Life on Mars Clip Analysis - Editing and Sound

Sound Clip

This clip of Sherlock Holmes begins with the sound of a fruit machine, this represents Sherlock's chain of thought and he is scrolling through the possible letters that are missing. There is non-digetic sound throughout the clip but some digetic sounds are merged in every now and then. The music begins quiet and at a fairly jumpy tempo. The audience is able to hear lots of different instruments used to make the sound. A guitar or banjo is introduced at approx. 0:11. As the clip proceeds, the music increases slightly. Each time Sherlock analyses the body and the audience is shown a piece of evidence there is a significant note played to highlight the importance of the evidence. The sound is usually a guitar be strum. Some heavier instruments are then introduced when Sherlock is finding out that this woman is a "Serial Adulterer". Drums are lightly being played to add some thickness to the sound. When he removes the woman's ring the audience hear a swooshy noise which emphasized the fact that it was regularly removed, this is the digetic sound. As soon as the audience are shown Sherlock's face, he smiles and the music ends on a single note. The first piece of dialogue is then delivered. Although the whole clip was majority non-digetic, the audience knew exactly what was going on and the music helped them to do so by getting louder throughout and having unique sounds where there was a piece of importance. 

Hotel Babylon Green Screen

Textual Analysis and Representation

Camera Shots, Angle, Movement and Composition

Shots: establishing shot, master shot, close-up, mid-shot, long shot, wide shot, two-shot, aerial shot, point of view shot, over the shoulder shot, and variations of these.
Angle: high angle, low angle, canted angle.
Movement: pan, tilt, track, dolly, crane, steadicam, hand-held, zoom, reverse zoom.
Composition: framing, rule of thirds, depth of field – deep and shallow focus, focus pulls.
　

Editing

Includes transition of image and sound – continuity and non-continuity systems.

Cutting: shot/reverse shot, eyeline match, graphic match, action match, jump cut, crosscutting, parallel editing, cutaway; insert.
Other transitions, dissolve, fade-in, fade-out, wipe, superimposition, long take, short take, slow motion, ellipsis and expansion of time, post-production, visual effects.
　

Sound 

Diegetic and non-diegetic sound; synchronous/asynchronous sound; sound effects; sound motif, sound bridge, dialogue, voiceover, mode of address/direct address, sound mixing, sound perspective.
Soundtrack: score, incidental music, themes and stings, ambient sound.
　

Mise-en-Scène

Production design: location, studio, set design, costume and make-up, properties.
Lighting; colour design

January 2010 Mark Scheme

65259 Mark Scheme January

Editing Clip

The clip of Sherlock Holmes uses narrative continuity editing which is typical of British TV dramas. This short clip is full of jump cuts and reverse shots back and forth from Sherlock, Watson and the body that Sherlock is analysing. Very plain text appears on the screen, white and no effect to try and not draw any attention away from the main image. The text is informing the audience of Sherlock's exact train of though, it's done in a very effective way by which when the name Rachel fills in the gaps of the scratching's on the floor and the last letter is spun around, like a fruit machine roll. The long pauses on each clue allows the audience to focus in to what it means and also to slow down the fast, jump shots which could confuse the audience. The reverse shots back and forth from the different characters created tension and allowed us to see into the mind set of all three, just by their facial expressions and body language - as there was no dialogue. The slow movement over each piece that Sherlock analyses is smooth and seems natural. When the text is showing that the woman was unhappily married (00:36) the colour of the image changes and flashes with the clear cut image and then a reduced brightness image. Throughout the clip, the camera has a permanent lens flare which    gives the illusion that the clip is excellent quality and that it is reflecting off of something. As lens flare are said to occur when the camera is zoomed - this clip would confirm this as all the shots are close-ups which could be a reason why there is a lens flare in the majority of the shots. The use of no dialogue and text instead is that we are able to take in the whole clip and get into Sherlock's mind set - the non-digetic music used is fast and creates a lot of tension with the sound of the constant ticking. 

Independent Research 6

Independent Research 5

Michael Haneke: There's no easy way to say this…

Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or-winning film Amour will strike some as brutal, as its elderly characters grapple with the indignities of ageing. The director proves a challenging subject to interview as he evades and obstructs – much like his films

Michael Haneke likes to say that his films are easier to make than to watch. Cast and crew have fun, but he expects his audience to be disturbed, affronted, even sickened. "On the set I make jokes," he said when we met in Paris to discuss Amour, which deservedly won him the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year. "I can't get too involved, or it turns into sentimental soup. I try to keep it light."

What he tried to alleviate while making Amour was a grim anatomy of elderly debility and dementia, complete with incontinence, forced feeding and the eventual stench of putrefaction. The film follows the decline of an octogenarian musician, who after a stroke is nursed at home by her adoring but increasingly angry and bewildered husband. The roles are played, as Haneke said, by "two great actors who go beyond acting. They both knew that this situation will concern them in their own lives in the very near future". Emmanuelle Riva is now 85, Jean-Louis Trintignant is 81; because films from the 1950s preserve their nubile youth – Riva in bed with her Japanese lover in Hiroshima Mon Amour, Trintignant worshipping the bosom of Bardot in And God Created Woman – it's alarming to see them now with stiff but fragile limbs and worn, sagging faces. Their anxiety is unfeigned, their injuries not acted. Riva had to strip naked for a scene in which a bossy nurse bathes her; she didn't believe, until the moment came, that Haneke was really going to oblige her to undress. Trintigant's arduous limp is the memento of a motorcycleaccident, and to compound his afflictions he broke his hand during the filming.

Amour is stark and sometimes brutal, as you would expect from a director who specialises in emotional extremity. Haneke's The Seventh Continentis about the doggedly meticulous suicide of an entire family, Funny Games about the torture and slaughter of another household; The Piano Teacher studies the hang-ups of a heroine who slices her genitalia with a razor and begs to be whipped. But the new film has a grave compassion not seen before in his work. Its subject, as Haneke put it, is "How do I deal with the fact that someone I love is suffering?", and its private source is the agony of the aunt who brought Haneke up when his feckless parents, both actors, realised they had no talent for child-raising. At the age of 92, crippled by rheumatism, his aunt overdosed on sleeping pills. Haneke found her in time, and rushed her to the hospital. She had previously begged him to help her die; he pointed out that since he was her heir, he might have ended in prison. A year after her first attempt, she swallowed more pills and put herself out of her misery. Though the circumstances in Amour are different, Haneke passes on his personal dilemma to Trintignant, who copes in his own mad, heroic way.

Earlier Haneke films have dealt with a casual, motiveless murder inBenny's Video, and the indiscriminate shooting of a crowd in71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. But Amour examines dying, a process that is more protracted and much more upsetting to watch. There is less drama here, because the decay is predictable and wearily gradual. All the same, the climax of Amour is a scene that takes you by surprise and leaves you numb.

Probably, like me, you won't know whether to be outraged or moved to tears by what you see. Haneke mistrusts the idea of catharsis, and thinks that Hollywood films have prostituted it by supplying "false [because too quick] answers". That's why his own plots are unresolved: Hidden is a whodunnit which leaves us unsure who did what to whom, and his adaptation of Kafka's The Castle breaks off, like the unfinished novel, in the middle of a sentence. At the end of Amour, the daughter of Riva and Trintignant, played by Isabelle Huppert, returns to her parents' apartment to sit and silently ponder what has happened. She represents us; perhaps, Haneke said to me, she incarnates "our bad conscience", since we have paid to witness the pain of fictional characters. Is she experiencing catharsis, which is a kind of purgation? It depends on what you project on to her frozen face; all I know is that my own feelings aboutAmour, when I calmed down enough to sort them out, were composed in equal parts of the terror and pity that Aristotle thought were the aftermath of tragedy.

The man who devised these torments has a passing resemblance to El Greco's emaciated saints. Haneke dresses exclusively in black, offset by a waterfall of white hair. Although he refuses to appear in his own films – he casts his wife Susanne, an antique dealer, as an extra instead – he has said that he fancies playing a Capuchin monk, since they wear such stylish hoods. The remark catches his combination of asceticism and elegance: an American journalist once described him as "a haute-couture Gandalf", a wizard who is a little too fussy about his wardrobe.

Haneke made his name by berating the complacency and amnesia of his native Austria and deriding the glossy, spendthrift consumerism of American movies: he relished the scandal at Cannes in 1998 when audiences jeered as the family in The Seventh Continent, having smashed their household goods, flushed wads of money down the toilet. Yet the enemy of the bourgeoisie is impeccably bourgeois, and when I arrived for our meeting at a swanky hotel near the Arc de Triomphe, I found Haneke – just off a flight from Vienna, where he lives – tucking into a luxurious lunch in the restaurant. Unhappy about being glimpsed in a situation where he wasn't in control, he scuttled upstairs to his suite and then, after an interval, made an entrance in the room set aside for our interview.

I expected him to be detached, even haughty. Huppert, from whom Haneke extracted such a lacerating performance in The Piano Teacher, once called him "a curious combination of Robert Bresson and Alfred Hitchcock". Bresson in films like Pickpocket or A Man Escaped watches souls striving for redemption; Hitchcock in Psycho or Vertigo explores the incurably neurotic mind. Haneke mixes the contemplativeness of the one with the mischief and malice of the other. Like a god, he studies the world from a distance, unable to intervene, perhaps amused by the small, insignificant disasters he observes. Hence his fondness for placing the camera far away from its subjects: Hidden coolly watches as a child's small world falls apart, his cries muffled by the intervening space; andCode Unknown concludes by showing how life, likened by Haneke to a flea circus, indifferently unravels on a Paris boulevard.

In person he is affable enough, but he prefers to have his contact with reality mediated by a camera. On this occasion his buffer was a translator; although Haneke's English is serviceable, he insisted on a go-between. He listened impassively as I told him how the climax of Amourhad astounded me. He didn't require a translation, but responded by asking, in a syrupy Viennese accent, "Was ist die Frage?" (What is the question?) He then sat back to enjoy his power and my flustered impotence. I began to understand the discomfort of his actors, who are obliged to play by his rules. Huppert had a tantrum when he refused to allow her to decide on the motives of her character in his apocalyptic fable The Time of the Wolf. Naomi Watts, whom he directed in the American remake of Funny Games, broke down in tears and protested that she was not a marionette as he bossily choreographed a scene in which she bustled about the kitchen. Haneke's ideal interpreter was the late Susanne Lothar, who played Watts's role as the excruciated wife in the original Austrian version of Funny Games. "She must have been masochistic," said Haneke approvingly, remembering that Lothar spent half an hour sobbing in her dressing room to prepare for one scene of abuse.

Haneke has a sly, sceptical awareness of the way the cinema manipulates us, passing off propaganda or advertising as reality. He is also, however, an arch manipulator. Given notice that this was to be an inquisition not a conversation, I rephrased my compliments and asked him a question about the startling climax of Amour. On principle he refused to answer. "Ah," he said, smirking as I tumbled into the trap, "you are asking me to interpret, and I will not. Every meaning is fine, all interpretations are OK. I do not choose between them, because I dislike explanations. It happened so with Juliette Binoche in Hidden. She asked me if the woman she played was having an affair with her colleague at work. There were two scenes together with this man: I told her to play one as if they were involved, the other as if they were not. I doubt that she found this to be helpful advice.

"We must allow,' he said, "for complexities and contradictions. When I am asked this kind of thing, I usually say I don't know the answer because I don't have such a good relationship with the author." He is of course himself the author, or auteur, since he writes all his films as well as directing them, so he was pleading lack of self-knowledge. He watched me fume for a moment, then giggled – a recurrent mannerism, perhaps an apology for his unco-operativeness, perhaps a signal of his temporary triumph.

There is a theory behind this game of hide and seek. His films argue against "the disempowerment of the spectator", which is why Amourbegins at a piano recital where we survey the audience in the Théâtre des Champs Elysées but don't ever see the pianist. "I give the spectator the possibility of participating," Haneke said. "The audience completes the film by thinking about it; those who watch must not be just consumers ingesting spoon-fed images." I was reminded of a scene in Amour when Trintignant spoon-feeds Riva, which might be another of Haneke's little parables: she spits the liquid back in his face, and he slaps her. "A film cannot stop at the screen," said Haneke, repeating one of his mantras. "Cinema is a dialogue." But it's not a dialogue in which he wants to take part: while empowering spectators, he chooses to baffle or obfuscate interviewers. Another fusillade of giggles filled the silence as I started again.

I quoted a comment Trintignant makes in the film, when Huppert arrives to find she has been locked out of Riva's sickroom. Trintignant summarises the ghastly scene inside, and says "None of this deserves to be shown." If it can't be shown to the patient's daughter, how did Haneke justify exposing it to a crowd of strangers in a cinema? "A film can show everything," he said, retreating to an untested generalisation. "It is different if someone from within the family says this. You have only not to betray your idea of what is human behaviour, and not add misery to what is actually there." That didn't seem to me to be an answer, since Trintignant is not talking about a bedside visit but about the propriety of making a spectacle out of decay and death. More giggles covered Haneke's reluctance to continue.

I began to understand the reasons for his shiftiness. Amour extends Hitchcock's infringements of taboo in Psycho, which Haneke much admires. Hence Riva's ordeal in the bathroom, and another almost unwatchable moment that corresponds to the revelation of Mrs Bates rotting in the fruit cellar. (At least Riva was still able to act, which gave her a way of defending herself; by contrast Haneke cast Annie Girardot as a doddering matriarch in Hidden at a time when Alzheimer's disease had left her unsure of who she was.) Haneke makes us witness things from which we would usually avert our eyes. Is he doing so to cater to our prurience, as when Huppert visits the peep show in The Piano Teacherand sniffs a semen-caked tissue she picks from a bin while watching a gross, grunting video of copulation? Or is he punishing us by compelling us to confront mortality, as the young boy in The White Ribbon does when he studies a corpse?

Haneke expects films to cause nightmares. When first taken to the cinema at the age of six to see Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, he began screaming in terror and had to be ushered out. After seeing Pasolini's Sadean epic Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, he remembers feeling nauseated for a month: that was the highest compliment he could pay the film's anthology of perverse and repellent sexual tableaux. In the past, he has had no compunction about admitting his sadistic motives. "I've been accused of 'raping' the audience," he said in 2006, "and I admit to that freely. All movies assault the viewer in one way or another." He added, rather snakily: "I'm trying to rape the viewer into independence."

When Haneke directed Don Giovanni at the Paris Opéra in 2007, he turned Mozart's blithe seducer into a psychopathic rapist who ripped the clothes from one of his victims and violated her onstage. Haneke explained away the act metaphorically: his Don Giovanni was a pumped-up financier in an office tower, so we were watching Wall Street fuck the little people of the world. But I can't help speculating about his fascination with the ruthless libertine, especially since the cast of Amour includes an operatic baritone who was once a notable Don Giovanni: William Shimell plays Huppert's husband, a philandering musician. "We met after I saw him as Don Alfonso in Cosí Fan Tutte," said Haneke. "The part in the film is small, I thought it would be amusing. Why not? And he will sing Alfonso when I direct Cosí in Madrid next year." That too is telling, since Alfonso in Mozart's opera is a manipulator, an unmoved mover who dares two young male friends to seduce each other's fiancees. Instead of questioning Haneke about his self-identification with this elderly cynic, I asked why Riva, early in her illness, shudders with disgust at what she calls Shimell's "British sense of humour". It's easy to imagine her son-in-law jollying her along, boosting her morale by teasing her. Would that be so very wrong? "I cannot say," replied Haneke with a disdainful sniff. "I am not British." His giggle this time was entirely humourless.

Foiled in my efforts to find out about his handling of people, I mentioned his lethal history with livestock. Trintignant traps a pigeon in Amour, and after appearing to smother it he chooses, in a beautiful rush of emotional release, to fondle and caress the bird. Haneke, I suspect, would have preferred to wring its neck, since like a method actor the pigeon ignored his direction. "Ah, that was awful! There were little seeds to guide it, but it went its own way through the apartment, always differently." It survived, however, unlike its fellow creatures in previous Haneke films. The family dog is the first victim in Funny Games, several horses have their throats slit in The Time of the Wolf, and Benny's Video begins with the butchery of a squealing pig – Haneke's perfectionism required the sacrifice of three porkers. Of course he had a theory ready to account for this carnage. "It is a hierarchy of power," he said. "Men on top, then women, then children, then animals at the lowest end. They are the ones that have to bear it."

But how much did these involuntary performers actually have to bear? I prodded Haneke about the aquarium in The Seventh Continent, overturned when the family wrecks its house as a prelude to suicide: the tropical fish flap and flounder in a sea of shattered glass. "We did our best to protect the fish," he said, which is not quite the same as the "no animals were harmed" declaration that the RSPCA requires. "To be honest, we did that scene many times. The whole studio was flooded, and the crew tried to grab the fish and put them in buckets of water every time I called 'cut'. By the end one or two were floating with their stomachs up. I believe they died of shock." This time he had the decency to not titter.

Blocking my efforts to implicate him in his films, he resumed his theorising. "You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same." A film, according to this logic, exists only in the eye or mind of the beholder; Haneke, preserving his own moral superiority, takes no responsibility if someone sees Funny Games as a snuff movie or The Piano Teacher as pornography, and he remains blameless if we view Amour as a chilly experiment that vivisects its elderly actors.

Haneke is the most incisive analyst of the kind of evasion he practises in interviews: it amounts, in his judgment, to a national psychosis. The Viennese parents in Benny's Video cover up the evidence of the murder their son has committed at home, and the German pastor in The White Ribbon indignantly refuses to recognise the horrors – including the crucifixion of a pet bird – that abound in his household. Haneke is dealing, as he has often said, with Austria's suppressed guilt, its refusal to acknowledge its shamingly recent past. Born in 1942, he grew up with this collective denial, which has become second nature to him; he has no war crimes to live down, but he must sometimes be alarmed by the darker, more transgressive impulses of his imagination. I didn't ask him about this, because he had already given me his all-purpose obstructive answer: he has only a nodding acquaintance with the author, so the dubious motives I attribute to him must be my own.

His slipperiness left me feeling frustrated, and I heard the echo of his pesky giggle, an aural version of the Cheshire cat's smile, in the Paris street when I left. Then I remembered the impact Amour had on me – a tribute to the beatific grace of its actors and to their physical and moral courage, yet also to Haneke's unsparing quest for the truth about the way we live and die. A film director has the right to remain invisible; hauled out of hiding by the marketers, he is entitled to conceal or to profess ignorance of the urges that underlie his work. But it's easier to watch Haneke's films, harrowing as they are, than to meet the man who made them.

What's wrong with the British Film Industry?

The above video really helped inspire my thoughts on the bigger picture of the film industry and how his views did in fact match with mine. I was finding it difficult to put my thoughts on the film industry down as I wasn't sure how to word them. After watching this video I found that he put each point very simply so that it's easy to understand. Although he is speaking about the film industry as a whole the same information and views still apply to the British film industry too.
The first issue that I find is wrong with the British film industry is that producers of films are concentrating too much on making filming costs low budget that the quality of the film decreases. They then go out and spend absurd amounts of money on marketing and promotional means to try and get people to watch the film to increase box office profits. The problem with this is that the marketing of the film is excellent quality but then it doesn't follow through when people go to watch the film and they are disappointed and give it bad ratings. If film producers were to spend more money and time on making the film as best as it can be and ticking all the boxes then they wouldn't need to spend as much on promotional methods because there are many cheap alternatives to advertise. Good reviews in themselves are a great advertising method as people do go to watch new movies based on reviews from other people. As the man in the video above discusses, the internet is not the new way to advertise films as it just doesn't work and doesn't hit people as much as other forms of marketing. Although it may be a cheaper method - the profit made from the marketing will eliminate the "cheap" costs. If one was to spend more on creating a TV trailer ad, it will interest more people to go out to the cinema and watch it and therefore the box office profits will satisfy the money spent on creating the trailer ad.
After some research online I found a number of different issues and problems that people were discussing that were wrong in the British film industry. Some may be matter of opinion but others facts. I read some information about problems within the film industry spoke about how our British film industry didn't base the making on their films on audience research and what the audience want to see in the cinema, but what's "in fashion". If a lot of romance films are being created - we produce another romance film and release it. I think this is where we are going wrong, instead of following the crowd in what everyone is making we should think of new, different creative story lines which will be unexpected. This will therefore cause more interest - linking back to the marketing issue. If we made more interesting trailers like short, effective ones which will make the audience eager to go and see what the film is about.
Lack of originality is another main issue I kept coming across when doing my research. People are saying that nowadays people don't want to see "perfect people" constantly being aired on TV and in films. They want real life stories which they can relate to and help them overcome problems they may be personally experiencing. People used to enjoy fantasizing over fictional characters who live the "perfect life" as they thought that maybe they might achieve it one day. Now they realise that it's most probably not going to happen and have taken a pessimistic attitude to the situation. They want to see people getting hurt because maybe they have been hurt or are experiencing hurt.
Overall I have discovered that the British film industry is becoming some what boring to various different people and to stop it collapsing indefinitely we need to try and introduce brand new, exciting stories and young, talented people to try and make the cinema experience more edgy and mysterious. This will solve the problem as people will feel that going to the cinema is an exciting free-time activity as opposed to a chore.

Metonymy

A trope in which one entity is used to stand for another associated entity. Metonymy is, more specifically, a replacive relationship that is the basis for a number of conventional metonymic expressions occurring in ordinary language. 

The pen is mightier than the sword. 
Pen and sword represent publishing and military force, respectively.
The following examples illustrate the controller-for-controlled metonymy:
Nixon bombed Hanoi.
Nixon stands for the armed forces that Nixon controlled.
A Mercedes rear-ended me.
The word me stands for the car that the speaker was driving.

Hegemony/Hegemonic

Hegemony: Leadership/A idea of dominance within people For example: One social class over another 

Hegemonic: Having hegemony/Having power

Hotel Babylon - Clip Analysis

Race/Class
• Other races: audience empathises for the, as they are discriminated against
• White people are clearly the dominant race
• High angle: looks down upon immigrants shows authority/superior person
• Eye level: the audience sees eye to eye with the white people
• All of the immigrants are put into one very small room like they are insignificant
Sound 
• Non-diegetic sound builds tension
• Music throughout the whole clip
• Diegetic: the shouting of the workers highlights their worry
• Knock on door then a long pause- creates tension for the audience
• Music is much slower at the end of the clip to portray emotion: sadness because a family member has been lost
• Music throughout reflects how you are supposed to be feeling
Mise-en-Scene 
• Where the immigration workers lockers are situated looks very dirty/scruffy as if they arent looked after.
• Immigrants costumes contrast with those of a higher class
High class: suits, royal blues, very smart etc.
Immigrants: Ratty overalls
• Owner/manager of hotel is wearing a very smart/posh suit to emphasise her role
• Those working for the immigration patrol were wearing blazers to emphasise their higher role and higher class
• Police uniform: well known, authority, looked up too
Camera 
• Panning shots
• Low angle when woman is on the floor for sympathy
• Pan up from hoover
• Tracking Shots
• Zoom into receptionist, we know the focus is on her
Editing 
• Sharp, short cuts from each cut
• Constant change of angle

Waterloo Road Analysis

0:00 - 1:20
This clip is from the BBC1 series Waterloo Road. It's a TV drama set at a rough school which is always experiencing big dramas each episode! I chose to analyse this episode because I feel that it shows really good camera shots. The clip begins with a long shot of a woman getting out her car and locking it. She is looking towards something behind the camera with severe intrest. This then turns into a restrictive narrative as the audience cannot share what she is looking at. She then walks closer to the camera. The auience is then able to see what she was looking at, by an over shoulder shot. A quick cut transition moves to the next scen and a establishing shot allows the auidence to clearly see exactly whats happening in the scene before any dialogue is spoken. It's clear that there is a performance about to happen as there is an audience set up infront of a stage. The camera then moves to backstage and school children are seen painting the set. They begin to have a converstaion with eachother and the camera cuts from each pair, back and forth. An edited transition then cuts to the stage again which blurs a circle. A close up of a man scrolling up a dial on a lights panel is shown. Then the camera in moved to the isle of the audience where at the end sits the light panel and a man and a woman sitting behind it. The camera is slowly zooming into them as they are speaking. Now and then cutting back to whats happening on stage. An over shoulder shot is then shown from behind the two people at the lights panel. The audience is then able to see the panel and also the stage ahead of it. At 1:18 tracking is used to follow the boy to enters the next scene. Background music is being played so that the show isn't silent when no dialogue is being said.

Polysemic

Those who reject textual determinism emphasize the 'polysemic' nature of texts - their plurality of meanings.

Synecdoche

A figure of speech involving the substitution of part for whole, genus for species or vice versa.

Symbolic

A mode in which the signifier does not resemble the signified but which is arbitrary or purely conventional - so that the relationship must be learnt (e.g. the word 'stop', a red traffic light, a national flag, a number)

Indexical

A mode in which the signifier is not purely arbitrary but is directly connected in some way (physically or causally) to the signified - this link can be observed or inferred (e.g. smoke, weathercock, thermometer, clock, spirit-level, footprint, fingerprint, knock on door, pulse rate, rashes, pain)

Iconic

A mode in which the signifier is perceived as resembling or imitating the signified (looking, sounding, feeling, tasting or smelling like it) - being similar in having some of its qualities

Camera Shots

ESPRIT Advert Analysis

Esprit

Audience and Institute

Re-written: Monarch of the Glen Mock Exam

In the clip shown of The Monarch of the Glen age is represented in many different ways. Different parts of the clip help the audience understand that age difference is a vital part to help explain the narrative. Camera, editing, sound and mise en scene are all techniques in which age is represented through.

Mise en scene is everything involved within a scene. Including: setting, props, costume, design, actors, body language and objects. We first see the girl in the clip as she appears in jeans and a white top, the colour white has connotations of innocence and in contrast to other characters, displays her femininity. When Amy is asked to drive the truck she reluctantly agrees and the audience can see the masculine, blue colour contrast with Amy’s young age and her innocence. We are introduced to Amy's headmaster and are immediately aware of his elder age by his facial features and also his clothes. The tweet pattern shows old-age and a red tie is worn to represent authority or maybe his wealth. It’s clear that Amy is isolated as she is surrounded be older generations who emphasise her youth. When we venture inside The Glen we can see wooden walls and antique furniture which places the building in an age of tradition. Amy's age is not stereotypically seen in places like these so she begins to look out of place. Amy's female character influences how she appears to the audience as it increases her vulnerability and weakness. When Paul confronts Amy about the situation of her running away from home he uses hand gestures to put across his disappointment not just to Amy but to the audience as well. He points his finger at Amy which implies frustration and anger towards her. She finds it hard to look him directly in the eye which demonstrates to the audience she knows that she has done wrong and that Paul is not pleased that she lied to him.

Camera and editing were used in this clip to represent age especially by the camera shots used. An establishing shot opens the scene with a view of Scottish Highlands which sets the scene for the audience and displays this rural setting for them. Close-ups are very effectively used to show age as you are only able to see the characters face so you are then therefore let into the characters thoughts and emotions are clearer. The close-up of Amy in the care shows the audience her young face and we can see her youth through the expressions she presents. A crowd shot shows all the workers working in a unity. This allows us to see how all the workers are elder than Amy and could question as to why Amy isn’t working with them. Binary opposites are shown clearly with reverse shots and highlight Levi-Strauss’ theorem of clear character opposites. An eye-line shot is used as Amy looks at the photo on her mirror and the audience is let into her feelings and are able to see that Amy is just a girl inside. As Amy leaves the room, the camera slowly zooms into the photo Amy was looking at which lets the audience see closer what Amy was looking at and also feel empathy towards her. The only movement the camera makes is when it follows the character in focus at that point by tracking. Panning is also used when we enter a new scene to introduce the audience to a new setting. It’s also used as Amy tried to start the truck and you hear her speak before you see her face. The camera then zooms in onto her face to a close-up. Transitions were mostly cut and there was no fading. The cuts were fairly quick to match the tempo of this particular show/clip.

Sounds allowed us to see how age is represented by Amy and the other younger boy both have harsh Scottish accents and opposing that, the elderly headmaster speaks in Received Pronunciation which again, highlights his age and upper class. Digetic sounds are used to create normality in the scene, the sound of birds, weather and general background noise and dialogue. In Paul and Amy’s confrontation, he speaks in a way that a parent would address their child which creates the idea that Paul looks at Amy as a child and feels emotions towards her like she was his own. Non-digetic music is played firstly outside as the workers are working; the music is country and lively. It brightens up the scene. A quick change in scene clashes with the music and a slower song is played as the woman discovers that Amy has runaway. This could demonstrate concern for Amy as she is only a child and shows the woman has sincere worry for her.

Overall age is represented very clearly due to all the above factors and a clear determination between different generations and how they appear to us. I think the most contributing factor, out of Camera, Editing, Sound and Mise en Scene is definitely mise en scene as its the visual interpretation of the clip which allows the audience to see how the different ages act and are shown.

Independent Research 4

James Cameron wins Avatar copyright case

Judge rules that Elijah Schkeiban's screenplay for Bats and Butterflies was 'not substantially similar' to sci-fi blockbuster.

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Protected planet ... James Cameron's 2009 hit Avatar. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Everett /Rex Features

Had Elijah Schkeiban succeeded in his copyright case against James Cameron over the blockbuster film Avatar, he might just have been in line for a large payout. However, a US judge yesterday dashed the novelist and screenwriter's hopes of securing a share of the film's $2.7bn (£1.7bn) box-office gross by throwing out the case. Cameron's lawyers had successfully argued that it is not possible to copyright such elements as a "weak hero" and a plot twist in which "the bad guys attack the good guys", reports The Wrap blog.

 

In his judgment, US district court Judge Manuel Real said Schkeiban's screenplay for a film titled Bats and Butterflies, based on his own series of children's books, was "not substantially similar" to Avatar. The screenwriter had complained that Cameron borrowed multiple plot elements from his script, which he said the director must have been passed by a third party in the film industry. However, Real ruled that Bats and Butterflies was "a straightforward children's story that lacks the depth and complexity of the moods expressed in Avatar".

Lawyers for Cameron had focused on elements of Schkeiban's argument in which he suggested that wheelchair-bound Avatar hero Jake Sully was based on his own protagonist, a small boy, because both were physically "weak". He also argued that a segue in which the bad guys turn on the good guys was based on his own similar twist.

"Even at this basic level of idea, the characters differ," Cameron's lawyers successfully argued. "Being seen as weak is not protectable expression." They later added: "Bad guys attacking good guys is not copyrightable."

Schkeiban had also claimed that the multi-levelled homes inhabited by the Na'vi tribe on Avatar's moon, Pandora, were comparable to the plants and trees seen in Bats and Butterflies. "The Na'vi can also experience their ancestors through a connection with sacred trees," Cameron's lawyers responded. "In contrast, the plants in Bats and Butterflies are just window-dressing."

Schkeiban's case is just one of a half dozen made against Cameron for copyright over Avatar since 2009. So far, none of the plaintiffs have succeeded in their actions.

Independent Research 3

Toronto film festival 2012: key contenders – in pictures

From Looper to Cloud Atlas, with a cagefight between Anna Karenina and Great Expectations in between, here are some of the films expected to have the best chance of nabbing prizes in Toronto

 

 

Toronto film festival – review

Joss Whedon's radical reworking of the Bard and Steve Coogan in What Maisie Knew are among the highlights of the 37th Toronto film festival.

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Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Hugh Grant at the Cloud Atlas premiere at the Toronto film festival. Photograph: Eric Charbonneau/WireImage

Toronto sometimes seems like it's still a work in progress. Every block downtown quakes with drilling, every skyscraper in four sports a tarpaulin anorak. Residents move into apartments on the 10th floor when the 12th is still under construction. If there's a new hotel in town – and there is: Trump, all black bathrooms and diamanté walls – then that's where people head. There, or to the box-fresh branch of Soho House, unwrapped specially for the fest. Toronto is not a town possessed by the past.

Its film festival, too, is a relative youngster (this is its 37th year), respectful to its elders yet impatient to press ahead. Like its artistic director, ambassador extraordinaire Cameron Bailey, he of the sharp suit and the 6am tweet, it's a festival that prides itself on being on the button.

And unlike its old-world counterparts – Cannes, Venice, Berlin – the programme does not sag with retrospectives. When they do unearth a golden oldie, it's to give it a makeover. The opening night of this year's fest offered not just Rian Johnson's futuristic sci-fi Looper, but also a live read of the American Beauty script, overseen by director Jason Reitman, with Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston in the Kevin Spacey role and Mad Men's Christina Hendricks as his wife.

This sensibility – literate but irreverent, playing with the past rather than doggedly following it – threaded through the 10-day festival. Some of the best-received films were set texts revamped for the HBO generation: Joss Whedon's smartphone-savvy Much Ado About Nothing, shot in his own LA mansion, featuring the cast of Firefly and a fleet of hybrid limos to whisk the returning heroes back to town. What Maisie Knew was transplanted to New York, with Steve Coogan as the father, Julianne Moore as the mother (now a rock star) and Alexander Skarsgård her new lover. Such uprootings deadhead both works, letting them bloom anew.

The straight adaptations, meanwhile, sank politely without making a splash. Mike Newell's Great Expectations is a superfluous version that burst the bubbles of Dickens's best soap, then diligently flattened all its cliffhangers. Midnight's Children adds nothing new to Salman Rushdie's novel other than more Rushdie himself (as well as adapting and executive producing, he provides the extensive voiceover).

Audiences here – and this is the one festival at which they really matter, for the people's choice award is the sole prize bestowed – instead went wild, one way or another, for the Wachowski siblings' time-travelling Cloud Atlas and for Seven Psychopaths, Martin McDonagh's black, snappy follow-up to In Bruges. They were ticked, too, by experimental flights of fancy such as Frances Ha – a mumblecore riff directed by Noah Baumbach that works as a zippy little vehicle for new muse Greta Gerwig – and by Yellow, a surrealist supply teacher saga from Nick Cassavetes.

These last two focus on personal evolution born from disaffection, of folk trying on new hats in the hope of re-routing their destiny. It's a theme echoed in a lot of the films playing, from Looper – in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt must assassinate his future self (played by Bruce Willis) – to Arthur Newman, a much-rubbished erotic drama starring Colin Firth and Emily Blunt as a couple who can only cop off with one another when they assume different identities. Other contenders, such as cop drama End of Watch, and The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cinefrance and Ryan Gosling's follow up to Blue Valentine, worried at the legacy left unless you radically changed your behaviour.

Toronto itself is as preoccupied with reinvention as the films it screens. There's a tangible sense here of the necessity of shedding your skin to best adjust to the new climate; an urgency unfamiliar from European festivals. This year Bailey hosted a summit exploring the new wave of co-productions between the US and Asia – the key concern for movies today, he thinks, for it's in China and Korea that cinemas are mushrooming and funding accumulating.

While Cloud Atlas and Looper were bona fide co-productions, which gave a nod to both territories in their stories, Bailey thinks the films screening at the festival in five years' time will feel much more organic. "Maybe what we'll see is a new version of what happened in the 1930s. The sophisticated comedies that came out of the golden age of Hollywood were actually the work of incoming Europeans."

That the west may have had its day was perhaps felt most keenly in the friendly but muted response to Hyde Park on Hudson, with Bill Murray as President Roosevelt, welcoming George VI to America for a pre-war summit. Two years ago, The King's Speech premiered at the festival, snagging the audience award, then going on to sweep the board at the Oscars. Hyde Park is a sequel of sorts, which hits many of the same buttons and shares some of the same characters. But the world has moved on, and Toronto, for one, is eager not to get left behind. They look up and east here, not back west.

Representation

The description or portrayal of someone or something in a particular way or as being of a certain nature.

Decode

When an addressee converts a coded message into understanding.

Encode

To put something into a form of coding. By representing it as something else.

Semiotics

The study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.

Jutxaposition

The fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.

Binary Opposites

The way opposites are used to create interest in media texts. Eg. good/bad, coward/hero.

Independent Research 2

Colour film of 1901, judged world's earliest ever, found at media museum

British cinematographer's footage of his children, Brighton beach and Hyde Park, pre-date Edwardians' Kinemacolor

A still from Edward Turner's colour film of circa 1902 showing his children, Alfred Raymond, Agnes May and Wilfred Sidney, with their goldfish and sunflowers. Photograph: National Media Museum/PA

There is not much of a plot – goldfish in bowl – but the scene and others from the same rolls of film were revealed on Wednesday as the earliest colour moving images ever made in a discovery that does nothing less than "rewrite film history".
The National Media Museum in Bradford said it had found what it contends are truly historic films from 1901/02, pre-dating what had been thought to be the first successful colour process – Kinemacolor – by eight years.
"We believe this will literally rewrite film history," said the museum's head of collections, Paul Goodman. "I don't think it is an overstatement. These are the world's first colour moving images."
The films were made by a young British photographer and inventor called Edward Turner, a pioneer who can now lay claim to being the father of moving colour film, well before the pioneers of Technicolor.
Turner worked for the American colour photography pioneer Frederic Eugene Ives, which inspired him to begin thinking about colour and moving pictures. It was an expensive business and Turner was backed financially by an entrepreneur called Frederick Lee.
The footage includes a goldfish in a bowl, Turner's three young children with sunflowers, Turner's heavily bonneted daughter on a swing, a scarlet macaw, a panning shot of Brighton beach and pier, soldiers marching in Hyde Park and what is thought to be the very first shot, traffic on London's Knightsbridge looking up to Hyde Park Corner. While film historians have known about the Lee and Turner colour process, it has always been regarded as a noble failure and more of a stepping stone to Kinemacolor in 1909.
The films were in the collection of Charles Urban, an American businessman who settled in London and was a hugely important cinema pioneer who took over backing Turner when Lee began to lose confidence. Urban donated his archive to the Science Museum in 1937 and the films were discovered when the collection was relocated from London to Bradford about three years ago.
The museum's curator of cinematography, Michael Harvey, recalls recognising straight away that they were Lee and Turner films because they were 38mm with two perforations in the frames. "We didn't know they were in the collection," he said.
With "a mixture of excitement and trepidation" he then led the team on the complicated job of seeing whether the films could be reconstructed into colour footage following the precise method that Lee and Turner had patented in 1899. "I did think 'am I being mad?' in trying to do this at one stage," said Harvey. The lengthy project involved a range of people including the film archive experts Brian Pritchard and David Cleveland, and the BFI National Archive with funding from Yorkshire Film Archive and Screen Yorkshire.
Collectively, they managed to prove that the Lee and Turner colour process did work. Harvey recalled sitting entranced in an editing suite watching the footage. "The image of the goldfish was stunning," he said. "Its colours were so lifelike and subtle. Then there was a macaw with brilliantly coloured plumage … I realised we had a significant find on our hands."
The next step was to date the films. Harvey said the footage of the Turner's three children was crucial since they knew when the youngsters had been born. The story was, ultimately, a tragic one though because Turner died at the age of 29, in March 1903.
Urban had turned to George Albert Smith to continue the research but Smith decided the process was unworkable and instead developed Kinemacolor.
Goodman said the discovery highlighted the untapped potential of the museum's collection which contained many wonderful things including the earliest surviving photographic negative and the earliest television broadcasting apparatus.
The footage will be shown to the public from 13 September at the museum in Bradford. And a BBC documentary, The Race for Colour, will be broadcast on 17 December in the Yorkshire and south-east regions.