What Makes a Film British?

The five films nominated for Outstanding British Film Award by BAFTA in 2010 were:

FISH TANK
AN EDUCATION
IN THE LOOP
MOON
NOWHERE BOY

In the past, other nominations have included:

Mama Mia
Slumdog Millionaire
The Bourne Ultimatum


According to the UK Film Council, a UK film is:

1. one which is certified as such by the UK Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport under Schedule 1 of the Films Act 1985 via the Cultural Test
2. one which was made under one of the UK's official co-production agreements or the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-production
3. a film which has not applied for certification but which is obviously British on the basis of its content, producers, finance and talent.

What is the Cultural Test?

The Cultural Test is made up of four sections:

1. Cultural content
2. Cultural contribution
3. Cultural hubs
4. Cultural practitioners

A film needs to score 16 out of a possible 31 points, subject to a "golden points rule". See Cultural Test points.

What is a Co-Production Agreement?

A co-production is a film which is made in cooperation between the UK and another country. The UK is one of many countries currently signed up to the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-production, which allows film producers from different European countries to work together. In addition, the UK has treaties with Australia, Canada, India, Jamaica, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Genre Theory: Genre and Institution

The UK Film Council collects data about all films exhibited in the UK and published them online in its Statistical Yearbook. You can find it at http://sy10.ukfilmcouncil.ry.com/Default.asp

Go there now, locate Section 4: Genre and Classification, and answer the following questions:

1. What genres does the UKFC classify films into? Do you think there are any missing or any which you think are sub-genres?
2. What genre grossed the highest box-office in 2009?
3. What genre of UK-made films grossed the highest?
4. What does this tell you about the sorts of films which the UK film industry makes successfully?
5. How does the BBFC classify films? Why do they do it this way (hint: what is the BBFC's purpose)?
6. Do you think the BBFC or UKFC way of classifying films is most helpful?
7. Which BBFC-classification performed best at the box-office in 2009?
8. Is 'animation' a genre? 

Coronation Street: First Ever Episode

The first episode of Coronation Street is an excellent example of how the portrayal of young people has barely changed in fifty years. There is a clear binary opposition between Dennis Tanner - the rebellious, moody rocker with his quiff hairdo and rolled-up t-shirt sleeves, who has just got out of prison, can't get a job and is accused by his mother Elsie of stealing money from her purse - and 21-year old Ken Barlow, who is dressed neatly in a tie and pullover knitted by his mother, goes to college, and has aspirations beyond his working class roots. You can find very strong similarities between these two and characters from modern soap operas, proving that not only do soap operas recycle storylines, but they also recycle stereotypes.

Watch the clip below:

Option B: Media in the Online Age

As an alternative to Media and Collective Identity, you may choose to answer either of the questions on the topic of Online Media.

Your best resource for this is the documentary "The Virtual Revolution"; youtube links follow:

Episode 1
Ep 1 part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPD4Ep_J81k
Ep 1 part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrsxhRnjWCs&feature=related
Ep 1 part 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvoydcnV7Dw
Ep 1 part 4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgXWImi-Pr4&feature=related
Ep 1 part 5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vyD_wh_Ml0&feature=related
Ep 1 part 6 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j-mPnjoOkk&feature=related

Topic 4: British Soap Operas

1. Media Language, Forms and Conventions.
a) What is a soap opera? List as many programmes as you can which you consider to be soap operas. What features do they have in common? Is it possible to identify subgenres of soap opera?
When you have done this, compare your notes with the following information from the BBC's guide to Life, The Universe and Everything

 

b) Choose an episode from a soap opera on BBC, ITV or Channel 4 - watch it, and write an analysis of it, explaining which conventions are being used.

 

2. Institutions and Audiences
Examine and analyse an evening’s TV schedule - either using a magazine, newspaper, or websites such as tvguide.co.uk , onthebox.com or the radio times . Identify what soaps are on and when.  Check BARB to get soap viewing figures for the major terrestrial channels, and find out how many of the top ten programmes are soaps.

• What do these figures tell us about soap audiences? What impact does scheduling have on audiences?How does scheduling help broadcasters target an audience who will appreciate the programme?

Write your answers in the form of comments to this post.

 

3. Representations and ideology
Choose a social group which is represented in soap operas (i.e. young people, old people, men, women, disabled people, ethnic minorities etc), and examine how that particular group is represented in two different soaps.

 

Write your answers in the form of comments to this post.

4. Create Your Own Soap Opera
Design and plan a new soap opera and pitch your idea to the rest of the class. There will be a prize for the winning pitch; 10 marks will be awarded for each of the following categories:

• Media Forms and Conventions: how closely does your idea follow established generic conventions of character, plot, and setting? Go into detail about who the characters are, their relationships and conflicts with each other. Find pictures, design a logo or title sequence, and maybe even compose the opening music.
• Media Audiences and Institutions: who is your core audience and how do you intend to target them? When is your soap scheduled to be broadcast? What time/day? How can you use the internet to reach your audience?
• Media Representations and Ideology: what vision of Britian are you trying to portray in this soap? Are you setting out to challenge and subvert established social prejudices or are you going to rely on safe conservative stereotypes?

Topic 3: Funding of British Cinema

Classwork Task:

Go to the website for the UK Film Council and follow the 'funding' link. There are three main funds by which the Council supports the British Cinema Industry. They are:

1. The Film Fund
2. The Innovation Fund
3. The Prints and Advertising Fund

In groups, find out as much as you can about what these funds are designed to support, and prepare a presentation for the rest of the class. Make sure that you also read the Funding FAQs which contain lots of useful facts and figures.


Prep Essay:

Read the articles below and answer the following question: What are some of the problems facing the funding of the British film industry, and what efforts are being made to overcome them? (800-1000 words)

Your answer must make reference to information found in these articles:

• British Film Industry Faces Funding Battle Despite Slumdog Success
• British film funding takes a new direction
• Financing the film industry

Topic 2: Representations of Youth in British Cinema

We have looked briefly at what constitutes 'youth culture' along with examples of some subcultures throughout the decades since the 60's.

First, add this information to your timeline. A brief reminder:
1960's: Mods and Rockers
1970's: Punks
1980's: New Romantics
1990's: Madchester
2000's: Chavs and Hoodies

The next job is to see how those subcultures have been represented in British films, historically. Time for a bit more individual research.

You will be given one of the following films to research:

1. Summer Holiday (Peter Yates)
2. To Sir, With Love (James Clavell)
3. Quadrophenia (Franc Roddam)
4. Gregory's Girl (Bill Forsyth)
5. Absolute Beginners (Julien Temple)
6. Sid and Nancy (Alex Cox)
7. Life is Sweet (Mike Leigh)
8. Get Real (Simon Shore)
9. 24-hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom)
10. The History Boys (Nicholas Hytner)

Please prepare a presentation or factsheet for the rest of the class including the following information:

• What is the plot?
• Does it star anybody famous at the time or who subsequently went on to become famous?
• When was it released?
• Is the story set in an earlier decade - i.e. is it retro?
• Following on from this, if it is set in an earlier decade, is it portraying a particular youth subculture; i.e. punks/mods/Madchester etc?
• Is popular music a major aspect of the film?
• How is it portraying young people?
• You will need to find a youtube clip of the film which illustrates any of the points you have just made.

Once you have collected information on all of the films, add this to your timeline too.

Case Study: 'This is England'

'This is England' (dir. Shane Meadows, 2006) is a brilliant contemporary piece of British cinema which you should study and be able to write about in the exam.

Your task will be to watch it in full, and then answer an essay question.

The following resources will be useful - make sure you copy/link to it:

• Michael Walford's 'This is England' blog at the University of Warwick has lots of information about the film and its social/historical context, as well as links to articles and reviews about the film.
• An interview with Shane Meadows on the BBC Film Network site about why he likes making low-budget films. Skip ahead to the 2min mark to listen to him talk about the making of This is England.
• What were the challenges he faced in creating the verisimilitude of the 80's setting?
• In this interview taken from the DVD, Meadows explains what he thinks about youth cultures in the 80s and today.
• What, according to him, were some of the appeals of belonging to a group such as the skinheads?

Extract from "Kes" (Ken Loach, 1969)

British Film Industry History: Social Realist Films

Social Realist Films

View more presentations from James Brogden.

Extract from "Saturday Night & Sunday Morning" (1961)

British Film Industry History: The British New Wave

British New Wave

View more presentations from James Brogden.

'O Dreamland' - 1953

British Film Industry History: The Free Cinema Movement

The Free Cinema Movement

View more presentations from James Brogden.

Extract from 'The Horror of Dracula'

British Film Industry History: Hammer Horror Films

Hammer Horror

View more presentations from James Brogden.

The Last Journey

British Film Industry History: The Quota Quickie

Quota Quickie ]

View more presentations from James Brogden.

The Night Mail

British Film Industry History: Documentary Films

The British Documentary Film Movement

View more presentations from James Brogden.

Prep for Lent Week Begninning 1st March 2010

First: if you were not in class on Friday, please send me your presentations as soon as possible so that I can upload them to this blog.

Monday: show me that you have found your AS notes on the history of British Cinema and added them to the notes you are currently making on Media and Collective Identity. I will be checking your notes to see how well you are keeping them - if they seem to be thin or incomplete I may ask you to copy somebody else's in a detention.

Thursday: produce a timeline showing the changes in British Cinema from the 1920's to the present day. Organise it by decade. For each decade, give details of the industry, using what you have learned from this week's presentations, along with one piece of contextual information. For example, for "The 1980's" you might add that cinema was weak due to the influence of VCRs and satellite TV, and for contextual detail you could add that 1981 was the year that Charles & Di were married. Just something to locate everything historically.

Historical Research: British Films

You will given, at random, one of the following British film movements, genres or series to research:

1. The ‘Documentary Film’ Movement
2. The ‘Quota Quickie’
3. Ealing Comedies
4. Hammer Horror
5. The ‘British New Wave’
6. Free Cinema
7. Avant Garde films
8. ‘Angry Young Men’
9. Social Realist Films
10. ‘Carry On’ Films

For each of these, please provide the following information:

- In which decade/years were these films made?
- Describe one film of its type: director, famous stars, plot (if any) etc.
- What kind of Britain is being represented by these films?
- Find a youtube clip of the film and explain what representation of Britishness is being constructed.

Some Basic Theories of Audience and Communication

Communications Theory

View more presentations from James Brogden.

Question 1b: Representation

Watch one of your classmates’ productions and answer the following questions:

What kind of genre do you think it belongs to?

In this genre, what kinds of characters are there typically and how are they stereotyped? Consider:
age
race
gender
nationality
sexuality

When I say ‘how’, I mean:
How is their image created by the use of mise-en-scene (costumes, props, settings etc)?
What about casting: do certain actors appear playing certain types of character in this genre, and what is it about their image which gets them cast for these roles?
What do these characters do in the narrative? Are they protagonists or antagonists? Are they rewarded or punished? Do they have happy endings?
Is the audience encouraged to identify/sympathise with them?

Looking at these generic characters as a whole, what values/behaviours/traits does society seem to be rewarding or punishing?

How many of these generic character types can you identify in the production which you are now watching ? Give specific examples and details.

Share your answer to 4 with the person who made this production.

Having heard somebody else’s analysis of your own production, explain whether or not this surprises you. When you made it, did you consciously set out to use or create certain stereotypes?

Question 1b: Some Genre Theories - in Brief

There is a lot of information about genre theory here at http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/intgenre.html

The Theory of Binary Oppositions
Structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) claimed that all cultural myths (and fims are a type of cultural myth) are structured according to binary pairs of opposite terms. This approach is inviting for the analysis of genre films, which tend to work by reducing complex conflicts to the equivalent of black hats versus white hats.
Find out more about this theory at http://www.englishbiz.co.uk/extras/binaryopposition.htm

The Theory of 'The Other'
Genre movies are always about the time in which they are made, not set, for entertainment inevitably contains, reflects, and reinforces ideology. It is in this sense of entertainment as ideology that Roland Barthes (1915–1980) conceives of myth. For Barthes, cultural myths endorse the dominant values of the society that produces them as right and natural, while marginalizing and delegitimizing others. In genre movies, as Barthes says of cultural myth generally, the Other becomes monstrous, as in horror films, or exoticized, as in adventure films. In westerns, for example, Indians are either demonized as heathen savages or romanticized as noble savages, but they are rarely treated as rounded characters with their own culture.

Try to explain your chosen production in the light of either Barthes' or Levi-Strauss' theories.

Question 1b: Genre - Historical Origins and Development Over Time

Choose one of your productions (Foundation or Advanced; not both) and find out a bit about the history and development of it. Use the following links to start with:

http://www.filmsite.org/genres.html
http://www.filmsite.org/subgenres.html
http://www.filmsite.org/genres2.html

Summarise what you have learned in one paragraph.

Question 1b: Genre

Sample Question: "A genre is ultimately an abstract conception rather than something that exists empirically in the world." Explain how you used considerations of genre in the creation of one of your production pieces.

If question 1b in Section A (Theoretical Evaluation of Production) asks you about your use of genre, try to break it down into the four key concepts of media studies:

1. Media Languages, Forms and Conventions

the codes and conventions of different genres
the historical origins and development over time
the construction of realism and other codes
the strengths and weaknesses of genre theory

2. Media Institutions
production line approach to genre associated with specific studios
pre-/post production, distribution, and exhibition
genre as marketing tool.

3. Media Audiences
Pleasures and expectations
audience identification
fans and cults
genre as ‘contract’.

4. Media Representations
character types - stereotypes and archetypes
representations of gender, race, nationality, age, sexuality etc
ideological dominant values typecasting and genre as a ‘reading’ device.

Question 1a: Using Conventions from Real Media Texts

You need to be fairly systematic in breaking down the forms and conventions of the media texts which you have created into easily manageable sections. We'll consider the video texts most of all rather than the ancillary print texts because the question asks about your skills development from Foundation to Advanced, and you simply didn't do any print work for Foundation so print doesn't apply.

Forms and Conventions are:

• Narrative
• Technical
• Representational

Narrative Forms and Conventions.
Think about your Foundation project first. What are the narrative conventions for the opening of a film? Every narrative will seek to establish an enigma right at the very start, to hook the audience's attention. Narrative and plot are very different from story, however. The story is the chronological sequence of events which happen to the character, whereas the narrative or plot means the order in which these events are shown to the audience. You may have chosen to open your film at the start of the story, when the events were at equilibrium, or stability; the calm before the storm. Alternatively, you may have opened your film somewhere towards the middle or end of the story, when events are at a disequilibrium (the problem or complication which the main character has to overcome), so that the rest of the film becomes a flashback. This is called opening the film 'in media res'.
Now consider your Advanced project. The narrative conventions of a teaser trailer are very different indeed. They mostly follow a straightforward linear progression of the story so that the audience has a brief idea of the main events. It will show the initial equilibrium, something about the disequilibrium or problem which the protagonist faces, and may even show glimpses of the film's final dramatic climax, but will not provide full closure - in other words, it won't show how the story ends or how the problem is solved. If it did, the enigma would be destroyed and nobody would want to watch the film.

Question 1a: Post-Production

Post-production is the phase of construction after principal shooting has finished. Basically, it means the editing process. Even though each production was video-based, the fact that one was a film opening and the other was a teaser trailer means that they each have very different forms and conventions, and editing is one of these.

Technical Considerations
Firstly, what were the technical skills required in transporting footage from camera to editing station? Most of you will have used digital miniDV tapes, but some may have used cameras which record straight to a hard-drive in HiDef. What were the particular technical problems which you had to overcome? Was the Advanced production easier than the Foundation one?

What type of editing software did you use? It will have been iMovieHD for the Foundation production, but when it came to your Advanced production you had the choice of using Final Cut Express and iMovie9 on the new macs, both of which required you to develop your editing skills in different ways. If you chose to continue using iMovieHD, then you may still have learned new tricks such as extracting audio streams for voice-overs. Almost everybody will have used LiveType to create animated titles.


Editing for Continuity/Narrative
The film opening was very much an exercise in continuity editing. You had to introduce a character, establish a setting, and create an enigma - all to make the audience suspend their disbelief and accept the world which you had created as being realistic. The continuity techniques to do this included things such as match on action, the 180-degree rule, and the shot/reverse-shot pattern. Give some specific details of how when and how you did this.
The teaser trailer was much different, requiring use of different types of transitions. For a start, trailers have to briefly summarise a lot of the narrative very quickly, by giving snatched glimpses of some important scenes and glossing over big gaps of time. This is called elision, or missing something out. You create this in editing by using fades and wipes. So: as part of the editing process did you use more fades and wipes? Almost certainly.


Working with Sound
Remind yourself of the different types of sound:

• diegetic: exists within the world of the narrative
• non-diegetic: doesn't exist within the world of the narrative
• ambient: recorded at the time of filming as part of the surrounding background noise
• incidental music: music designed to create atmosphere or communicate some aspect of character
• musical stings: short burst of music or sound effects designed to shock, surprise, or draw attention to something happening suddenly.
• dialogue: characters talking to each other
• voice-over: any character's speech heard over the sight of something different than them speaking
• sound bridge: any sound which carries the audience out of one scene and into the next

Each production will have used more of some and less of others. You need to write about which ones you used and whether or not you got better at using some more than others. Also, which ones you composed yourself, and how, or whether you acquired them from sound-effects sites or copyright-free music sites.

Titles and Special Effects
Did you use any special colour filters? Did you use lens-flares, ghost-trails, saturated or desaturated colour, or any other exotic effects? Did you speed up or slow down the footage? What did you do differently/better with your use of titles?

Question 1a - Research and Planning

For both your Foundation and Advanced Portfolios, 20% of the marks have been allocated to how well you have researched and planned your productions.

Research
You will have researched TEXT, AUDIENCE, and INSTITUTION.

• Textual Research: for the Foundation film opening, and again with your Advanced teaser trailer, you were asked to research the forms and conventions of the genre you chose. You will have blogged clips from Youtube. This may have been difficult with film openings; was it easier to find trailers? Did any clips have embedding disabled so that you were only able to post a link to its URL? You may have found additional information from other sites such as IMDB, or sources of information such as textbooks. Whatever you used, the key questions to answer are: as you moved from Foundation to Advanced Production did you do more research? Better research? Was information easier to find? Did you use more/different sources?
• Audience Research: first you need discuss the purpose of your audience research. What were you trying to find out? Had you developed a story idea and were trying to find out whether or not they liked it? Were you trying to find out what an Empire reader wanted from an issue of the magazine? Next, what was the methodology? In other words, how exactly did you go about collecting this data? Did you construct a questionnaire, and if so how did you deliver it? Did you use social network sites such as Facebook? Did you use a focus group? Finally, what were your results? What did your audience actually tell you (use statistics or quotations if you can) and did that affect what you planned? Again, the emphasis is on development - did you do more/better audience research for your Advanced production than for the Foundation one?
• Institutional Research: what companies, studios, broadcasters, publishers or regulators did you find out about? Did you determine what kind of BBFC rating your film would have? Who would create/distribute/publish/exhibit your kind of product, and more importantly how did you find this out?

Planning

There were four assessment criteria for your planning mark, and it makes sense to describe what you did according to these:

1. Organisation of actors, locations, costumes and props: when you were planning your Foundation production, what kinds of problems did you encounter trying to get your actors together at the same time, or getting them to certain locations, or getting permission to use these locations, or acquiring particular costumes and objects? More importantly, how did this experience make you change what you did when you came to shoot your Advanced production?
2. Shot-lists, layouts, scripting, and storyboards: for the video tasks, did you do anything different/better with your storyboard - i.e. creating an animatic? You will have drafted layouts for your magazine and poster, which is a development of your drafting skills because you didn't have to plan a print-based task at Foundation level.
3. The quality of presentation of your research and planning: compare your Foundation and Advanced blogs - hopefully the latter will show more detail about the planning and research process.
4. Time-keeping: this means punctuality and your ability to meet deadlines. If you had created a shot-list, did you manage to stick to it? Or if not, did you go way off schedule or only a little bit? Did you have enough time to complete all the editing? Was anything rushed, or would you have liked more time for anything? Again, the important thing is: did you get better at this with your Advanced Production?

Question 1a - Digital Technology

If the question asks you about your use of digital technology it is important to keep in mind several key features:

CONVERGENCE.
Digital Technologies exhibit convergence. That is, different functions combine together on one device. Your mobile phone is the best example. The more uses you have made for it, the better. You might have used it to phone around and organise your cast and crew, taken still photographs of possible locations, used it as a memory stick to transport files between home and school, saved a copy of your finished video on it to show people etc.

MANIPULABILITY
Because all of your work is essentially a bunch of computer code, you can copy, save, transport and change it very easily. You will already have done things like extracting the audio from a clip or using photoshop to change photographs for your cover and poster.

Exam Section A: Theoretical Evaluation of Production

You have to answer two compulsory questions.

Question 1(a) requires you to describe and evaluate your skills development over the course of your production work, from Foundation Portfolio to Advanced Portfolio. The focus of this evaluation must be on skills development, and the question will require you to adapt this to one or two specific production practices from the following list:

- Digital Technology
- Creativity
- Research and planning
- Post-production
- Using conventions from real media texts

In the examination, questions will be posed using one or two of these categories.
If you have done any video production work outside the media course, you are free to additionally refer to this experience.

Question 1(b) requires you to select one production and evaluate it in relation to a media concept. The list of concepts to which questions will relate is as follows:

- Genre
- Narrative
- Representation
- Audience
- Media language

In the examination, questions will be set using one of these concepts only.

Introduction

The purpose of this unit is to assess your knowledge and understanding of media concepts, contexts and critical debates, through understanding of one contemporary media issue and your ability to evaluate your own practical work in reflective and theoretical ways.

The examination is two hours. You have to answer two compulsory questions on your own production work, and one question from a choice of six topic areas. The unit is marked out of a total of 100, with the two questions on production work marked out of 25 each, and the media theory question marked out of 50.

There are two sections to this paper:

Section A: Theoretical Evaluation of Production (50 marks)

Section B: Contemporary Media Issues (50 marks)