Research - postmodernism

BAUDRILLARD:

Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator and photographer. He introduced the concept that reality or the principle of the "real" is short-circuited by the interchangeability (the quality of being capable of exchange or interchange) of signs in an era whose communicative and semantic (the study of the meaning of words & linguistic development) acts are dominated by electronic media and digital technologies.

POSTMODERNISM:

Jean-Francois Lyotard - "In postmodernism one has given up the idea of a grand narrative."

The idea now is to accept a number of different perspectives and not exclude any expression or perspective from the culture of information stream. Postmodernism is the philosophical equivalent to New York City: Embracing pluralism, combination and diversity.

Definition from Compact Oxford English Dictionary: a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions.

TYPES OF POSTMODERN MOVIES:

(P) Pastiche: self-referential, tongue in cheek, rehashes of classic pop culture

(F) Flattening of Affect: Technology, violence, drugs and the media lead to detached, emotionless, unauthentic lives

(H) Hyperreality: Technologically created realities are often more authentic or desirable than the real world

(TB) Time Bending: Time travel provides another way to shape reality and play "what if" games with society

(AS) Altered States: Drugs and technology provide a darker, sometimes psychedelic, gateway to new internal realities

(MHTH) More Human than Human: Artificial intelligence, robotics, and cybernetics seek to enhance, or replace, humanity

LIST OF POSTMODERN MOVIES:

1. Pulp Fiction - P
2. Scream - P
3. Scary Movie - P
4. Austin Powers - P
5. Fight Club - F
6. Apocalypse Now - F
7. Matrix - H
8. The Truman Show - H
9. Dark City - TB
10. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - AS
11. Robocop - MHTH
12. Blade Runner - MHTH

DEFINITIONS:

• Ironic: dry; humorously sarcastic or mocking
• Nostalgic: Unhappy about being away and longing for familiar things or persons
• Narrative style: the story that is created in a constructive format.
• Intertextuality: the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. Refers to another author's borrowing and transformation of a prior text.
• Parody: Make a spoof of or make fun of, a composition that imitates or misrepresents somebody's style usually in humorous ways
• Self-referentiality: referring to oneself or itself

Final piece - practice music video

Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product uses forms and conventions of music videos as very often music videos follow a love story, which we used as the plot for our video. We decided to have both characters looking down and upset asthough something had happened, once they saw eachother they headed towards eachother and hugged. We decided that a hug is a loving action towards another person, however it did not mean that our actors had to do anything that they did not feel comfortable doing. Therefore we managed to get it across to the audience that they were more than friends. Also, because the song was very slow, we decided to make it into black and white to make it look more old fashioned and professional. We decided that this looked very effective and even decided to use the black and white effect on our digipack, except the shot of the swing set. We had agreed that we wanted one of the shots to stand out, so we decided one should be in colour, and we said that our poster would be more effective if it was in colour, otherwise it would blend in and wouldn't stand out on things such as brick walls, so we decided to contrast it against our video and digipack, but using the same setting.
Our lip syncing was not to the best standard, however it was slightly rushed and we had to try to make it look effective in editing. We understand that lip syncing is an important part to music videos, however as we knew that this was only a practice to help us get new skills needed for the proper thing, we did not take it as serious as we needed to (the lip syncing, not the whole project) and we understood that we would need to work harder for the real production.

How effective is the combination of your mail product and ancillary texts? (poster etc)

For our digipack, poster and majority of our video we decided to do all of our shots together on the same day to prevent having to do them on a different days with them wearing different outfits. The shots on our digipack include a shot of the "Oliver Park" sign, a shot of the male against the gate with a guitar, a shot of the swings and a shot of the male and female walking away holding hands. The shot of the couple walking away was taken from our filming, some of the shots which we didn't end up using. We also used a black and white effect on the digipack to create synergy between the digipack and the video. We think we used synergy very well because if you saw any of our products you would automatically be able to relate them to the video or the ancillary texts.

However the quality of our ancillary texts was quite poor as we forgot to take out a still camera to take the pictures, therefore we had to use the "grab" tool on the Mac and transfer it to a computer. Therefore the quality was very poor, and we realised that for our final piece we need to make sure we remember the camera so that we can have much better quality.

Ancillary Texts

Poster

Digipack

Filming & Editing

Filming

When it came to filming, we were actually very well organized, and we managed to do all the filming that we had aimed to do within approximately an hour. Meaning that we were staying on target and when we came back to school we did the editing that we could do so far, and we also managed to get our poster and digipack within one lesson, meaning that we were well ahead of schedule. We had managed to finish all of our extra products, and we just needed to do a little more filming which included the lip syncing. When it came to doing the lip syncing we found it very difficult to match it up with the song, but we managed to do it, not perfectly but satisfactory. Overall we were very pleased with the overall filming.

Editing

However when it came to editing we were 9 seconds short of film, but we managed to get it to fill up a whole minute, by slowing down many shots, which actually makes it look more effective because of the tempo of the song. We also had to put all of the shots into black and white, to fit in with our theme.
After doing the editing I felt much more confident when using the Mac and trying new things. I learnt many new skills such as changing the saturation of shots, slowing down/speeding up shots to the prefered speed, putting text onto shots and much more. This experience has made me feel more confident about doing the real production work as I feel that even though we didn't get the choice of song we wanted, we still managed to make it work.

Risk Assessment

For our production, there are not many risks as we are not filming near a road, apart from the shots in which we sit in the car, however we will make sure that the male sitting in the front seat (Jacob Cox) will not have the keys so that there is no chance that the car will start without a legal driver in the driving seat.

The only other issues that could occur is someone tripping over bags, or maybe falling over the swing-set which will not cause much bodily harm, maybe a few scratches but it will not be a serious injury.

Even when taking the pictures of the female and male there will be no risks as we will be on open grass away from the roads, with a gate between the car park and us.

Props needed for filming

For our filming at 'Ollie Park', we needed to take the guitar for our shots for the digipack and poster and also for the shots of the male walking whilst strumming the guitar. We also needed a swing set for our production, so that the female could be sat swinging looking depressed. When filming in the car, we only needed the car which our friend let us borrow, and the pictures which we used on the seat of the car. Overall there weren't many difficulties accessing these props, except for the car, however our teacher said that if worst came to worst she would let us borrow her car as long as there was no driving involved.

Storyboards

Difficulties when planning- mini production

When we had to choose a song, we had 2 songs that we wanted to do, however other groups pitched their ideas better than us. Therefore we had to resort with Tom Waits - Looking for the heart on Saturday night. Because of the tempo of the song (very slow!) and the fact that singing didn't come into the song until halfway through the clip, we struggled to find ways to do lip syncing to fit in with the rest of our clips.

We were also originally going to use a car, as there is car noises in the song, such as a horn beeping. However after speaking to Mike and Nanette they told us we were not allowed to use it, even if the driver was a qualified driver. Therefore we had to come up with new ideas to get around this, so we decided to do filming inside the car and do shots such as lip syncing into the rear view mirror. However, we had decided to do all the car filming at the start of the video, but because of difficulty of song we couldn't do lip syncing at the start of the song as there were no lyrics and had to edit.

There were also issues such as people being absent, almost every lesson there would be one person absent, making it difficult to plan because our ideas kept changing, however one member of our group left last week, and since then we have had a full group.