There is another very long post here worth checking out; in time I'll update everything here, but for now here's a summative overview (with a nod to Chris Creber, who I've adapted some of this from).
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| FilmSound's guide has lots of quotes from academic writers |
Not all of these are tech based, but most are, a good indication of how transformative new media technologies have been - and certainly not always for the better.The 'Music Video Day' concept carries an intentionally high risk of failure at the heart of it. If you're not organised enough, don't work well as a team, don't give clear directions to your cast, underestimate the setup time for each shoot and for each shot, don't quickly move to secure costumes and props, don't book rooms in time ... spectacular, very public failure is a very real possibility.
The flipside to failure is what you can learn from it - and the inspiration and impetus you might gain as you stride on to your main productions. When we had filmmaker Coz Greenop in recently, a crucial part of his story, his ultimate pathway to success in Cannes, was his 'failure' here with his GCSEs.
Not getting the required grades to enter 6th form, he went elsewhere, excelled in Media Studies and set out on the path that led to launching a successful business, a globally distributed debut feature film and getting hired to helm a £4m second feature.
I'm thinking about this not just in the context of the exhausting past week with effectively two videos and a feVocalist shot, but from reading an article about 90s (and very much ongoing) Northern Irish pop rockers Ash (Girl From Mars...) in the summer 2015 edition of Classic Rock magazine, an airport purchase en route to Luxembourg which I'm only now getting round to reading a week later.
Ash had a huge hit with their debut album, but their darker follow-up tanked. That happened while they were still teenagers, quite remarkably. Vocalist Tim Wheeler would consequently languish in a New York hotel, self-harming, before bouncing back with an even bigger third album (having quelled the bipolar disorder that led to such self-destructiveness).
I thought this was a great quote:
We also had significant failures... TBC
ADDITIONS, MAY 2015: I've added further sample answers, the ones provided by OCR, at the end of the post.Therefore, in this post you'll find (usually including A-grade) scripts from: January and June 2010; January 2011; June 2013; June 2014.
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| A reminder of how the paper looks [click to enlarge] - it continues on to a 4th page. You answer both Section A Qs (30 mins, 25% each) and ONE of the two questions from the appropriate Section B category [Media Regulation] (1 hour, 50%) |
The Section A questions follow; scroll further down to see the past Media regulation Qs too
This is a simple but highly useful audience/narrative theory, which also reflects standard marketing thinking (question 1 a potential distributor will ask of a film production: who's the star?). Richard Dyer's (Amazon book list) landmark 1979 book Stars argued that the star system was central to how the media operate, and how we read texts. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (his 1986 follow-up) used case studies of Hollywood icons from the golden era, examining 'the ways in which audiences simultaneously construct and consume a particular star's persona' (Wiki). You might see parallels here with much later web 2.0 theorists such as Gauntlett and Gillmor and such declarations as "the former audience" (see this post for associated material on this).It goes deeper still though, into the weird contract we draw up with ourselves when we watch film. “Tom Cruise is doing that for real!” we exclaim to ourselves as we see Tom Cruise doing some casual rappelling. “Whoa!” We never truly watch blockbusters as pure narratives, but instead are constantly aware in their place in a wider ecosystem of celebrity, in which Cruise also has divorces and jumps on sofas and twinkles next to fans. We’re in awe of Cruise-as-Hunt rather than Hunt himself. (Tom Cruise, Christopher Nolan, and the new anti-CGI snobbery)The excellent MediaKnowItAll site has a useful entry on this, considering not just the film angle but also how the music industry inculcates this approach to its modes of operation:
A star is an image not a real person that is constructed (as any other aspect of fiction is) out of a range of materials (eg advertising, magazines etc as well as films [music]).Their entry is copied in below, but is best appreciated on their site, where you can also click around and find further useful material.
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| Is Jenkins too utopian, optimistic? [image source] |
People who use Google are the product
Every time you go to a party and take a picture and post that picture to Facebook, you’re being a rat. You’re being a narc.
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| A popular meme, Google is/Dr Evil [image source] |
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| Austerlitz on the Weezer vid |
Postmodernist French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. Where Plato saw two steps of reproduction—faithful and intentionally distorted (simulacrum)—Baudrillard sees four: (1) basic reflection of reality; (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretence of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever".[7] In Baudrillard's concept, like Nietzsche's, simulacra are perceived as negative, but another modern philosopher who addressed the topic, Gilles Deleuze, takes a different view, seeing simulacra as the avenue by which an accepted ideal or "privileged position" could be "challenged and overturned".[8] Deleuze defines simulacra as "those systems in which different relates to different by means of difference itself. What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance".[9]
"Because people are inherently social," the Harvard business professor Anita Elberse points out, "they generally find value in reading the same books and watching the same television shows and movies that others do." What's more, and equally understandably: "People have a taste for winners: if, say, a book is popular and has been widely discussed in the media, consumers have more reason to read it." [from Guardian review]
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| Scroll down for sample quotes and review snippets, such as Bloomberg's fairly critical view |
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| Use the look inside feature for a preview |
"Because people are inherently social," the Harvard business professor Anita Elberse points out, "they generally find value in reading the same books and watching the same television shows and movies that others do." What's more, and equally understandably: "People have a taste for winners: if, say, a book is popular and has been widely discussed in the media, consumers have more reason to read it." [Guardian review]
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| The UK poster |
[Sid and Nancy] had a preview in LA - one of those events where the invited audience fills out forms and answers a studio's questions. these were some of the responses from the preview audience:
I feel this film was totally evil.
The following is extracted from the brilliant Indie auteur Alex Cox's X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker (Soft Skull Press: Brooklyn, 2008). Writing about production of his debut feature, Repo Man (an archetypal cult movie - not to be confused with the Jude Law vehicle Repo Men), he recalls being challenged over portraying a key female character as a serial adultress. He thought his script was spot on, but then again ......I am a white male leftist, already guiltyu of the sins of sexism, racism, and generally wishy-washy-ism. As the days went by, I reflected regretfully on the adolescent sexism of my script. ... I [removed a] sex scene. Still I felt guilty: Debbie was still a poor excuse for a character ... I rewrote the liquor-store scene [giving her a heroic send-off].Have you reflected on the role collaboration played in your creativity? Remember, seeking out (at minimum) audience feedback implies that the audience/producer divide is questionable too! (cf. Gillmor's "the former audience" concept (2004))
This was a good idea. ... By alerting the director, the TV coordinator and casting director improved the picture. Could a film made by a group - where all take the role of a director, say - reach a decision like this? Presumably it could. Who knows? Maybe this interaction points to a more collaborative system, in which a group might make decisions more quickly.
(emphasis added; p. 59)
Research suggests that advertising campaigns for a female audience are dominated by heterosexual Caucasian size 0 to 2 models. This is a fact, despite what we might think or want, in a multicultural, complex world. Increasingly, accusations have been made by the likes of Naomi Campbell and Dame Vivienne Westwood that representations of women in advertising are too white and nearly exclusively under size 6.
Baudrillard would love the version of America that Rockstar has constructed, a hyper-real theme park of violence, corruption and excitement. But you don't have to think about it. You don't have to think at all. GTA V might be about friendship or ambition or regret, but it also looks to be a game in which you can blast through the streets in a truck, boot filled with guns; a game where you can pilot a jet fighter over the Californian landscape; where you can bike down a mountain or jet ski into that fluorescent sunset.If YOU come across further examples of real-world usage of concepts we use in Media, please pass on a link/quote!
In a chaotic and crumbling former public washhouse in a rundown district of northern Paris, Inna Shevchenko was explaining how a large leather punchbag hanging from the rafters might be used by the foot soldiers of a new generation of feminists.
As she prepared to welcome recruits to the Ukrainian-based feminist group Femen's first "international training camp", it was clear that the instruction would not be all ideological. The talk was of "war", "soldiers", "terrorism" and "enemies". Was it not curious, one French journalist asked, that Inna and her warriors had adopted the language of combat, traditionally a male domain, to describe their mission?
Was it not also inconsistent, another asked, that the new feminists were using nakedness to rail against female exploitation? In a week that had seen the banning of photographs of a topless Duchess of Cambridge, it was certainly topical.
"Ah, but we have a different idea; we are talking about peaceful war, peaceful terrorism," Inna said. "We are taking off our clothes so people can see that we have no weapons except our bodies. It's a powerful way to fight in a man's world. We live with men's domination and this is the only way to provoke them, the only way to get attention.
"We don't hide our bodies, we don't hide our faces, we confront our enemies face to face. We look them in the eyes and we have to be well prepared physically for that."
There was, she explained patiently, no contradiction in going topless or naked to protest against what they view as the three main evils of a global "patriarchal society": sexual exploitation, dictatorship and religion. Protesting naked, as Femen's slogans insist, is liberté, a reappropriation of their own bodies as opposed to pornography or snatched photographs which are exploitation.
On a less intellectual level, taking their clothes off ensures a lot of publicity.
"It's absolutely true that there is practically no market research done in terms of readers," says the Carnegie medal-winning British children's author Melvin Burgess. "I'd be fascinated to see how people read my books, who's reading them, when they're reading them."
But there "is a danger", says Burgess, that "you just start responding all the time" to what readers want. "Storytelling isn't interactive, really – you are taking the lead. So I'd love to know [how people are reading my books], but I wouldn't necessarily take any account of it."
Award-winning author China Mi̩ville feels similarly. "I hope it wouldn't change how I wrote, but conversely I do wonder if getting specifically worked up about this is simply a kind of neophobia, because if it did change how you wrote, wouldn't it just be a new variant of what authors have done for centuries, which is writing to a market?" he says. "In other words, that writing to algorithm, while I'm certainly no fan, is just writing to what one believes readers want Рno more or less infra dig than writing in response to demands from the marketing department, or in response to one's analysis on perusing the bestseller list, or trying to second-guess what makes a best seller. A bit more micro-level in its analysis, but not qualitatively 'worse' or 'better'."
The "one very different thing" here, says Miéville, is reader privacy, which he calls "a real issue". Burgess agrees. "I'd love to know what my readers are up to but I don't like the way social media do it all behind your back," he says.
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/04/big-ereader-is-watching-you
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