Trailer for season 5 of Madmen

http://youtu.be/vesjh3LXSKM

Rapturous

This is cheating a bit as this extract is taken from the TV series 2 of Madmen (2011), however, this scene is rapturous, because...it is at the end of a really significant episode, the main character, Don Draper, a really cool man, is leaving to go on a journey, it is the end of the 1950s and the start of the 60s. He is starting a new phase in his life which reflects the change in society from the 50s-60s. He is entering the unknown, both physically and metaphorically, plane travel then was unusual and very glamorous.
It fits in with the format of Madmen which is to always have a really fantastic song, that was out at that time in the 1960s to close the episode. In
The music rises to a crescendo, in tandem with the visuals, the use of light as the plane rises is amazing and just beautiful, almost blinding him, reflecting his leap into an unknown phase of his life.
When I first saw it on TV, I had to rewind it on Sky+ and watched it several times over.

http://youtu.be/2Ir1Es4ZjN8

They used  a Beatles song, 'Tomorrow never knows', Lionsgate, the studio that produces “Mad Men,” paid about $250,000 for the recording and publishing rights to the song. That is an appropriately high price, several music and advertising executives say, since many major pop songs can be licensed for less than $100,000. Link here

Work for you to complete for next lesson.

1. Read all the posts on the blog, remember, we do not have time to go over everything in class. Consider the blog posts your reading list. This is now A2 work, advanced level and you are expected to complete at least 30 mins work for every lesson you have.
You should read/watch the links and make a few notes on your understanding of them on your blog.

2. Consider Bordwell and Thompsons' comments,

'Our basic assumption is that as an art, film offers experiences that viewers find worthwhile-diverting, provocative, puzzling, or rapturous. But how do films do that?'


You should find films that you find diverting, provocative, puzzling or rapturous. If you can, get a still or clip from You tube of the part of the film that inspires those reactions in you.

Next week you will be expected to present your favourite one and explain how you think it achieves that effect. You may present this as a powerpoint or just play an extract and talk about it if you prefer.

For example, a film that I find diverting is Withnail and I (1987). It is one of my favourite films of all time, it is amusing, thought provoking and has a great soundtrack. I discovered it at a very significant time in my life. This particular scene provides me with a lot of aesthetic & intellectual enjoyment.

It is very well filmed in difficult conditions (pouring rain). It occurs at the end of the film where the protagonist has been acting like a bit of an idiot throughout the whole film, he is a borderline alcoholic trying to become an actor. In this scene he delivers the soliloquy from Hamlet, (which I studied at A level and knew very well) and finally proves, in a very poignant manner, that he really can act. It works on several different levels and is a film and a scene that I can watch repeatedly.

The first ever documentary, Nanook of the north 1922

Nanook of the North (also known as Nanook of the North: A Story Of Life and Love In the Actual Arctic) is a 1922 silent documentary film by Robert J. Flaherty. In the tradition of what would later be called salvage ethnography, Flaherty captured the struggles of the InukNanook and his family in the Canadian Arctic. The film is considered the first feature-length documentary, though Flaherty has been criticized for staging several sequences and thereby distorting the reality of his subjects' lives.





Question for you to consider. 
How much manipulation or staging should a documentary maker use? At what point does the reality become fiction? Would you consider programmes like TOWIE or Made in Chelsea to be documentary, docu soap?
Genre develops and evolves and in these cases this is what we are witnessing.

Development of genre....Horror

Nosferatu 1922, adapted from Bram Stoker's Dracula



You can clearly see with its use of shadow lighting and suspense how it set the film language and generic conventions of the narrative of a horror film.

Film History continued... The silent movies

Charlie Chaplin The Kid

Review of Prometheus.. is it art, or a blockbuster?

"Yeah! Take that, Sir Ridley Scott!" seems to be the gist. "If you’re so smart, with your conceptually audacious two-hour epic about mankind questing beyond the stars in search of a face-to-face encounter with the divine, how come Charlize Theron and Noomi Rapace don’t run sideways to get out of the way of that crashing spaceship?"

How come? Who cares? Having now seen Prometheus twice (and enjoyed it even more the second time than I did the first) I can confirm that the fact neither Theron nor Rapace thinks to run sideways during an action sequence predicated on them running forwards does not render the film worthless – and anyone who finds themselves getting worked up about it is making some fairly basic mistakes about how to enjoy blockbuster cinema.

Despite its faults, which are fairly mundane as these things go,Prometheus is a film that demands to be puzzled over, marveled at, even dreamed about. Some of the dialogue might not stand up to scrutiny, but my word, the ideas do. You may already be aware that fantasy writer Adrian Bott has, fairly convincingly, mapped the film's underlying mythology onto the Dying God archetype described by James George Frazer in his seminal study of religion and folklore, The Golden Bough. I don't recall anyone doing that with Avengers Assemble.

I suspect that with Prometheus you’re either on board or you’re not, and no amount of coaxing will convince the moaners to go back and work out what they’ve missed. But I wouldn’t be too surprised if, in 30 years or so, they’re being quoted at the top of an article like this one.

Full article here

Good link to outline film language

Bordwell and Thompson on film art

Remember 'GLARN'.

We need to go back to the basics of film language and try to identify what it is audiences enjoy about film and why the auteurs make them.

Read this extract from the seminal book by critics, Bordwell and Thompson.
Consider and take notes on the points that you will need for your exam and Advanced Portfolio.

Film art

View more presentations from shsgmedia

The history of film

An interactive timeline, click here

A brief history of film

Evaluation questions

Remember, for this production you will have to respond to the following evaluation questions on your blog.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real

media products? 

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

But you must also prepare for a possible question in the exam on:

How your skills developed from foundation-portfolio and also how you can apply theories of 

'GLARN' (this now replaces 'LIAR").

Genre

Language

Audience

Representation

Narrative

so obviously you need to have some awareness of what these theories consist of before you begin!

This powerpoint from last year may help you comprehend.

What is postmodernism?

The Smashing Pumpkins video for 'Tonight, tonight'  is a good example of post modern, intertextuality. Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966. As critic William Irwin says, the term “has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from those faithful to Kristeva’s original vision to those who simply use it as a stylish way of talking about allusion and influence”. Kristeva's ideas have been linked amongst others to Saussure's (1913) theories of semiotics and Roland Barthes. Barthes's many monthly contributions that made up Mythologies (1957) would often interrogate pieces of cultural material to expose how bourgeois society used them to assert its values upon others. Roland Barthes's incisive criticism contributed to the development of theoretical schools such as structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, Marxism and post-structuralism. While his influence is felt in every field concerned with the representation of information and models of communication, including computers, photography, music, and literature. Barthes’ work was ever adapting and refuting notions of stability and constancy means there is no canon of thought within his theory to model one's thoughts upon, and thus no "Barthesism". His works remain valuable sources of insight and tools for the analysis of meaning in any given manmade representation



and in a slightly more surreal manner, The Mighty Boosh's moon character

A Trip to the Moon (French: Le Voyage dans la lune) is a 1902 French black and white silent science fiction film. It is loosely based on two popular novels of the time: From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne and The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells
The film was written and directed by Georges Méliès, assisted by his brother Gaston. The film runs 14 minutes if projected at 16 frames per second, which was the standard frame rate at the time the film was produced. It was extremely popular at the time of its release and is the best-known of the hundreds of fantasy films made by Méliès. A Trip to the Moon is the first science fiction film, and utilizes innovative animation and special effects, including the iconic shot of the rocketship landing in the moon's eye

It was named one of the 100 greatest films of the 20th century 
Still influential today...
see Smashing Pumpkins video for Tonight Tonight

The Lumiere Brothers

The first films produced were short. Film was very expensive, they didnt have batteries to power cameras etc. 

The Lumiere Brothers were groundbreakers in the field. Each of these films are 17 metres long, when handcranked translates to 50 seconds. They mainly produced 'actualities', that reflected everyday life, or mini documentaries. Maybe you would like to produce an 'actualite' of your own? 

They toured with their work using a Cinematograph which effectively functioned as camera, projector and printer all in one.
The Lumiere Brothers have been credited with over 1,425 different short films and had even filmed aerial shots years before the very first aiplane would take to the skies.
The Lumières pioneered not just the technical attributes of the camera but also its artistic attributes, creating a dialogue of REALISM that has always been a crux of cinema.




These early, silent films are useful to look at, not only to give you some historical context into the development of film, but also to pin point the evolution of the visual language and grammar of film that has formed the codes and conventions we take for granted today.

The Great Train Robbery 1903

These films show film makers attempts at creating a 'narrative'. This one in particular shows how important editing and using different shot types is.

Almost an example of how not to do it! Needs faster editing and a wider variety of shot types and camera angles.

The film used a number of innovative techniques including cross cutting, double exposure composite editing, camera movement and on location shooting. Cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique. Some prints were also hand colored in certain scenes.The film uses simple editing techniques (each scene is a single shot) and the story is mostly linear (with only a few "meanwhile" moments), but it represents a significant step in movie making, being one of the first "narrative" movies of significant length

The Advanced Portfolio

Your task, you may choose from one of the following three option:

1. A promotion package for a new film, to include a trailer, together with two of the following three options:

a website homepage for the film;
a film magazine front cover, featuring the film;
a poster for the film.

2. A short film in its entirety, lasting approximately five minutes, which may be live action or animated or a combination of both, together with two of the following three options:

a poster for the film;
a radio trailer for the film;
a film magazine review page featuring the film.

3. An extract/package from a local TV news programme, lasting approximately five minutes, together with two of the following three options:

two hyperlinked pages from the programme's website;
a generic radio trailer for the programme;
a short title sequence for the programme.