Date for your diaries

Hey all,

I can't wait to share this film with you guys! 

I will be putting my finished short film on youtube on Monday, and it will be available to watch from midday. I will post a link to the film on here.

Interpreting Texts

During Wednesday's series of lectures, one of the other topics was how we interpret media texts. Matthew Hall, one the speakers, introduced me to the Stuart Hall's ideas about 'Encoding/Decoding' texts. Hall was a Jamaican cultural theorist and sociologist who was made famous for introducing this idea. So lets look at this idea; first of all when looking at a media text, we have to figure out what the dominant message is; what has the author encoded into the text? Next we have to think; what might be a negotiated interpretation? Basically, how does the audience decode the meaning, do they accept some of the author's intentions? Do they mis-interpret others? Finally we have consider what an oppositional or resistant interpretation is. How does the audience interpret the same text but generate an alternate meaning to that intended by the author?

Stuart Hall

Youth, Culture and Collective Identity

Yesterday I was at the 'Youth, Culture and Collective Identity' A-level study day at BFI Southbank. It was a day of lectures dedicated to our exam that we will doing in the Summer, and it was a very beneficial. The first section of lectures was on identity and collective identity.

Jacques Lacan

We learnt about some important people to take note of, one of them being Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalyst who had developed a theory called the 'Mirror Stage', a stage at which child begins to develop their identity. Moving on from this, the lecturer (Matthew Hall) began to talk about psychoanalytic film theory and asked the question: how do we use the cinema and television as a 'mirror' to reinforce our identity? After this, Henry Jenkins was introduced, another theorist who believes that we need to interact in order to form our identity. 

Henry Jenkins

 When we interact, our own identity is influenced by other people, also we may be interact and be heavily influenced by media representations. For example, if we see someone we really like in a film, we may aspire to be like them, and we may shape our identity to be like them. Other theories that exist are that we actively use these representations to reinforce our existing identity and show us how we should aspire to be, or we use media texts as a means to basis for collective identity (e.g Beliebers, TwiHards, Directioners). 

Media trip!

The last two days have been awesome. Along with my media class, I spent two days in London doing some really fun stuff and attended an American youth study day at BFI Southbank on Wednesday. On the Tuesday I caught the 8:11am train from Spooner Row; the only train that stops there all day on the way to Norwich, yes, its a quiet place. We all met in Norwich and from there we got on the train heading directly to London Liverpool Street at 9am. Excitement was high and we were all looking forward to what lay ahead. We arrived in London and then got to the accommodation, dumping off our bags before heading out to Oxford Circus, where we took in the sights and sounds of the busy London street. The HMV there is crazy, I recommend it. After having possibly the best sandwich ever (6" Chipotle Chicken melt) from Subway, we all headed to the BBC where we went on an excellent tour of the news rooms and the BBC radio rooms. 

      

 The BBC news room was so lively. There was so much going on, and as we all stared down on the news room, the guide explained what actually goes on down there as well as talking about how news stories are verified and how the news presenters are journalists that work 12 hour shifts, working for hours on producing 75% of their own news report. I always just thought news presenters just read the news, but I was wrong; they are journalists themselves, not just news anchors. After this we hit up the BBC One Show studio, which was smaller than expected, and we were told about how its filmed and then we had the chance to sit down on the famous green sofa and get our photo taken. After this, we headed to the BBC radio 4 studio where bands such as Metallica, Coldplay and individual artists such as Justin Timberlake have recorded and performed to audiences. To finish off the tour, we were all taken through to a room where some microphones were set up; this is where BBC radio drama is recorded and as expected, we were able to act out and record our own radio drama. It was great fun and I learnt a lot of things that I did not know about the BBC. On the Tuesday evening, we headed out onto the dark and dingy backstreets of Whitechapel on a Jack the Ripper tour. This tour lasted around an hour and a half, and although it was bloody freezing, the tour guide made the trip extremely interesting and engaging. Being a great lover of history, it was fantastic to go on a tour and learn so much about the mysterious murders from someone called Jonny (like me), who has been studying the subject for 22 years! It was clear to see that he was an expert on the subject. 

On the Wednesday morning we awoke to the comfort of a warm shower, unlimited coffee and unlimited croissants; score. After having far too much to eat, we headed off to the BFI for the American youth study day, which will I explain in depth in another post. After this, we headed to Camden Market to experience the excellent smells of exotic street food outlets and spend ages browsing through the various record shops. In the evening we caught the train back to Norwich and this excellent trip was drawn to a close. On the whole, the trip was really exciting and I learnt a lot of interesting stuff. 

Anyway, today I'm back at school and the never ending grind of sixth form life can continue. Good day. 

 

More on camera angles

Earlier in this blog I looked at some basic camera angles which were the: worm's eye view, low angle, eye-level, high angle and bird's eye view angles. In this post I will be looking at another important camera angle that should be taken into consideration when making your own film, and it is quite common. First of all lets refresh our understanding of what camera angles are. Camera angles are the way that the camera is angled when filming takes place, and the job of a camera angle is to give emotional information to the audience, and guide the viewing audience with their judgement about the character or object thats in the shot. Heres an example for you; if there is a low angled shot of the main character, what we can draw from this shot is that the main character is dominant and powerful. 

One of the key camera angles that I did not discuss in my earlier post was the angle known as the Dutch angle; otherwise known as the Dutch tilt, German angle or Oblique/Canted angle. To achieve this angle, the camera is not laid on a non-horizontal surface and therefore its on a sideways slant. This camera angle produces a sense that something is not right, because the camera shot is imbalanced and unstable, reflecting the situation on screen. This camera angle is often used in horror movies, in which scenes of uncertainty and pure horror need canted camera angles to further the scare factor. 

Above is an example of the Dutch angle. This looks like a
typical scene from a horror film.