AS Coursework and Case Studies material

First and foremost, here’s the checklist for what should be on your blog and how it should be ordered. Don’t forget that it’s dead easy to change the order of your posts, simply adjust the dates for each of your posts, and then your blog host will automatically rejiggle them: Blog checklist

Here’s the handouts from the past few weeks to help you guide through your research for your chosen film:

Box office Mojo and imdb

The Numbers

Here’s the answers as well to check your responses and also help you if you’re stuck navigating through the sites: Box office Mojo and imdb (answers) and The Numbers (answers)

Finally, here’s the PowerPoint on the British Film Industry – BFI and details about how the industry is funded: British Film funding

A2: Coursework deadline 7th April

Hi folks, just a reminder that your deadline for ALL of your coursework is Thursday 7th April.

Your blog must include all of the completed versions of your practical work, namely the completed radio drama, poster and features listing. Please make sure your printed materials are posted in as high a quality as possible.

For your ease, the following guides need to be used as a checklist prior to your deadline:

Research and Planning

Developing your script

Ancillary task 1

Ancillary task 2

Evaluation guidelines

Your indispensable guide to Soundtrack Pro

AS: Avatar presentation

Here’s last week’s Avatar presentaion to give you a flavour of what you need to research for your case study.

Here’s an electronic version of the guide to this section of the exam: G322 Guide

AS TV Drama Revision Guide and G322 stuff

Here’s an electronic version of the revision guide for TV Drama as promised: AS Revision Guide

For those who missed it, here’s the brief for what we will be working on for the next few weeks in relation to the case studies you need to produce for the second part of the exam. Note that you will not be tested on it in next weeks mock: G322 Guide

Finally, if you weren’t in lesson this week, please use this handout to get your head around the first two websites (www.boxofficemojo.com and www.imdb.com) that you will need to look at in order to research your film

A bit of light relief (with an educational slant…)

With coursework deadlines fast approaching and mock exams just around the corner I thought you may enjoy sitting back and having a laugh at a new viral video doing the rounds.

This is Rebecca Black, the new female equivalent of Justin Bieber who has racked up a rather impressive 6 million youtube hits (update as at 18th March – we’re now up to over 16(!!) million hits) since the videos release on, ahem, Friday last week.

The video has already been parodied, covered and given the dubstep treatment. Some are calling the track the “worst song in music history,” hardly surprising when it features lyrics such as “Yesterday was Thursday/Today it is Friday/Tomorrow is Saturday/And Sunday comes afterwards.” Thanks for that Rebecca. Was always slightly confused about the positioning of Thursday in the week. Nice to have that cleared up.

Others meanwhile, believe the song could be a postmodern take on everything that’s bad about pop music today, with Rolling Stone calling the track “uniquely compelling.”

Whatever the intention, job done. Black’s got our attention and the response to the follow up single and album campaign should make for more fascinating viewing.

A2: Advertising in the on-line age

BT once again demonstrate the effectiveness of utilising cross-convergence for their ever popular Adam and Jane campaign.

In the latest TV ad, Jane went into early labour, bringing her wedding preparations to a halt. BT has asked consumers to help finalise her wedding plans by choosing the dress, car and first dance through a Facebook poll.

In addition, Absolute Radio listeners can sign up at Absoluteradio.co.uk for the opportunity to get married live on air. Three couples will be chosen at random to compete in a ‘Mr & Mrs’ style competition and the chance to win the ceremony. On 15 April, two weeks before the Royal Wedding, the entire Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show, featuring the winning couple’s wedding with O’Connell as a witness, will broadcast from London Zoo in front of an audience of giraffes, rhinos and meerkats.

Listeners can also click through to Facebook from Absolute Radio’s site to choose Adam and Jane’s first dance. The options are ‘True’ by Spandau Ballet, ‘Lovin’ you’ by Minnie Riperton and EMF’s ‘Unbelievable’.

David James, marketing director at BT, said: “We want to give two lucky listeners a day they’ll never forget – and getting married live on national radio is certainly unforgettable. Absolute Radio has come up with an innovative, engaging way for us to promote the UK’s second biggest wedding event of the year.”

It is the second time BT has asked the public to determine the lives of Adam and Jane. Last August 1.6 million people took part in a Facebook vote which decided Jane was pregnant.

A2: Citizen journalism

Quick post, quick question: how has Citizen Journalism increased the audience impact of last week’s earthquake and Tsunami in Japan?

The following post that went live on Friday just after the earthquake hit helps illustrate the role Facebook and  Twitter (which saw 1,200 tweets a minute sent from Tokyo in the hour after the earthquake struck, according to Tweet-o-Meter) played in sharing vital information:

It seems the internet is working a lot better than the phone lines. Friends and family are already posting short messages saying that they’re fine, not to worry.

Ten years ago, we would still have been concerned. I recall that during the San Francisco earthquake of 1989, it took me two days to reach a friend out there, two days during which I was convinced that she was buried under a motorway somewhere.

Those who mock the social networking phenomenon as a new way for the world to share what it had for breakfast should take note.  Twitter, Facebook, Mixi and all the others are just a way of sharing information, and in the midst of a disaster information is what we all crave.

A2 Coursework

The pressure is on, now is the ideal time to make sure that your blog is fully up to date in order to avoid a panic in the last week of term. Here’s the handouts that you will need to cross check to make sure that you’ve covered everything:

Poster task guidelines

Developing your script

Your indispensible guide to Soundtrack Pro

Please use and abuse these handouts, especially the guide to soundtrack pro, bits of which you can steal, rewrite in your own words and post to your blogs.

With regards to the analysis of radio drama’s that you have listed to, below is a great example from Mark Hannigan. Setting it out in this way will make sure that you have covered all basis, just make sure to relate narrative theory (Todorov, Propp, Strauss) to the drama. Clips from youtube would also help to illustrate your understanding:

In 1938 Orson Welles broadcast his unfathomably hit radio drama, ‘War of the Worlds’, perhaps one of the most pivotal sci fi radio dramas of the twentieth century.
The narrative of WotW presented itself in a very controversial way. Mimicking that of news broadcasting and also styles of evening entertainment shows, it perpetuated the false reality of the radio drama with such finesse that if you were to listen to it without knowing what you were listening to, you have presumed this was reality. A sad fact of truth for some towns in the bible belt of the US.

Welles had planned this radio drama with such precision to elude all ideas of the world outside of the piece, as that became the only thing you focus on. With the only form of immediate news-baring coming from radio, Welles engineered his drama with perfection to play on this; he even postponed breaking the verisimilitude by pausing for a break ten minutes later to aid his cause. This in turn helped cumulate the rising terror associated with this famous radio drama.

The radio drama itself is split into two parts, the first a vibrant and powerful piece of warped reality, with very little to prove otherwise, the second an obvious and lacking narrative that follows a characters journey into finding that the aliens have died from bacterial viruses. The second half appears both anti-climactic and highly lacking in comparison to the first, as the illusion is not only shattered but appears to have been entirely ignored.

Cultural Codes
Welles pays high attention to speech within his radio drama, right down to implementing false stuttering and faked false starts. This also includes attention to detail when covering regional accent and dialect, pitch and tension to alleviate empathic/synthetic stress, technical jargon from scientists and use of vocal bass to ensure the stereotype of authoritatian figures.

For example, the radio presenter adheres to this, his faint new york accent blanched over by American RP, this tentatively is played with a numbness and perpetual calmness to fear. His interviewed subject a simple New Yorker had a restricted vocabulary and slow pace of response.

Symbolic Codes
The Rhythm of this piece is key to the tension being built, in the beginning we have the illusion of an evening entertainment show broken into by “emergency broadcasts”. These broadcasts break the tinny music (signature to live radio of that time), to allow a soft, monotonous, slow paced speech, only to return to the music that has been skipped forward somewhat to create the illusion of the pace moving faster than it actually was. Yet for the majority of the piece ‘real time’ is used to perpetuate the realism being created.

Technical Codes
This piece has been intricately woven with sound effects to maintain realism. The attention to detail is astounding, from the faint clock ticking in the background of the observatory to the interviewed New Yorker standing “accidentally” too far from the microphone. This not only aids in setting the scene and atmosphere but makes you feel like a fly on the wall to something that is “really going on”.

Silence was more heavily used toward the end of this radio drama as a scene changer or time passer, yet it was also included in the first half to represent death, silence. Likewise with music, discounting the opening sequence of a variety show, it was mainly used in the second half to set the tone of the piece.

AS: Pics for the audience question

Amazing.

http://www.coleofduty.com/

A2: The citizen journalism debate

The recent uprisings in the Middle East has brought out some quite opposing debates about the concept of citizen journalism. On the one hand, you have writers such as Emily Bell who wrote in The Guardian that:

“It is impossible to imagine how a story as vivid as that of Mubarak’s fall in Egypt could have been told without the reporting of Al-Jazeera ….and what local bloggers and citizens were tweeting or posting through social media links.” (read full article here).

Whilst on the other side of the fence, writing for the Global Journalist, Michael J. Jordan negates the use of the Citizen Journalism term:

“Who exactly were these men storming Tahrir Square on horse and camelback? Anyone can tweet a message about horsemen trampling protesters, but it’s the nosy journalists who try to trace them to Mubarak’s secret police.” (read full article here)

It’s an interesting debate, and one that would be well worthy of exploring for any of the digital media related questions.

Murdoch buys BSkyB

Following yesterday’s announcement that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has offered to sell off the loss-making Sky News, the Government today confirmed that Murdoch’s bid for full ownership of BSkyB has been given the green light.

As you are aware, Murdoch currently owns only a portion of BSkyB which means that he is unable to control the content of any of their programming. Critics of the bid believed that the Sky News Network could become a platform for the media giant to influence the public to vote in the conservatives for example, or buy more copies of films released on his 20th Century Fox label. The key word here is impartiality, and ultimately, Sky News’s impartiality would have been seriously compromised should Murdoch have won the bid without selling the news arm first.

Check out this link to hear some media buffs chatting through the news. Definitely worth a listen – if you are able to discuss the media like that, you’ll be well on your way to an A* grade.