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.

Jump to comments (…)

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.

ump to comments (…)

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.

Indpendent Research 1

The Possession leads nightmare weekend for US box office

Lawless and The Words fail to exorcise fright flick from top spot for the worst weekend at the US box office in four years

Still holding on … Natasha Calis in The Possession. Photograph: Diyah Pera

What an awful weekend at the US box office. So awful, in fact, that you have to go back four years to the same weekend of the year to find another session when not a single movie grossed more than $10m. The first official weekend of autumn is historically a slow one but this was a poor show and reflected several things.

1. The Possession
2. Production year: 2012
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 15
5. Runtime: 92 mins
6. Directors: Clarence Brown, Ole Bornedal
7. Cast: Clark Gable, Grant Show, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Joan Crawford, Kyra Sedgwick, Madison Davenport, Natasha Calis

Firstly, the movies on offer are either a bit long in the tooth or frankly uninspiring. There are some good 'uns hanging around such as The Bourne Legacy and that old warhorse The Dark Knight Rises, plus a few other choice releases including ParaNorman and Lawless that don't have such broad appeal but are chugging along. Ditto The Expendables 2. But the others have not done as well as might have been expected because, well, they're not that hot. Step forward, The Odd Life of Timothy Green.

Secondly, attendance has been down since the Aurora shootings earlier in the summer – a portion of the US audience is clearly still wary of visiting the multiplex. I spoke to a distribution executive at one of the major studios about this the other day and he said he and his peers had no idea how to turn things around, other than to hope that good movies will bring back the crowds.

A quick word on The Words. The Bradley Cooper/Zoe Saldana romance landed softly in third place on roughly $5m, which is too bad because I liked the movie when I saw it in Sundance. But there is hope. The target audience will be older and that demographic tends not to race to the cinema on opening weekend. So The Words could grow over time and let's not forget that CBS Films wouldn't have spent gazillions on marketing because it can get advertising spots over at its big corporate sister, the CBS network.

That said, the launch was a bruiser for CBS Films and Sundance feels like a distant memory now. Back in January, as Sundance unspooled, this solid, old-fashioned movie was a hot pick as distributors lined up in the snow to see it for the first time. It's a sobering lesson for the distribution community as buyers rush around the Toronto screening rooms this week. Savvy marketing can make something from an average movie, but if your campaign is off-colour even a good one will suffer and these days there's virtually no way back from a poor opening weekend.