. My main inspiration came from “Psycho”, and we put a direct link in our film, everybody recognises the famous shower scene and so we added a shot of the shower to denote danger I hoped that this would mean that subconsciously people would foresee the danger that was ahead of Claudia. Another film that inspired us was “Sin City”, the violent film is black and white most of the way through with hints of colour in places and conveniently because of technical reasons our film looked better in black and white which added a film noire feeling to it, we tried to copy “Sin City” by adding hints of colour such as when Claudia puts on red lipstick but we didn’t have the technology to do so. This turned out well because it made the film more appealing for an older audience being in black and white, this was lucky as our target audience is the older generation. Although we managed to tern around our technical problems for the better it was still a hard task to get over, in colour our film was very grainy and visually unappealing this was due to lack of lighting on set as we planed to film at night. We learnt a lot from this mistake as we now know that lighting is vital for the look of the film. We even had to re-shoot because of this problem and made the same mistake again by waiting to long to start filming, we realised that we could have simply filmed the scene during day and edited the light on the computers. This was not our only problem, our sound effects went very wrong at one point, the character Max played by Jacob was meant to have some dialogue but the equipment we had couldn't pick up sound from the distance we were from him. We tried to overcome this problem as we had some feedback from classmates and this was the main concern and we tried to dub the sound with somebody else’s voice, this sounded very wrong and we found that our only choice was to have no dialogue in the film. We found that this made the film even harder to read for the audience. Another technical difficulty was tracking. We borrowed a 'dolly' from school but the road surface we were using was far too unstable for the dolly to move along it smoothly. We had to improvise by using a hand held camera method which I think turned out looking quite professional.

One of the easier parts of making the film was the film shoot, working out the shot types was something that we found easy, creating tension from the shots we used, for instance the pan when Claudia is leaving her house an walks towards the camera, I wanted the audience to be looking at Claudia’s legs and being reminded that she is an “uptown” type of girl with class. I also wanted them to be thinking about where she is going and who she is meeting. We hoped that this would create suspense in our film.

A very important part of making our film was the mise en scene, everything that was in the shots, including both setting and costume, we kept the setting simple using real houses making it as realistic as possible, we gave Claudia a very important prop, the record player which I felt played a huge part in her characterisation, finding out the type of person she is, it shows she is an old fashioned kind of girl, not somebody who would just shove on the radio, we wanted her to be the kind of person who spend time deciding on what music she wanted to listen to, somebody who is upper-class, her costume represents her social class, she wears the simple black dress with red lipstick, a classic look that most people would recognise as “the date look”. We wanted the audience to be able to relate to her, most girls would understand the way she was getting ready for her date. We hoped this would attract the audience into wanted to watch more of the film as they wanted to know more about this character. Jacob has the same classy look but with a horrible twist, he places a knife into his pocket, this denotes danger, the dagger shot is so fast that it is hard for the audience to catch it, I think that this is good because when he hold the knife out towards Claudia at the end the audience will realise and remember. Jacob is a very complex character and we wanted to get the audience very interested in him but not giving to much away. We wanted to inform the audience that this man is dangerous but at the same time very mysterious.


The target audience for our film has a very wide range; the film is definitely for over 18's as I believe that the film would get very violent later on with the murder of Claudia. However the film is sophisticated at the same time, so the target audience would be for adults aged 30 onwards. I think we attracted our audience by making the film sophisticated like our characters and by making the characters easy to relate to.

Music was one of the biggest issues we had during the production of our film, it was the cause of many arguments between me and Helena, if we used the wrong piece of music the suspense becomes all wrong, in my opinion I believe that this is what happened, the first piece of music is to upbeat but does create a good contrast to the second piece which I think would be better as a much simpler piece, just a heart beat or one instrument on its own such as a violin. Despite this I do think that overall our film is very good and it works and is understandable, which is something that is vital to make the film successful.
The media institution that I would want to produce my film would be channel 4/ Film 4 I think that it would make the film feel more personal to be produced by a British film company.

Lizzy Morey
Word Count: 1,170

Max Kill

Genre

For our film we decided to go with a Thriller Genre, we chose to do this because we found that with a Thriller theme the story could be much broader, our initial thoughts were to make a chick flick and we even came up with the idea of getting ready for a date which we still use, but by changing simple things such as the music it turned into a much deeper film about murder.
So our very first influences were from films such as Legally Blond and Chicago! After deciding to change Genre we starting to get idea's from films by Alfred Hitchcock such as his most famous film Psycho, we have a direct reference to this in our film when we see somebody turning on a shower and anybody in the audience who would have seen Psycho will become unnerved.

The Story Board

We used our Story board to plan all the shots we were going to use, what order we would shoot them and how big the shot size needed to be! The Story board was very usefull as it helped as a list of what to do next. However, as we tryed to stick to the story board we found it became difficult for a few shots which we had to improvise on the day.