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?