Gogglebox

Gogglebox represents a range of people; they include a mix of culture, race, age and gender. This makes the makes the programme suitable for a large audience as many people can relate to the programme. I would say the programme is aimed at teens and above because there is sometimes some strong language used which may be unsuitable for younger people. I am not completely sure how the programme is made however I think they have the people sit in front of their TV and have good lighting behind the TV with a few cameras capturing different angles of their reactions. I think the main reason the programme has become so popular and successful is because it is so relatable. It is such a simple concept and so easy to understand and follow. It’s a programme that the whole family can sit down and enjoy watching together. Even the programme seems like a reality programme, how do we know that it’s not set up? The sofas that they sit on may just be a set, the people may be told how to react and the families may be set up. We don’t actually know. The programme makes us believe that we are in each family’s house watching their honest rations to different TV programmes.

Coursework production

For my production, I plan to create a T-shirt, a poster and a box set DVD cover. They will all contain the title of my series, 'Solitary'. There three items can all be used to advertise and make money from.

The T-shirt could have the characters on them or simply just have the series name on. This could just be a simple unisex t-shirt for anyone to buy.

The poster would have to be fairly eye capturing and stand out, however I don't want to use bright colours as it might look a bit childish and my target audience is teens - young adults. The poster would have to link in well with my series to give across the idea of what the series is about.

The DVD cover would most likely be the same or similar to the poster, but obviously a smaller version.

Development of my coursework idea...

Setting

My teen horror is set in a run down theme park during the winter season. Leaves are on the floor and rain is very frequent. The whole theme park is gloomy during the winter season and not very well lit as the dark approaches earlier in the day. The theme park contains many rides however they are old fashioned and rusty. The theme park also contains a few fast food restaurants, sweet shops and merchandise shops. The theme park is surrounded by a lake and there is a bridge to access the park. During the winter the bridge is blocked off as the theme park closes.

Sound

Music and sound effects would be added to make the scene set and to make it more dramatic and tense.

Development of my coursework idea..

Title of my series

Solitary

Characters

Grace, Hannah, Katie, James, Richard and Fred are my main characters.

Grace is 17, average height and slim figure with big curly blonde hair. She comes across as dumb however she has excellent ideas and helps the group get out of a lot of difficult situations.

Hannah is 18, tall and skinny, fairly lanky. Hannah has dark brown long hair and tends to be dressed in black clothing. Hannah is inquisitive and brave and really loves adventures however can be very lair back and not show this adventurous side to her.

Katie is 17, short and slim, she has a shoulder length light brown hair. Katie is a very anxious person and is always looking out for others. With Katie, safety is always first and she plans everything before it happens. She is the mum of the group.

James is 17, average height and slightly chubby. James is bossy and always seems to think he is correct in all situations. He rarely is. James likes to take charge and tries to be the 'alpha male' of the group.

Richard is 18, tall and muscular. Richard looks like he is very strong and brave, however he is a coward. He never wants to be adventurous and tends to take the easy option is any scenario handed to him.

Fred is 18, tall and slim. Fred is rather nerdy and loves to evaluate every situation with great precision, Fred is rarely wrong but sometimes doesn't have the confidence to speak up in front of his friends. He tends to keep quiet and follow the crowd to make life that little bit more simpler for him.

After watching 'Tyrannosaur'..

As I watched Tyrannosaur, I realised how clever the producers had been with their film making. The managed to get the music, lighting, characters and scene setting pretty much perfect as is really captured my attention throughout the film. During the film, we really got to know the characteristics of each person and about their personal lives and they did that very cleverly as we could relate to each character and understand them.

How can you enrich your narrative?

I can enrich my narrative by using better wording , better adjectives and better descriptions throughout the narrative

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What elements can you add to bring your characters alive?

I can add descriptive words on the characters appearance and explain their personalities and show off their personalities in scenarios.

How will you actively seek to serve your target audience?

I will actively seek to serve my target audience by making sure it is age appropriate and interesting towards my audience otherwise I will fail my target audience.

TODOROV THEORY

- Equilibrium -

- Disruption -

- Recognition -

- Repair -

- Return -

From researching todorov's theory i have found that a perfect example of this theory is the film, 'Die Hard'.

They have shown how the film has followed todorov's theory by writing it out.

1. John McClane (Bruce Willis) is coming home to his family for Christmas and all is calm. (The equilibrium)
2. Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) and his team of terrorists take over the nakatomi building which is hosting a Christmas part of which McClane and his wife are attending.
3. (2 points of recognition) McClane isn't in the room when the terrorsits storm in so is able to move up the builiding when he hears screaming. People outside of the building realise there's a disruption when a police man's car is shot at from the building.
4. The police try sending in a SWAT team in which fails. The situation is solved by John McClane throwing Gruber out of a high floor window which kills him.
5. The equilibrium is restored when the police got McClane, his wife and the other hostages out of the building, and the McClanes leave in a police car.

Christmas consumerism and the role of the media

As soon as Halloween is over the Christmas adverts start to appear. Some more famous than others. A company well known for their Christmas adverts is John Lewis. Year after year John Lewis seem to produce heart-warming adverts that really get people into the Christmas spirit. They tend to make the adverts fairly touching to make the viewer relate to the advert. However the company really do not care about the advert, they honestly just care about their sales at Christmas. The whole point of the advert is not to make the audience happy and emotional, but to make the audience purchase things from the store. This year John Lewis were very clever to make a whole new character up for their advert, ‘Monty’. Monty is a penguin featured on the advert and is now available in store for shockingly high prices. John Lewis is just an example of this consumerism within companies, they are not the only company, and hundreds of companies do this worldwide.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iccscUFY860

'Grayson Perry: Who Are You?' - Response

Teen horror idea

Teen horror idea An idea that I have come up with for my teen horror TV series is to have a group of teens/young adults visit a theme park on the last day before it closes for the winter season. The group of teens are university students so they decided to go in celebration of their Christmas holidays starting. The teens are all very adventurous and mischievous. Because it gets dark earlier in the winter, the theme park closes earlier but they did not know that as they had been their numerous amounts of times before over the summer. As the theme park was dark the teens get confused as to why it is fairly quiet and no rides are running. Then they realise they have been locked in the theme park. All of their phones had run out of battery and there was no way of contacting anyone. None of their families knew where they had gone but they thought they would be returning home that evening since they had broken up for the holidays. As late night approaches the theme park gets colder and spookier. Some of the teens spot supernatural sightings. As the teens become more and more desperate for food to survive they might even turn on each other as a food source. I could play with this whole idea by adding in more horror like scenarios and more ghosts and supernatural things within the theme park.

Representation

Testament of Youth review

Testament of Youth was a film about a young girl called Vera who had a passion for studying and was desperate to get the chance to extend her studies at Oxford University however World War 1 had commenced and many of her close relations and friends got involved in the war and the fighting. Vera decided she wanted to join and help so she stopped her studies and became a nurse for the wounded soldiers. This took Vera on many adventures and she saw a lot. The movie is touching and emotional as it shows the harsh reality of how dangerous the war was and how millions of people lost loved ones due to the war. I personally found the film to drag on a little bit, I think they didn’t need a lot of stuff that they put in the film as it seemed to make the film prolong and it wasn’t really getting to the point. However saying it seeming a little long, I did enjoy parts of the movie and I think it was very cleverly made from a book into a film and the director did a good job of capturing the emotions that people in World War 1 must have felt. 

Creating a magazine evaluation

Overall I think the front cover came out well on our magazine. As a group we decided to create a men's magazine with a range of content. I had the challenge of being Editor and I created the front cover and the back cover. To create the front cover I needed to discuss with my team what colour theme and look we were going to adopt for the magazine. As a group we decided the best colour combination would be blue and white as this seemed to link in with the sophisticated feel to the magazine. The front cover shot was take by me. I chose to have a range of boys pose on the steps and for the back cover I took the same shot but from behind them. The typography on the front cover is very legible and I think it grasps the attention of others. A criticism of the design was that it looked fairly similar to the Facebook logo. Overall I think our front cover represents what our magazine is about and stands out.

Evaluating my 60 video about me

I personally think that I could have made my 60 second video about me a lot more interesting. I simply just spoke the camera about me however I could have filmed my writing or illustrated it. This would have made my video a lot more fun to watch and a lot more interesting.

Opinion on..'Telling lies' and 'Love does grow on trees'

During the lesson we viewed the two short films 'Telling lies' and 'Love doesn't grow on trees', they were both very different.

'Telling lies' was a short film all about telling lies and how everyone does. Their were no people filmed however it was their voices and text came up with what they were saying. The different sizes and colours of the text would emphasize what the people were saying. When someone was lying in the short film, the text would come up white, this represent when the person was telling 'white lies'. I thought the whole concept of this film was very clever, however it took me a while to actually realize that the lies were coming up white which represented the 'white lies'.

'Love does grow on trees' was about this young boy who became obsessed with pornographic images. He couldn't buy pornographic media from stores as he was too young however he came across this area in the woods where he found hundreds of images ripped out of newspapers and magazines. His obsession soon got out of hand and he realised this when he met a girl he took a fancy to. Once he had realised he returned them and then the film ends on a cliff hanger as we don't know what happens next with the girl he met. Personally I wasn't to interested in this film as it didn't really capture my attention however I do think it had a clever concept.

Sequences

Click on the link below to view my prezi on sequences..

http://prezi.com/hlatv76y2hfk/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

Narrative, genre and mis-en-scene

Click on the link below to view my prezi on Narrative, genre and mis-en-scene..

http://prezi.com/2jof7htra5ki/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

Review of the short film ‘Ralph’

Writer / Director: Alex Winckler

Producer: Olivier Kaempfer

When watching the short film ‘Ralph’, I straight away noticed that the movie was very similar to what happens in the film ‘Mr. Bean’s Holiday’. Ralph has arrived in France with his suitcase and a sheet of paper with Clares’ (his supposed lovers’) number on it. Ralph fails to get through to Clare after trying different numbers and ends up in a French restaurant. Ralph doesn’t get off to a very good start with the Waitress serving him however it all changes.

This short film is a dramatic romance as it features both a little drama and romance. Throughout the film there were many different camera shots. As Ralph walked out of the station into France, the camera did a 360° view around Raplh so the audience could get a good idea of the area surrounding him. They featured close ups numerous amounts of times to show Ralphs different emotions on his face. They also used close ups for the other characters featured in the film. The lighting throughout the film is very clear and everything is easy to sea. When he was in the station at the beginning, the lighting wasn’t as bright but that’s obviously because he was indoor, however when he stepped outside, the lighting was a lot brighter giving the impression that it was a sunny day in France.

Throughout the whole film there were only three noticeable sounds in the background. The first sound was just a busy area, for example, traffic passing and people chatting. When Ralph was in the restaurant there was some very subtle French music in the background which set the scene well. At the end of the film there was some upbeat music for the ending. Even though we don’t actually see what happens in the end completely, it was still seemed to be a happy ending.

The characters within the movie consist of Ralph, Clare, the waitress, the manager of the restaurant and Lorenzo. The narrative throughout the film is fairly complex as the film features French narrative without subtitles so we understand how Ralph must feel with everyone speaking French. The audience is just as confused as Raplh is with the language barrier.

Overall I enjoyed this short film and I think they very cleverly squeezed a lot into just the thirteen minutes space it was shot in.

Gossip Girl Review

I myself am a keen gossip girl viewer, I have almost completed all 6 seasons of it. This is simply because of its gripping nature and cliff hanging ends to each episode. Every single episode leaves me wanting to watch the next episode straight away as I want to find out what happens next. Gossip girl is a teen drama. It includes many insights as to what it's like to be a teenager, including boy troubles, fashion and friendships.

Gossip Girl is set in New York’s Upper East Side. It's about teenage girls embarking on their new life journeys to college (university). There is a narrator to the whole programme who is in fact gossip girl. Gossip girl stirs and leaks all the gossip going on within the small community. Gossip girl watches over every move of the most popular girls and boys in the Upper East Side. They can't get away with anything, as the truth always comes out.

 The plot remains interesting each series because of its famous and dramatic plot twists. Everything can change within a split second on gossip girl. The programme contains many main characters. Each character is very different to one another; I think this makes the programme more interesting. My favourite character is Serena Van Der Woodsen who is played by Blake Lively. Serena is such a complex character and is very hard to figure out. I often feel she is misunderstood when most of the time she only means good.

 I think the audience of this programme is for anyone over the age of 13. I know many people who watch this programme, including my mum and both my male and female friends. I think gossip girl can attract any audience with its gripping cliff hangers and plot twists.

60 Seconds About Me