Monday, 29 June 2009
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
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
Thursday, 25 June 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
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
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzJxVRBq0uM - The Italian Job film Trailer
Saturday, 20 June 2009
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.
We discussed the film Slumdog Millionaire and whether of not it was British, having a British cast and Director but being set in Mumbai.
Monday, 27 April 2009
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
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
Sunday, 22 March 2009
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