A good model for discussing interrelationships between media and society
http://www.media-visions.com/communication.html
also a very useful vocab site
Kolker, Robert. "Glossary." Film, Form, and Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2002.http://journalism.wlu.edu/J338/vocabulary.htm (film vocab)
Monday, September 19, 2005
websites with info on sound and light
Sound http://www.tpt.org/newtons/12/movisnd.html
Lighting Is All About Chiaroscuro by Walter Graff http://www.film-and-video.com/broadcastvideoexamples-Chiaroscuro.html 19/09/05
Lighting Is All About Chiaroscuro by Walter Graff http://www.film-and-video.com/broadcastvideoexamples-Chiaroscuro.html 19/09/05
Friday, September 16, 2005
Analysing Media Messages
This is a great set of questions for you to think about when analysing any media message:
*who created this media message and why are they sending it?
Who owns and profits from this message (stakeholders)?
What techniques are used to attract and maintain viewer/reader attention?
What lifestyles, values and viewpoints are represented in this message?
What is left out of this message and why?
What are some ways that different people (e.g. rich/poor) might interpret this message?
Best of luck with the rest of the exams. Don't hesitate to email me if there is something specific you need with your production or any other standards.
Pay your money to the school office for the production day - we must have numbers in order to go ahead.
*who created this media message and why are they sending it?
Who owns and profits from this message (stakeholders)?
What techniques are used to attract and maintain viewer/reader attention?
What lifestyles, values and viewpoints are represented in this message?
What is left out of this message and why?
What are some ways that different people (e.g. rich/poor) might interpret this message?
Best of luck with the rest of the exams. Don't hesitate to email me if there is something specific you need with your production or any other standards.
Pay your money to the school office for the production day - we must have numbers in order to go ahead.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Representation of Teens
Useful revision notes and activities for understanding of gender representation
http://www.saskschools.ca/curr_content/media20revision/unit1/lesson8/lesson8.html
http://www.saskschools.ca/curr_content/media20revision/unit1/lesson8/lesson8.html
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Essay Writing
For the external practice exam the question asks you to -
Analyse and evaluate the interrelationship between society and Reality Television.
As well as your notes on Reality television from the internally assessed question I strongly recommend that you check out the advice on this site.
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/argument.html
Analyse and evaluate the interrelationship between society and Reality Television.
As well as your notes on Reality television from the internally assessed question I strongly recommend that you check out the advice on this site.
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/argument.html
Thought you might enjoy this
You are a member of a film production studio that has recently been hired to produce a documentary about the Gilded Age of American history.
American novelist Mark Twain coined the term "Gilded Age" in an effort to illustrate the outwardly showy, but inwardly corrupt nature of American society during the industrialization of the late 1800's.
The documentary will need to highlight the many aspects of society that made up the Gilded Age, including: technological innovation, big business, urbanization, immigration, and reaction to the period.
http://www.oswego.org/staff/tcaswell/wq/gildedage/student.htm
American novelist Mark Twain coined the term "Gilded Age" in an effort to illustrate the outwardly showy, but inwardly corrupt nature of American society during the industrialization of the late 1800's.
The documentary will need to highlight the many aspects of society that made up the Gilded Age, including: technological innovation, big business, urbanization, immigration, and reaction to the period.
http://www.oswego.org/staff/tcaswell/wq/gildedage/student.htm
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Part 3
So, for example, Robert Flaherty’s pioneering 1922 film Nanook of The North features scenes in which the Inuit family, which is its focus, hunt and catch a walrus. To catch this ‘authentic’ tradition, Flaherty actually required the family to re-enact a practice that had long gone out of fashion. In the same film, scenes shot inside an igloo necessitated the building of a special set with a wall removed so that the cumbersome camera equipment could be accommodated.
Another Flaherty film called Man of Aran (1934), told the tale of people living off the coast of Ireland and showed a shark hunt. Again, this was a practice that was almost extinct and an expert had to be brought in to teach the locals how to do it, before the cameras started rolling.
Another early documentary-maker was called John Grierson and sequences from his 1929 film Drifters about the herring fishermen of the North Sea required the redesign of the herring boat cabins, again so the bulky cameras of the period could be accommodated. So the search for truth has often involved documentary-makers in subterfuge and re-enactment.
There is no one way of telling a story using documentary, but there are different ways of addressing the subject matter and the audience. As has already been addressed, documentaries have often attempted to obscure the fact that they are highly constructed products, resulting from the rendering down of hours of film and the employment of careful film and sound editing. Think of specific examples you are familiar with where this occurs.
Expository
A very traditional form of documentary in which an unseen speaker performs a voiced-over commentary that literally explains the images that we are seeing. It is the form often associated with wild life or historic documentaries, in which the viewer might feel in need of information about what they are seeing. The audience is not particularly ‘empowered’ by this kind of approach, finding itself in a subordinate role listening to the version of events that the filmmakers choose to prioritise.
Observational
This is the mode associated with ‘fly-on-the-wall’ type documentaries. They appear to have been filmed in ‘real time’, as if the camera has happened upon events while those involved are seemingly unaware of the filming going on. The filmmakers correspondingly attempt not to interfere in what is underway. We do not hear their questions and we do not see them. There is no voice-over telling us what to think or what conclusions we should draw.
Interactive
Many documentaries feature a certain amount of interactive mode filmmaking. Such sequences will involve those being filmed responding to questions asked of them. In such interviews, the questions of the filmmaker may be left in or edited out. This may be a way that individuals in a film can make their own case, but it is also a mode that can act to undermine the interviewees, making them look foolish or deluded. Their interpretation of events or personal account may be rendered to seem trustworthy or untrustworthy depending on the context of surrounding shots or the nature of the statements being made in their own right.
Reflective
This is a style that is usually associated with more experimental documentaries, ones in which the filmmakers are interested as much in the process of making a film, of how reality can be constructed, as the actual content. At the simplest level the film may make no attempt to hide aspects of its construction - showing us the camera people for example.
Notes from
http://www.filmeducation.org/secondary/documentary2004/
Another Flaherty film called Man of Aran (1934), told the tale of people living off the coast of Ireland and showed a shark hunt. Again, this was a practice that was almost extinct and an expert had to be brought in to teach the locals how to do it, before the cameras started rolling.
Another early documentary-maker was called John Grierson and sequences from his 1929 film Drifters about the herring fishermen of the North Sea required the redesign of the herring boat cabins, again so the bulky cameras of the period could be accommodated. So the search for truth has often involved documentary-makers in subterfuge and re-enactment.
There is no one way of telling a story using documentary, but there are different ways of addressing the subject matter and the audience. As has already been addressed, documentaries have often attempted to obscure the fact that they are highly constructed products, resulting from the rendering down of hours of film and the employment of careful film and sound editing. Think of specific examples you are familiar with where this occurs.
Expository
A very traditional form of documentary in which an unseen speaker performs a voiced-over commentary that literally explains the images that we are seeing. It is the form often associated with wild life or historic documentaries, in which the viewer might feel in need of information about what they are seeing. The audience is not particularly ‘empowered’ by this kind of approach, finding itself in a subordinate role listening to the version of events that the filmmakers choose to prioritise.
Observational
This is the mode associated with ‘fly-on-the-wall’ type documentaries. They appear to have been filmed in ‘real time’, as if the camera has happened upon events while those involved are seemingly unaware of the filming going on. The filmmakers correspondingly attempt not to interfere in what is underway. We do not hear their questions and we do not see them. There is no voice-over telling us what to think or what conclusions we should draw.
Interactive
Many documentaries feature a certain amount of interactive mode filmmaking. Such sequences will involve those being filmed responding to questions asked of them. In such interviews, the questions of the filmmaker may be left in or edited out. This may be a way that individuals in a film can make their own case, but it is also a mode that can act to undermine the interviewees, making them look foolish or deluded. Their interpretation of events or personal account may be rendered to seem trustworthy or untrustworthy depending on the context of surrounding shots or the nature of the statements being made in their own right.
Reflective
This is a style that is usually associated with more experimental documentaries, ones in which the filmmakers are interested as much in the process of making a film, of how reality can be constructed, as the actual content. At the simplest level the film may make no attempt to hide aspects of its construction - showing us the camera people for example.
Notes from
http://www.filmeducation.org/secondary/documentary2004/
Part 2
The earliest film could not capture (document) the sounds of such a scene. The only soundtrack would be live music accompaniment in the cinema provided by a pianist. Even then such sounds could have a profound affect on how an audience received what they were seeing.
In an article in 1917 the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov wrote: "to make a picture the director must compose the separate filmed fragments, disordered and disjointed, into a single whole and juxtapose these separate fragments into a more advantageous, integral and rhythmical sequence, just as a child constructs a whole word or phrase from separate scattered blocks of letters."
From: Richard Taylor & Ian Christie, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents1896-1939 (Routledge & Kogan Paul 1988), p.41.
It is a curious phenomena, but if different images are edited together then it can affect how each of them individually are interpreted. A Russian called Lev Kuleshov first examined this 'effect'.
In his experiment he filmed Mozhukhin, a famous Russian actor and shots of a bowl of soup, a girl playing with a teddy bear, and woman laid out in a coffin. He then cut the bits of film so that the shot of the actor was seen first being followed by the soup, the girl and lastly the dead body. Each time the same Mozhukhin sequence was used. Viewers were asked what they made of what they had seen and many felt the shots of the actor conveyed different emotions, though each time it was in fact the same shot. They praised him for his changes in mood - from thoughtfulness concerning the soup, joy at seeing the child and sorrow concerning the dead woman. In this way Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of editing. It became the director’s belief that inter-cutting film, rather than performance, was the prime basis of filmic expression. And it has to be said, emotional impact on an audience.
That is a bit of background to a key product of careful editing, called montage, in which images are woven together to create suggestive combinations in which the meaning is often far greater than the individual elements on their own.
Documentaries are meant to be attempts to get at the truth. Both the films under consideration here contain a central concern with exposing something fundamental about a complex subject. The Fog of War is focused at blowing away some of that fog so that key principles governing the conduct of nations and those charged to lead them can be explored. Capturing the Friedmans also suggests the idea that something elusive can be caught. Think of and refer to your own examples here.
One of the key ways in which documentaries suggest they are telling the truth is by being made in ‘fly-on-the-wall mode. This requires the filmmaker to create the illusion that the camera (and any other crew) is invisible. Whatever the subject, it then looks as if they are going about their business, as they would do if the camera were not present. Of course, from the earliest days of the cinema, when this mode has been employed, it was always illusory because the often-dramatic incidents these films delivered up to us (as with any feature film) invariably had others present filming or recording sound. It is also the case that careful adjustments of ‘the real’ had to be made to accommodate the earliest camera equipment.
In an article in 1917 the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov wrote: "to make a picture the director must compose the separate filmed fragments, disordered and disjointed, into a single whole and juxtapose these separate fragments into a more advantageous, integral and rhythmical sequence, just as a child constructs a whole word or phrase from separate scattered blocks of letters."
From: Richard Taylor & Ian Christie, The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents1896-1939 (Routledge & Kogan Paul 1988), p.41.
It is a curious phenomena, but if different images are edited together then it can affect how each of them individually are interpreted. A Russian called Lev Kuleshov first examined this 'effect'.
In his experiment he filmed Mozhukhin, a famous Russian actor and shots of a bowl of soup, a girl playing with a teddy bear, and woman laid out in a coffin. He then cut the bits of film so that the shot of the actor was seen first being followed by the soup, the girl and lastly the dead body. Each time the same Mozhukhin sequence was used. Viewers were asked what they made of what they had seen and many felt the shots of the actor conveyed different emotions, though each time it was in fact the same shot. They praised him for his changes in mood - from thoughtfulness concerning the soup, joy at seeing the child and sorrow concerning the dead woman. In this way Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of editing. It became the director’s belief that inter-cutting film, rather than performance, was the prime basis of filmic expression. And it has to be said, emotional impact on an audience.
That is a bit of background to a key product of careful editing, called montage, in which images are woven together to create suggestive combinations in which the meaning is often far greater than the individual elements on their own.
Documentaries are meant to be attempts to get at the truth. Both the films under consideration here contain a central concern with exposing something fundamental about a complex subject. The Fog of War is focused at blowing away some of that fog so that key principles governing the conduct of nations and those charged to lead them can be explored. Capturing the Friedmans also suggests the idea that something elusive can be caught. Think of and refer to your own examples here.
One of the key ways in which documentaries suggest they are telling the truth is by being made in ‘fly-on-the-wall mode. This requires the filmmaker to create the illusion that the camera (and any other crew) is invisible. Whatever the subject, it then looks as if they are going about their business, as they would do if the camera were not present. Of course, from the earliest days of the cinema, when this mode has been employed, it was always illusory because the often-dramatic incidents these films delivered up to us (as with any feature film) invariably had others present filming or recording sound. It is also the case that careful adjustments of ‘the real’ had to be made to accommodate the earliest camera equipment.
Part one of some notes about doc and history
Supplementary Notes for Documentary AND Film History:
The term 'documentary' has long been a source of argument. An early pioneer of such filmmaking was called John Grierson and although he thought it a 'clumsy' term, he suggested it should stand. Another definition of this genre that Grierson used was 'the creative interpretation of actuality'. What do you think that phrase might mean?
Consider one of the first kinds of documentary - in fact one of the first kinds of film at all - the movies that earlier pioneers made outside factories at the end of a shift when large numbers of workers could be seen leaving for home. What aspects of this kind of simple filmmaking can be considered?
• Actual (A) - in other words something that would have happened whether or not the camera was there?
• Creative (C) - in other words affected by practical decisions made by the director/camera operator, and which had the effect of making the sequence more entertaining
• Interpretive (I) - in other words affected by practical decisions made by the camera operator/director that might affect an audience's understanding of what they were seeing.
The term 'documentary' has long been a source of argument. An early pioneer of such filmmaking was called John Grierson and although he thought it a 'clumsy' term, he suggested it should stand. Another definition of this genre that Grierson used was 'the creative interpretation of actuality'. What do you think that phrase might mean?
Consider one of the first kinds of documentary - in fact one of the first kinds of film at all - the movies that earlier pioneers made outside factories at the end of a shift when large numbers of workers could be seen leaving for home. What aspects of this kind of simple filmmaking can be considered?
• Actual (A) - in other words something that would have happened whether or not the camera was there?
• Creative (C) - in other words affected by practical decisions made by the director/camera operator, and which had the effect of making the sequence more entertaining
• Interpretive (I) - in other words affected by practical decisions made by the camera operator/director that might affect an audience's understanding of what they were seeing.
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