School is a major institution, as is the home, they both contain a whole set of rules and codes which 'constrain and control' our lives. In Media Studies, we are most concerned with the institutions responsible for producing media texts.
The institutions concerned with media are usually big companies that would own lots of other smaller companies, which are usually used to influence their ideas and rules into the other companies. The institutions are very big and have global patterns of ownership.
This biggest example of a media institution is The Disney Corporation, owning many companies such as Walt Disney Motion Pictures, Walt Disney Records, Walt Disney Studios, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, Walt Disney Pictures, Disney Consumer Products, Disney Store, Disney cruise lines. They also own a variation of television channels, including their own entire branch such as the Disney Channel, ABC, ESPN, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel and even 25% of GMTV.
Many people do not know that Disney own so much, one of the reasons why Disney does not make it so obvious that they own all of these because people might start to dislike Disney because they control a lot of the media, but by owning many of the companies as an institution it can be biased. Disney is expected to promote family values and they make all of their companies do this, even if the viewers or customers are not aware of this.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Film opening
Back to the Future was was distributed by Universal Pictures in 1985, executive producer Steven Spielberg and director Robert Zemeckis brought us this comedy-adventure featuring a cast of then largely unknown actors such as Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd and Crispin Glover and a plot involving time travel. Written by Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale Back to the Future has become one of the most popular and successful film trilogies ever created.
The opening sequence of this film is an unusual one as it does not the introduce the character to things such as the plot and location to the film, this is used as an advantage because the way the film does this is makes us, the audience want to carry on watching because it intrigues us and we want to find out more.
The film begins with some credits, details if the cast and crew then the title of this film appears on the centre of the screen in large, bold, futuristic font, whilst this information is appearing on screen there is a diagetic sound if clocks ticking, the first shot of the actual film is a close up of a clock and then there is a reverse zoom and the camera is tracking to reveal loads more clocks within the same room, all different types but all reading the same time, this is very unusual, it makes you wonder why there are so many clocks within the room and who the clocks belong to, it makes you want to carry on watching because it is so unusual you want to find out more about it. The camera carries on tracking and takes the focus off of the clocks and onto two newspaper articles that are framed on the wall, the main headlines of these are ‘Brown mansion destroyed’ and ‘Brown estate sold to developers – bankrupt inventor sells’ this reveals a bit more to the viewer without making it too obvious. The camera then tracks some more to reveal some framed photographs of some famous inventors and you then see a bed with rubbish on it and around, all of this gives clues out to the viewer to what kind of person lives here, the diagetic sound of the clocks ticking carries on throughout the whole of this sequence.
The radio next to the bed that has been programmed to come on does as if it was an alarm to wake somebody up, but we have established that there is nobody there to wake up, the person talking on the radio reveals what year we are in, which is in fact 1985, then the television comes on and it is the news that is showing, there is a main headline about plutonium has been stolen, we assume that this is some vital information because otherwise they would not have bothered to tell us it.
The camera then tracks to show a close up of an invention that makes coffee, toast and feeds the dog, the camera tracks to show all of this as it is happening and at the end shows a close up of a dog’s bowl that has the name Einstein on the front.
The front door then opens and it is not until 2minutes 50seconds that the first piece of dialogue is said, a male character says “hey doc?” not much of this character is revealed as you only see the characters lower legs from the knee down, we can assume that the character is a male in his teens because he is carrying a skateboard and a school bag and he is wearing Nike trainers. We see the character walking around the house but still we only see the characters lower half of the legs, it is not until 4minutes into the film that the characters face is eventually revealed, who is one of the main characters in the film, Marty McFly who is played by Michael J. Fox.
The opening of this film does not reveal too much about the film which makes the character want to carry on watching to find out what the plot is about. You do not know much about the characters within the film and you still do not find out who the house belongs to. The unusualness of the opening sequence is what makes you want to watch more.
The opening sequence of this film is an unusual one as it does not the introduce the character to things such as the plot and location to the film, this is used as an advantage because the way the film does this is makes us, the audience want to carry on watching because it intrigues us and we want to find out more.
The film begins with some credits, details if the cast and crew then the title of this film appears on the centre of the screen in large, bold, futuristic font, whilst this information is appearing on screen there is a diagetic sound if clocks ticking, the first shot of the actual film is a close up of a clock and then there is a reverse zoom and the camera is tracking to reveal loads more clocks within the same room, all different types but all reading the same time, this is very unusual, it makes you wonder why there are so many clocks within the room and who the clocks belong to, it makes you want to carry on watching because it is so unusual you want to find out more about it. The camera carries on tracking and takes the focus off of the clocks and onto two newspaper articles that are framed on the wall, the main headlines of these are ‘Brown mansion destroyed’ and ‘Brown estate sold to developers – bankrupt inventor sells’ this reveals a bit more to the viewer without making it too obvious. The camera then tracks some more to reveal some framed photographs of some famous inventors and you then see a bed with rubbish on it and around, all of this gives clues out to the viewer to what kind of person lives here, the diagetic sound of the clocks ticking carries on throughout the whole of this sequence.
The radio next to the bed that has been programmed to come on does as if it was an alarm to wake somebody up, but we have established that there is nobody there to wake up, the person talking on the radio reveals what year we are in, which is in fact 1985, then the television comes on and it is the news that is showing, there is a main headline about plutonium has been stolen, we assume that this is some vital information because otherwise they would not have bothered to tell us it.
The camera then tracks to show a close up of an invention that makes coffee, toast and feeds the dog, the camera tracks to show all of this as it is happening and at the end shows a close up of a dog’s bowl that has the name Einstein on the front.
The front door then opens and it is not until 2minutes 50seconds that the first piece of dialogue is said, a male character says “hey doc?” not much of this character is revealed as you only see the characters lower legs from the knee down, we can assume that the character is a male in his teens because he is carrying a skateboard and a school bag and he is wearing Nike trainers. We see the character walking around the house but still we only see the characters lower half of the legs, it is not until 4minutes into the film that the characters face is eventually revealed, who is one of the main characters in the film, Marty McFly who is played by Michael J. Fox.
The opening of this film does not reveal too much about the film which makes the character want to carry on watching to find out what the plot is about. You do not know much about the characters within the film and you still do not find out who the house belongs to. The unusualness of the opening sequence is what makes you want to watch more.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Evaluation - Preliminary task
When planning our preliminary task we had to produce a small piece of film which consisted of a character opening a door, walking across a room and exchanging some sentences of conversation.
We followed the three continuity principle actions which were match on match action, shot reverse shot and the 180 degree rule.
We began the task by creating a story board of how we wanted our preliminary exercise to be, we planned to set our short film in the toilets. The story board consisted of the speech that the two characters were going to say, what each scene was going to consist of and also what camera shots we were going to use. We knew we had to include match on action, shot reverse shot as well as keep to the 180 degree rule. However we also included a point of view shot, side shot, bird’s eye view and a close up, we had to film our shot reverse shot twice so that we could get it from both character perspective. In our story board we decided that Amy would be a bully and Saffron the victim, the scenario would be that Saffron owed Amy some money and she was aggressively asking for it back.
When filming our preliminary task we found that we had no problems and that we also found it relatively easy to film and we completed filming it quite quickly. We found that the problems did occur when we attempted to upload our film from the camera to the laptop. We attempted to change everything from the video camera to the battery charger when we eventually found out that it was the laptop that was faulty, so we changed are laptop and found that our video uploaded virtually straight away. We found that the editing of the film went really well and was completed quite quickly as we found that there was not much to do a part from shorten the length of frames and delete a few clips we did not need or could not use, but when watching the film back we found that we had made two continuity mistakes, one was where of the characters had moved suddenly from one place to another and had slightly changed positions, we tried to cover up these mistakes by using different editing techniques, on the first we used a fade transition to try to make the continuity mistake less obvious to the audience watching and for the second we attempted to use a close up to try and draw out the attention of the mistake by doing this we found that our only problem with this was that the transitions looked a bit out of place when we played back our film. We also added some music at the end of our film and some text and transitions, we did this to try and make it look more professional.
Overall I was quite pleased with the turnout of our finished film clip for our preliminary task. I felt that everything went well and the finished film ran quite smoothly and the continuity mistakes that we made were not as obvious as they were before. I thought that this was a good first attempt at making a short film.
We followed the three continuity principle actions which were match on match action, shot reverse shot and the 180 degree rule.
We began the task by creating a story board of how we wanted our preliminary exercise to be, we planned to set our short film in the toilets. The story board consisted of the speech that the two characters were going to say, what each scene was going to consist of and also what camera shots we were going to use. We knew we had to include match on action, shot reverse shot as well as keep to the 180 degree rule. However we also included a point of view shot, side shot, bird’s eye view and a close up, we had to film our shot reverse shot twice so that we could get it from both character perspective. In our story board we decided that Amy would be a bully and Saffron the victim, the scenario would be that Saffron owed Amy some money and she was aggressively asking for it back.
When filming our preliminary task we found that we had no problems and that we also found it relatively easy to film and we completed filming it quite quickly. We found that the problems did occur when we attempted to upload our film from the camera to the laptop. We attempted to change everything from the video camera to the battery charger when we eventually found out that it was the laptop that was faulty, so we changed are laptop and found that our video uploaded virtually straight away. We found that the editing of the film went really well and was completed quite quickly as we found that there was not much to do a part from shorten the length of frames and delete a few clips we did not need or could not use, but when watching the film back we found that we had made two continuity mistakes, one was where of the characters had moved suddenly from one place to another and had slightly changed positions, we tried to cover up these mistakes by using different editing techniques, on the first we used a fade transition to try to make the continuity mistake less obvious to the audience watching and for the second we attempted to use a close up to try and draw out the attention of the mistake by doing this we found that our only problem with this was that the transitions looked a bit out of place when we played back our film. We also added some music at the end of our film and some text and transitions, we did this to try and make it look more professional.
Overall I was quite pleased with the turnout of our finished film clip for our preliminary task. I felt that everything went well and the finished film ran quite smoothly and the continuity mistakes that we made were not as obvious as they were before. I thought that this was a good first attempt at making a short film.
Why i chose AS Media studies
I chose to take Media studies because i thought it would be a fun an interesting subject to study. I also thought it would interesting to study the different types of medias in detail.
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