The Politics of American Media

Booker, K., From Box Office to Ballot Box: The American Political Film Account

• p160 ‘tendency in the american national pysche towards violent and hatred of the other’
• Americans as ‘saviours of the vietnamese people’
• The Green Beret ‘depicts the war in Vietnam as a simple, good vs evil struggle of good guy Americans against bad-guy Americans’
• p161 ‘Films made after the end of the war had come to grips with the fact that this American victory did not occur’
• ‘most American films had… glorified war’

Dimaggio, A. When Media Goes to War: Hegemonic Discourse, public opinion and the limits of dissent

• p12 New York Times committed to “ democracy protection”
• p165 ‘opposition to the United States is common in the Muslim world’
• p166 ‘ the field of media stdies focuses too heavily on the United States and Europe
• p168 ‘ corporate media ownership is inherently undemocratic
• p171 ‘western corporations are assaulting the cultural autonomy of poorer states

Kellner, D.,  Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan*(http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)

• p1 ‘the rise and decline of 60s radicalism, the failure of liberalism, and the rise of the New Right in the 1970s; and the triumph and hegemony of the right in the 1980s’
• 1960s ‘film transcoded the discourse of the anti war, new left students’
• “New Hollywood” eg Bonnie and Clyde
• ‘Hollywood film, like U.S Society, should be seen as a contested terrain… struggle of representation over how to construct a social world and everyday life’
• Conservative films: star wars, rocky, superman, close encounters of the third kind

Kellner D., Media Spectacle http://eclass.uoa.gr/modules/document/file.php/MEDIA118/celebrity+culture/Book_media+spectacle_douglas+kellner.pdf

• p vii ‘Media culture excels in creating Megaspectacles of sporting events, world conflicts, entertainement breaking news,’
• p3 ‘capitalist society seperates ’art from life’

Orientalism

from the book Orientalism by E., Said, 1979, NY, Random House

• pxxviii 'herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like 'America' or 'Islam' and invent collective identitiesfor large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse
• p1' a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes and remarkable experiences
• 'Americans will not feel the same about the orient' - more association with China and Japan
• 'The orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and more recurring images of the Other'
• p94 'a realtion between Western writing (and its consequences) and Oriental silence the result of and the sign of the West's great cultural strength, its will to power over the Orient'
• p95 'Orientalism as a kind of Western projection onto and will to govern over the Orient'

Camera movement

• Pull back retraction
• pull back reveal
• open up - revealing additional info
• close out eg Rebecca, blood diamond
• draw in
• draw out - start of close, out to wide, character remain in relation to each other
• spin around
• fly over
• depth dolly
• dolly up, dolly down
• spin look eg tombstone, after hours
• track through solid
• vertigo/dolly zoom
• expand dolly - actor moves faster than camera
• contract dolly
• collapse dolly - actor overtakes camera

Crane Techniques

Crane Up, move away
Crane down, move towards

Searching cranes - character searches, crane away reveals magnitude of search

Rise up - looking over an obstruction

Fall Down - look at something on the ground

Crane front to top - from full on to overhead

Crane up entrance

Crane up expression - emotional response - pyschological detachment, nature of life

Crane up look down

Crane down, look up - from full on to below

Children's TV

Anne Wood

• Reflect children's experiences back to them - build confidence
• Children living in the same but different world
• As independent production company can only sell to BBC currently
• have to get budgets elsewhere
• independent producers taking creative and financial risk

• hear voices like their own and see places that are familiar - know about their own world
• animation tax break last year, about to be live action tax break - nickolodeon commissioning 3 new shows
• helen skeltern being good role model for girls

Notes on Pride and Prejudice

• Collins misreads Elizabeth, Bingley misreads Jane, Lydia misread Wickham and Mrs Bennet misread everyone
• Heidegger claims emotion influences what we see
• Elizabeth has emotional and rational intelligence
• We see emotions that comic character miss
• 'Darcy is masculine becuase he is emotional' p131
• the worst character are those that speak most forcibly for contemporary mores' p135
• Mrs Bennet always takes on the position of conflict with Mr Bennet and Elizabeth

Keith M. Opdahl, Emotion as Meaning: The literary case for how we imagine

Fabula and Sjuzet

Fabula the order of events as referred to by the narrative

Sjuzet the order of events presented in the narrative discourse

Peter Brooks, 1984:12

Ned Lukacher on Post Modernism

the dilemma of the postmodern world is...

'to recognize that "mourning is in error2 but to be nevertheless condemned to mourn; to be unable to remember the transcendental gorund that would once again give meaning to human language and experience but also unable to stop mourning the puxtative loss of an originary memory and presence that doubtless never existed'

Originary memory - quest for the moment of orgin

Hemingway and Emotion

from Keith M. Ophdal

• 'The story exists to give the reader an emotional reaction'
• Hemingway "The writer may omit things that he knows and the reader... will have a feeling of those things as strongly as if the writer had stated them'
• readers fell context and implication
• language triggers not feelings but images
• almost every word carries an emotional charge
• 'connotation and association mean that every word in a passage floats in a pool of meaning' p113
• one part of mind understand abstract denotation and another feels some of the emotion
• in hemingway feeling is resides within the text, in Fitzgerald it resides within the narrator's voice

Notes on Locke

• Using fades despite time not passing
• yellow and blue
• welsh accent not perf
• Whilst talking to mistress hand brushes against face - showing wedding ring
• Wife being nice - football, sausages, son answers phone - family
• male voice calming hysterical female on phone
• help for heroes on outside of car - goodness on outside
• police car whizzing past illustrating speed limit
• Ivan corrects 10 years to 9 years
• describing on phone ' im here in the dark in our bedroom'
• Driving away from usual responsibilities
• slip of concrete like his relationship mistake
• when puts hand to his face see wedding ring 
• he supporting her in her weakness fear
• both work and family breaking down
• cant control people
• bethan has gas donal has cider - everyone going out of control, putting themselves in the hands of substances
• instructor pacifier
• angry on his own - never on the phone, maintains around other people
• straight unending road in sat nav
• 'you have a call waiting'
• wont say i love you
• 3 different situations can't be stopped
• uses previous rep
• dad in back seat - a;ways behind him
• only voices not faces
• silence of shock
• his son loves him
• ends with baby cries
• his children end the film - lost everything else

Grading Basics

Gamma - shadows

Pedestal - mid tones (over tone)

Gain - highlights

Wallace Stevens

Where from:

• Pennsylvania

When:

• 1879-1955

Interesting Facts:

• Harvard
• lawyer
• worked at insurance company until death
• inspired by romantics

Themes:

• duality
• sensual experience
• anticlerical, aesthetical

Works:

• Transport to Summer
• Harmonium
• The auroras of autumn

Ideologies in GoFighting

in Episode 11

• Sponsored by brands - drinks bottles
• Use new 'virtual reality' software
• Haung Lei given more info than others - information creating heirarchy
• Mole within the police - bringing everyone else down - would be stronger if putting needs of group over individual
• water fight - moments of brevity between info - underlying brotherly bond
• outside law/army as special agents
• tv is branded
• wang xun as weakest gets teased
• 'transportation'
• traitors creating tension amongst audience
• using each other to distract guards
• using authority as celebrities
• Discussion of how much the guards earn - leads in to Hong Lei taking control over them
• Force of personality
• gets clue from prisoner
• Have to sneak past/outwit guards, disguise as workers
• keeping look out
• clue in chinese calligraphy
• have to snitch on others
• show interrogates themselves - show not managed by person/single presence
• police using physical methods

Charlotte Bronte on Jane Austen

she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that strong Sisterhood; even to the Feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional graceful but distant recognition; too frequent converse with them would ruffle the smooth elegance of her progress.

Late Fragment by Raymond Carver

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Notes on Love, Rosie

• Use reddish orange light in Rosie's bedroom
• Shines through her hair in her moment of anguish
• Evolution of digital messaging showing passage of time in their relationship
• Soft focus in some handheld kissing shots
• track/slider for LA of Sam Claflin sitting on bottom airport railing?

Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen

Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears on the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader's mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial.

Notes from 'Dreamcatcher'

• Didn't try to make anyone all good or all bad - didn't oversimplify
• Didn't cut out problematic things characters said eg ex pimp saying he didn't regret his life
• Begins with inner city streets of chicago - gritty dark run down, contrasts with blue pink sunset over skyscrapers - underbelly, beautiful on the outside
• recurring motif of Brenda looking into mirror and applying make up/eyelashes/weave
• Brenda seems so strong then in one emotional scene near the end she reveals how emotional and fragile she still is
• Brenda as link between different stories, different aspects/sides to prostitution
• Brenda asked documentary maker to come and raise awareness
• All girls in the school club had been raped
• Platform to speak out
• Crying behind camera
• Just documentary maker and sound recordist - quiet, easy to get along with
• when getting permission from contributor gave documentary maker's details back and said would keep in touch

Notes on Still Alice

• Use of focus to reflect her deteriorating mental state
• Editor said about taming Kristen Stewart's performance
• End it with mother daughter rather than husband wife
• Kate Bosworth's role was limited
• green childish butterfly necklace - gift from mother, covering self in memories, part of her reverting back to childishness
• Sparse use of music
• not always building to a cut to a different scene
• pulling focus in and out of objects like her mories come back and forth and the comprehending ability of her mind alters
• leaps straight into her first being minorly affected by the disease - editor said audience already knew film was about JuliaNE mOORe geeting alzheimers so had to get on with it

Notes on Harold and Maude

• Head cut off in the beginning - could be any age, specially considering clothes
• Mother's clothes match house
• Mother domineering
• Harold's messy death obsession juxtaposed with neatness of how mother keeps house
• Dark red blood matches with furnishings
• More washed out colours around Harold
• crossed legs of therapist juxtapose with Harold's loose legs - confidence
• Cut after 'I go to funerals'  emphasizes
• Old lady sneezes and eats apple - alive and messy
•  Inside house similar colours and light to still life
• Robotic arm adds dark humour
• Harold has deathly pale complexion
• Symmetry of shots with mother in
• Suicides performed for his mother

Feet and Beats

Monometer is a one-foot line

Dimeter is a two foot line

Trimeter is a 3 foot line

Tetrameter is a four foot line

Pentameter is a five foot line

A beat can be seen as a stress which means that the number of beats is often the same as as the number of feet.

But there are more unstressed syllables in a anapestic line than a trochiac line.

Lines with the same number of stresses have the smae number of beats despite the extra syllables.

Stress Patterns

Stress is measured in feet

An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable i.e destroy

A trochee is a stressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable i.e football

An anapest consists of two unstressed syllables then a stressed syllable i.e contradict

A dactyl has a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables

Two syllable patterns are more like speech, Three syllable patterns are more 'singsongy'

Notes from 'Think of England'

Martin Parr 1999

• Begins with questions that he will asking
• Voice behind camera brings in performative element
• Immediately introduces the contrast of class - perhaps answering that Englishness is in fact based on class distinctions
• Uses people's answers to questions to raise queries eg british vs english
• Dialectic approach in way it cuts from a man saying there is no hooliganism to a different man opening a woman's coat to reveal her low cut top
• Introduces concept of Britain vs others, namely Germany the only country Britain is really able to say it rightfully invaded
• Goes from pub to posh people having an extra pimms - the same things but in a different manner
• Things like sport returned to as a uniting point for different people
• No names of places given, focusing on the people
• Interviews while they're doing something
• Begins with Southern accent, moves west, but multiple examples of accents being deceiving - not the same as where people are from necessarily
• Shots of flags in different places
• Social mobility
• Different scenes - city, country fete, beach
• Traditions eg Sunday lunch
• Gradually comes to people who define england as opposed to other countries
• Racism 'send them all back' - whiteness as part of englishness, people who were once subjects of the British empire no longer count
• This is followed by a woman saying she likes the fact that immigrants can find a home is England - multiple perspectives existing in country, neither more english than the other
• Where home is and how use nationality to define yourself
• Normal people not authorities
• Weather
• Goes to places where people gather - filming community
• Different ages
• Unity of englishness - north south divide
• capturing moments of life

Films to watch

• Risky Business
• Willow
• Terms of Endearment
• Valley Girl
• Porky's
• Brazil
• 42nd Street
• The Colour Purple
• Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
• Steel Magnolias
• Breathless
• Joyeux Noel
• Calvary
• Stand by Me
• Say Anything (Watched 6/3/2015)
• Tootsie
• Birdman
• Beijing's Bastards
• Raging Bull
• Swing Time
• Mama
• Scarface
• Jeux d'enfants
• Blade Runner
• Fast Times at Ridgemont High
• 20 feet from Stardom
• Purple Rain
• The badabook
• Desperately Seeking Susan
• Rain Man
• Frances Ha
• The Major and a Minor
• Driving Miss Daisy
• National Lampoon's Vacation
• Do The Right Thing
• Die Welle
• A Fish called Wanda
• American Gigolo
• 8 1/2
• Witness
• Weekend at Bernie's
• Dinner With Andre
• Magnolia

Health and Safety in the Studio

Sound:

• Notify director when doing line up tone
• everyone take off headsets and turn off speakers

Lighting:

• Avoid total darkness but switch off studio lights when not in use
• Use gloves when adjusting lights
• Safety gauzes in place
• No cables left dangling against light

General:

• No smoking, food or drink
• Never stand/put things on cables
• Don't cover electrical items
• when moving electrical equipment switch off from mains
• use circuit breakers
• don't let cables become tangled or tight
• When lifting keep your back straight and use leg power

Aspect Ratios

Standard Definition

SD 4:3 - 720 x 576 non-square pixels
Pillar box
can be made 16:9 by using an anamorphic lens

High Definition

16:9
720p HD frame 1080 x 720
Full HD Frame 1920 x 1080
Letter box

Quad HD = 3840x2160

2k = 2048x1080

4k = 4096x2160

Working with Lighting

Health and Safety:

Always use gloves

  Keep away from curtains and furniture

  Allow 20 mins cool-down time

Always use RCD (trip switch) 

  Always extend any cable coiling to avoid

  overheating from electrical induction (to prevent   potential melting of cabling)

  Don’t overload circuits, esp. in non-studio locations 

 Don’t touch new bulbs with fingers when changing light   bulb

Tape down all cables across throughways

  Carefully adjust sturdiness of lamp stands

  Rain!

  Wind – use sandbags to weigh down lamps 

White Balance

Cameras must be set to recognise a certain colour temperature as neutral white.  This is known as adjusting the white balance.

White light is made up of the full spectrum of these wavelengths, but different proportions of combinations of this spectrum will produce different‘tones’of white, although our eye will adjust to them and just see ‘white’.

To adjust the white-balance

•Get in manual mode

•Go to memory A or B

•Focus on a white surface (full frame) with correct exposition

•Hold AWB button until AWB OK is displayed

•The principal two are photographic daylight (usually thought of as 5600 K) and tungsten (3200 K).

•However, daylight can vary from 2000 K at sunrise to 7000 K on an overcast day.

Boom Operating

Why use a boom pole? Which is the closest place to an actor's voice, that is outside most shot framing?

What is the quickest way to change the position of a microphone?

Video formats

NTSC is used in US and Japan

30 fps

Europe's standard of definition is PAL

Old movies were 16 fps

Cameras have been 24fps since the introduction Of sound

See every frame twice so actually 48fps

Mains electricity is uk is alternating current at 50 hts and as this was used to lock TV signal in it is 25fps

Avid Editing Notes

Exporting:
go to  format options, make sure sound is checked

Keyboard Shortcuts:
s=save
h=hide
] or [=zoom in/out
j <---
l --->
c will open clip in source window
l or k to make tracks different sizes

Audio:
s button will solo a track, m button will mute a track
CDs are normally louder - adjust in import settings
windows, workspaces, audio editing
can select from fast menu to automation mix as the sequence plays, right click, modify

Dupe Detection will highlight if you've used any frames more than once

AMA linking:
If AMA link up doesn't work then delete the AMA management folder on the macintosh hard disk

Users:
To make new user go to settings, drop down from apple to new user

Save bin layout in case you mess bins up: workspaces, properties, associate a layer with a workspace

Effects:
If have green dot they play in real time without rendering
To save an effect drag its icon into the bin

Titles:
Tools, title tool application
...... put border on
drag box to create shadow, click in box to change direction of fade
object menu, soften shadow
click white box to open temporary control
object menu, send to front or back
roll is up and down
crawl is side to side
set in and out points to adjust the speed to credits
right click, render at position to make text work

Time Warp:
won't change sound speed
fast menu, speeding frame
use speed graph or points on graph
Roger recommends 'blended inerpolated'
put anchor in middle, click both keyframes on, make middle one another point, type -100 in first bottom box

Nesting:
Double click video track to add another effect

Colour Correction:
workspaces, colour correction
waveform monitor, rgb parade
y waveform is luminsesence
if leave video track on it applies effect to whole track
eye drop a colour cast with wrong colour
retroscope reads colour saturation
option c will save colour correction

Working with still graphics:


When editing a news story:
A1=Sync (dogs barking, people talking)
A2=Voiceover
A3=F/X (traffic noise etc)

Warnings:

• When you make a new sequence you lose your undo list
•