Monday 22 June 2015

narrative theory

Narrative theory is how a film or story relates to each other, in the film Romeo and Juliette the theme was that there were rivalling families who are meant to hate each other but the two children fall in love. In Frozen the new Disney film, there is the point that Ana thinks that Hans is a hero, but it turns out he is a villain in the end. You have Olaf who is the magical snowman who risks his life to make sure that Ana doesn't freeze and die. The trolls are linked to the princess from when she needed there help from when she was younger. 
Binary opposites are usually used in films to help the plots, they are also used in music videos as part of a narrative to reinforce song lyrics. 


Levi Strauss - Binary Oppositions



The above picture shows some class work that we did on Binary Oppositions. The idea is that you can base a narrative around things that are opposites. The examples i found above are that in Romeo and Juliet Love and Hate are two large opposites that create the narrative and in World War Z two of the major themes are death and life. 


Propp - Seven Spheres of Action 

Propp came up with the idea that in plays and literature that you would have 7 different character types. A clear example of this is from the film Frozen where they have used 7 different main characters:
Hans (False Hero & Villain), Rock Trolls (dispatcher), Olaf (Helper), Kristoff (Hero), Elsa (Princess), Ana (Princess), Sven (Donor for providing aid to the hero). 

Tzvetan Todorov - 5 stages of action 

At the beginning of Parent Trap the stat of equilibrium is that the twins are living separately with individual parents. The disruption to that is when they meet at camp. The state of disruption is when the twins try to get their parents back together. The resolution is when they come up with the holiday so they can get the parents back together. The new equilibrium is them all living together as one big family. 

Friday 19 June 2015

interview question draft

the contributors to the documentary were:

- Harry O'Donoughue (rider)
- Keenan Mehmet (rider)
- Charlie Wheelhouse (rider)
- Aaron Brogden (rider)


Keenan Mehmet

Q: whats your name and where are you from?

A: my names Keenan Mehmet and I'm from Eastbourne

Q: how long have you been riding?

A: I've been riding for about three years

Q: why do you go to the skatepark?

A: i go to the skatepark as its a nice place to be and you have something in common with everyone that goes there as you are all going there for the same reason, to have fun

Q: why do you do the sport?

A: i do it as its a get away from a normal life and its something i really enjoy

Harry O'donoughue

Q: whats your name and where you from?

A: my names Harry and i live in Bromley

Q: how long have you been riding?

A: I've been riding for about four years

Q: why do you go to the skatepark?

A: i go to the skatepark to escape my life as its full of people doing the same thing as you and as a result of this its just a really friendly environment and a cool place to be

Charlie Wheelhouse 

Q: Whats your name and where are you from?

A: my names Charlie Wheelhouse and i live in bromley

Q: why do you skateboard?

A: i skateboard as its something fun to do in my spare time and i enjoy it so much so I've carried it on a turned it into my life

Q: would you recommend it?

A: i would most defiantly recommend it to someone who has never done it before as it is so much fun


Aaron Brogden

Q: Whats your name and where are you from?

A: my names Aaron Brogden and i live in bromley

Q: why do you skate?

A: i skate to get away from my life as my life is so hard with all the exams i have, i just find skating as a get away from it all

Q: do you enjoy it?

A: yes its the best decision i ever made to start it up












interview pitch

Overall our pitch that we made prior to our documentary is very informative and shows exactly what we are going to do and what we were going to film.



WWW:

  • It was very informative in parts in stating what we were planning to do
  • It gave a rough, short , snappy insight into what goes on at a skatepark
  •  We included where the skatepark is geography wise is and how far away from the town centre
  • In the documentary the best parts were the openings were we had background music over the  credits and the tricks.
  • its shows how the skatepark impacts people lives



EBI:

  • In the pitch we were suspect to poor spelling/grammar at a couple of points
  • We were quite vague in some areas where didn't go into detail when maybe we should of done
  • The risks that could of occurred were too extreme and could of ended in a very bad manor.
  • Could of asked more questions and a more variety of questions to the skaters
  • Another improvement could of been to interview more locals


The main issue with our camerawork is that in some of our shots especially with Keenan Mehmet you can not see the skatepark when he is talking about it. Another piece of camerawork that didn't go down too well was Harry O'Donoughue shot where it was very dark in the background and in a dark room you may not be able see his face.


As a team we believe the documentary was success because we didn't believe we could reach the quality that it currently is. Also we are pleased that we have reached over 1000 views on it. Every person that contributed did a great job in their role of giving us their insight of the skatepark


The pitch we feel was good but we did have to make a few adjustments to our original pitch, such as some spelling and grammatical errors. We also feel we could of made the pitch longer than it actually is and put more detail in the points that we wrote about. But for what we have done we both think we have done a good job.

production log


Production Log

The production log is basically what we did to create our documentary, and the order we did them in. I would say that the process of creating our documentary was pretty smooth as the paperwork was all done in order and was all in on the deadline.

Stage one -
                  What me and Harry did first was to finish the drafts for the documentary  this is the stuff like the story boards, etc. This gave me and Harry a clear idea on what we wanted to do. The concept of our idea is basically how people go to the skatepark to get away from their normal life as they feel the skatepark is a different life.
When the storyboard was done with our main focus was the casing, obviously we needed a few others to star in our documentary, so we found a few friends who we could cast in our documentary, this is the whole idea of the casting. So in the first stage we finished our story board and the casting list for our documentary.

Stage two -
                 In the second stage we finished :
                                                                   - Crew Roles
                                                                   - Artist Case studies
                                                                   - Filming Permission
                                                                   - Clearance letter
                                                                   - Script
                                                                   - All of these pieces of work were created within a week, these pieces of work were to do with the setting up of the music and setting we were doing the documentary in. They were done in the order as shown above, this was also smooth as we had no troubles whilst creating this pieces of work.

Stage three -
                   Stage three was the production phase :
                                                                               - Risk assessment
                                                                               - Shot list
                                                                               - Equipment / Props list
                                                                               - Location Reece
                                                                               - Track choice and analysis
                                                                               - Shooting script
                                                                               - Case studies
                                                                               - Call list
                                                                               - This was the end of the production phase of our music video, the pieces above were done in the order as shown above. This was the end to the lead up to creating our music video.

The filming / editing stage -
                                            This was when we began to film our documentary over the course of a whole day, the editing took a little longer as we had to add transitions and special effects by using 'abobe premier pro' and 'adobe after effects' :
                                                                     - Final Edit
                                                                     - Final music video
                                                                     - After this stage there was still more work to be done, the build up work that we had decided to leave till after we finished our own documentary  so we would have a better insight to what we had to do :
                                                                   - Advertising in documentary
                                                                   - Meaning in documentary
                                                                   - Single shot camera analysis
                                                                   - documentary styles
                                                                   - documentary purposes
                                                                   - These were the final pieces of work for the unit about creating our own documentary  there was another one or two pieces of work that I may of missed or left out but that is because they were not as important as these pieces of work.

evaluation

This is our final evaluation of our final edit for our documentary on skating. In the link below we mention what we did throughout filming the documentary. We also talk about what we thought went well the most and what we thought we could've improved in the documentary to make it better than what we actually made it. Overall I think we can say our documentary on the skate park was a huge success as it turned out a lot better than originally planned.
there was a couple of things that we needed to change in the documentary such as some fonts being hard to read so they needed to be changed to a font that could be easily read, we also had to shorten a couple of clips as some things that were being said had been repeated so they needed changing which was just a matter of editing but other than that the documentary went really well.

During the process of my documentary the planning and research went very well, as a result of this the documentary turned out exactly as planned and was a success, during the planning we made sure that everything was prepared for when we were ready to shoot, for example we done a location rec. to make sure that the location we were filming was appropriate and to know where we were going to be filming so that when it came to the time of filming the video we were prepared and already have knowledge of where we are going to film, we also done a props list to ensure we knew exactly what props we needed and how much they would cost, we also did a cast list to plan who was playing which role, finally we did a production schedule to know what scene involves what so that when the time of making the video came we knew what to do. overall out group worked really well together as everyone put in equally as much work to get an overall success as i think the video turned out really well.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvxMYEqhf_Y

final proposal / pitch







documentary research






story ideas

code and conventions

1. Voice Over • In our documentary we used a voice over to explain what’s happening in the documentary we’re presenting. • We also use the voice over to talk about the the life of a skater and what they do on a day to day basis. • The voice over is meant to grab the attention of viewers to entertain and to entertain them throughout.

  • 2. ‘Real’ Footage Of Event • Using real footage in a documentary is Key as you don’t want your audience to think what you’ve made is fake. • In our documentary all of our footage is real and only some parts of it would be archive. Which was filmed ages ago which we used and put into our documentary. • You can tell our footage is real because we interviewed everyone one-to-one. In our documentary we edited out our voices and we put in our questions in text box’s which everyone can clearly see.

  • 3. Technicality Of Realism • The lighting we used is all natural light. As we interviewed more or less everyone outside and only filmed one person inside. • Some of the sounds that you can here in our documentary is real because when interviewing certain people their was music being played in the back ground. • We also edited quite a few songs into our documentary to add to the moment for example at a sad point we played a slow song.

  • 4. Archive Footage/Stills • As mentioned before we had to take some footage from old skating videos because they had some footage in which we couldn’t get ourselves. So we had to ask them if we could use some of their footage which they’d filmed during the years. • This is called Archive Footage. We could obtain this footage on our own so we had to take a few clips off an old friend to add into our documentary.

  • 5. Interviews With ‘Experts’ • We interviewed experts within the sport such as: • the UK champion • Managers • manufacture owners• We asked them all different questions with them afterwards trying to find out more information. Some of them we didn’t agree with so we had a little bit of a debate over it. So when we finished we went back home and looked up if this information to see if it was true or not.

  • 6. Use of Text/Titles • We used Text tiles in our documentary to put the questions onto the screen. • We also used them to show who we were interviewing throughout. • We used them at the beginning and the end of the documentary to show the title and who did the editing and thanking those that helped film this documentary.

  • 7. Sound • We did add music into our documentary so that the viewers wouldn’t get bored when they’re watching the archive footage skating being done during the documentary. This music was played at the beginning and the end of the documentary. • This added and effect because it added a bit of life to the documentary instead of keeping it boring and plain.

  • 8. Set-Ups • For the set up for our documentary we filmed in quite a few locations Which was quite hard as we had to keep traveling to get footage (the furthest place being Eastbourne) • the most common place though was a room in my house as it had the best environment for interviewing.

  • 9. Visual Coding • This visual coding in our documentary would be the skaters wearing their tracksuits with their company on it. • The owners of the brand wearing branded clothing and suits to show importance towards the brand.

Tuesday 16 June 2015

genres of documentary

  •  Performative Mode • The final mode Nichols discusses, is easily confused with the participatory mode, and Nichols remains somewhat nebulous about their distinctions.

  • Example: In the documentary “Touching The Void” when “Joe Simpson” touching the void has rein acted scenes within in this documentary. http://vimeo.com/22437968

  • One person in particular created a few performative documentaries “Marlon Riggs” who created a documentary in 1990 called “Tongues Untied”. In one of his documentaries he said that he used his experience as a gay black dancer in New York City too create this documentary. http://vimeo.com/58572230

  • http://vimeo.com/64378671
 Poetic Documentary: Poetic documentaries, which first appeared in the 1920’s. The poetic mode moved on to organized images of the material world by means of associations and patterns, both in terms of time and space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSSqa9RD3mw



In the poetry Documentary you can see that its all smooth and well, as everything is slowly linked to everything. Their isn't any talking its just quiet and smooth transactions that make it poetic.





Observational Documentary: The first observational Documentary dates back to the 1960's. The films aimed in this specific are are based on immediacy, intimacy, and revelation of the human character in ordinary life situations. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZDxOS0QNPI
















In this Documentary you don't hear any voice overs apart from when you hear someone playing music in the street singing. In this documentary you only really hear the noise of what you would normal hear on a day-to-day basis, such as cars driving. Cars beeping etc.







Expository Documentary: Expository documentaries speak directly to the viewer, often in the tom of authoritative commentary employing voice over, proposing an argument and point of view.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhOy9kJqqks














In this documentary you can hear a voice over talking about the safety around campus of university and how life is. They talk about what it's like and how they've adapted to their new lives.Participatory Documentary: participatory documentaries believe that it is impossible for the act of filmmaking to not alter the events being filmed. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeKmDOthGsU














This documentary talks about the morning of a the life of john. In this documentary they talk about his morning and how he works and what he has to do for a living.






Reflexive Documentary: when the film discusses how they make the movie, as well as the actual film it self. They also interview the directors so that they get in part of it as well.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sviHM5rNZ5A












This documentary is different because it has different scenes some with music playing and some with people talking about what they're doing. Which the title is called 'The Road'. It's about them traveling on the road and where they're traveling to.

news vs doc



News Report Essay:

                     RP: Received Pronunciation accent, this is known as Standard English Language

                     Articulate: This s a person that is able to speak fluently and comprehensively

                     Presenters: Two people (One Male/ One Female)

The news reporters get their information through sources in which they've sent people to do a documentary on, so they can report back with information that is valid and what the people of today want to hear about.

News:

The news crew sent out reporters so they can gather information about what’s going on in that specific area. For example: Scotland want separation from the UK so businesses such as the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBK), and NatWest. Will no longer be used as an English bank as they're Scottish Businesses. So the news crew have sent reporters up to Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland to find out more news about what’s going on.

Documentaries: 

In documentaries you'll get different types of camera shots and also they'll stick to one topic. Documentaries try and link all the small/ big details together. In the News they to small stories and fitting them all into one show with only on or two different types of camera shot.






News:

Different news reports send in different reporters, for example: Sky Sports News will send reporters to football/rugby/basketball/cricket. To get all the news from the games. Other places such as BBC news will send places to Land marks in different countries or to certain cities/towns depending on how big the report is.





















Documentaries: 

Documentaries stick to the same topic throughout, if they go off topic a little bit they'll always find a way to link into the same topic they're meant to be talking about. If you look at David Attenborough for example. He does loads of different types of documentaries and he makes them so unique and interesting because he goes into so much detail that he drags everyone in and they listen to what he has to say about his documentary that he's doing. He doesn't just say random facts that everybody already knows he goes into small detail and researches it as well.











Journalist:

journalist will need to interview eyewitnesses so they can gather more information about what's happened so they can get a better insight to what has been done/ what’s getting done. Gathering information from people around the area is another way of getting news reported, as they may know more information than others that are on the scene.

In Afghanistan there would be a correspondent that is a reporter, commentator, or general speaker, to report back to the UK what’s happening over in Afghanistan.


Documentaries: 

Documentaries will get journalist researching about a certain remote areas in which they can then make a small show to report to us what’s happening and how things have changed other the last few years.







The reporters will need to get a camera angle in which they can get a good few of what’s going on in the background, so it makes more sense to what the journalists are saying. Getting the right view of what’s going on in the background is better for the news team to report as its easier to understand what’s going on.

what is a documentary

What does a documentary try and bring across?:

A documentary tries to bring across a specific topic, that its based an example of this would be David Attenborough. Because he does so many documentaries people are attracted to listen to him because he always talks about the same topic but on different things within the documentary. He does documentaries on:

  • Natural history 
  • National Wildlife
  • The genius of Britain 
  • Natural world
He (David Attenborough) captures all of the small details about each of his subjects as he's passionate about what he does and thats creating documentaries for viewers that want to learn more about certain topics.

This is an image of David Attenborough filming a documentary in the Amazon Rainforest. For his documentary on National Wildlife.






This is another image of David Attenborough doing a documentary on the Natural World.







Both of these documentary's which were both filmed and presented by David Attenborough are very interesting to watch. This is why he's so successful because he digs out all the small details as well as the more interesting details which makes him so unique.

In the link below it shows a David Attenborough Documentary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwAejlfacYs

animation video

legal and ethical

Legal and Ethical

Slander:

Slander is where you verbal criticise  someones character. This is different to Libel because Libel is when someone is criticised through written criticism. This is different because you don't know how someone is actually feeling when you get criticism through writing to someone. When you're saying something to someones face its easier to see where someone is coming from because sits verbal and you can also see their body language.

An example of Libel: Cameron Diaz 

The British Sun newspaper hinted that Cameron Diaz had an affair with Shane Nickerson, a friend. When the article was published, she and Shane Nickerson were in relationships and the hardly recognizable imaged posted with the article caused damage to both relationships, so Cameron Diaz sued for defamation. But no one is sure of the amount of money Diaz was awarded.












Libel:

Libel is when something is written down criticising somebody's character, where as Slander is when you verbal criticise someone. Libel can be used in a newspaper article and criticise them through news.  Slander and Libel can lead to legal cases.

An example of Libel: Keira Knightley 

Keira sued the daily mail for claiming she had a eating disorder and got £3000 given to her for damages that had been caused and gave that £3000 to an eating disorder charity.






Ethics:

Ethics in a documentary has to have a moral to the story and it has to have a meaning. Ethics in a documentary is the heart of the story. For example our documentary which is based on skating which we're trying to reflect the life of a skater showing how and what they do on a day to day basis and how they cope with the finical side of it.

Issues of documentary


Accuracy - In our documentary we made sure that we kept everything natural so that we could show a real representation of a sixth former and how they act. The only thing that we pre prepared the interviewee for was the interviews where we would tell them the questions just before we would turn the cameras back on.

Balance - This is an important point of the documentary because the point is that you see the sixth form through different types of peoples eyes. The balance means that there is an equal argument and an equal opinion of the school. Having a balance in the documentary is imperative because you need to make sure that its not bias and diversity is what would make the documentary interesting.

Impartiallity/ Bias - This is where something is going in favour of what the producer thinks, wants or believes by claiming they're not biased when really they are. The bias within a documentary could be to do with the views that are portrayed by the film maker. If the documentary is based on a subject that could have controversial views then it is important that the film maker is fair and balanced with his ideas. In our documentary we made sure that none of our personal views were implemented, meaning that bias free.

Objectivity - The objectivity of my documentary is finding out how three people react to a situation they may not be comfortable with. We followed three students around so that we could see what their reaction would be, and how they would work with the cameras as well as showing their day to day life.

Subjectivity - Both of the film makers for this documentary were just general people who were in my media class, they weren't really friends with the people being interviewed so it wasn't like they had a preferred student but on a professional level we had to keep a distance to prevent any personal things becoming involved.

Representation - We were trying to show what it was life in the life of a sixth former, how things have changed since the lower school and what they do now their in the sixth form. They represented different types of sixth formers and thats what we were looking for and they really represented that.

Tuesday 9 June 2015

interview questions


What is you favourite interview and why?

        My favourite interview was 'In Town Tonight' the reason for this is this particular interview included an interview with former ss officer Heinz lingo who was Hitler's personal attendant, in my opinion i found this really interesting as seeing an interview with Hitler's right hand man, 'a man who was with him till the end', when watching i found out that he was help captive by the Russians for 10 years and he had arrived in England on the day of this interview. one of the things i found most interesting is that he was the first to see Hitlers dead body. Heinz also said that the Russians never found the body of Hitler and that he believes it is buried in a 'common grave', overall i found this interview really interesting which is why it is my favourite.

what is your least favourite and why?
        When watching this interview i found it really boring as the questions being asked where too vague and in my opinion the the answers that were being given were not satisfying, i also found that the subject that was being discussed was not interesting at all and comparing to the last interview that had someone who was hitlers right hand man being questioned, this interview just did not interest me.

what was the best question asked out of all the interviews and why?
        I found that the best question asked was in the interview 'in town tonight' when he asked Heinz 'were you with hitler all the time' and Heinz replied with 'yes, i was always with him' i think this question is really good as it opens a whole new variety of questions as you now know that he would know all Hitlers movements and also maybe getting facts about Hitler that we didn't already know.
what was the worst question asked out of all the interviews and whys?

Were you conscious of colour discrimination in your own life? This question was brought up in the Martin Luther King interview. The reason  why I like this question was because Martin answered back with "yes I was aware of colour discrimination from an early age". And he went back further into his child hood and answered that question in depth.


The worst question was "to What is oranges a autobiographical". In an interview you don't jump straight into why you've written an autobiography or even ask why you've put this in the autobiography. In an interview I would've asked why did you decide to write this book or why did you decide to become an autobiographer. In my own opinion the interviewee came across as rude and arrogant.


What is the funniest response? What question prompted it?

In my own opinion none of the responses from either interview were funny as all the questions from the Martin Luther King interview were serious questions and went into depth in his responses. and min the Jeanette Winterson interview she just had a straight face and answered then quickly but in depth.


What is the most emotional response? What question prompted it?

"I wasn't allowed to go swimming because there wasn't a pool for us" This was prompted when he was asked about what he did for activities. This is sad because white people had so much more of an opportunity than any black people would. 


Who is your favourite interviewer? Why?

John Freeman was my favourite interviewer because he was so detailed with his questions and he would also question the answers that were given and i think that this shows that he was interested in this influential figure. 


Other interesting things you have found?

         in the art in luther king interview i found how interesting his childhood was and how he treasured everything he had and didn't take anything for granted 































Wednesday 3 June 2015

Visual Effects Editing Guide

Visual Effects Editing Guide






For our animation we had to do stop-motion animation meaning we had to take a single camera shots and then move the objects slightly.

Editing: Editing requires careful analysis and a good mindset which will allow you to edit quicker, so you can make your animations flow. The animation we've done is simple to edit as all we have to do is place the pictures that we've taken and cut them down a little bit so we could make our animation the length it has to be (30 seconds) this is because we had to make our animation the same length as every other animation advert.

an example of stop animation is of the image below:














Sound: Editing sound into an animation as simple as you had to get the sound off of youtube and get the html code which we then placed onto the editing software. We then cut down the sound down to the 30 seconds that we wanted to be put into our animation. After we had cut it down we then overlapped it onto the animation to finish our final piece.

an example of editing sound into an animation is in the image below: