Stop Animation Practice

On the 1st of December Andrea and I met up outside of lesson time to do some filming for our music video. In this time we focused on the introduction of our song. We are planing to create a stop animation for the intro in order to introduce the name of our song and the artists. In Mondays lesson we made a list of everything we would need for our stop animation. We created our stop animation by taking photos. I bought in my camera and took the photos whilst Andrea moved around the props (shells and paper balloons that we drew and cut out). The layout looked very nice but when we uploaded all the photos onto our mac and put it into imovie in Fridays lesson i noticed that the props were moving far too slow and it wasn't very clear, although i did say that we needed to move everything around faster. I guess this was a good way to practice but i do think that we need to do it all over again. I am planing on meeting up with Andrea in our next free period so we can do this again, faster this time so that it's more choppy and clear.

I will be uploading the first one we made so you can see exactly what i am talking about and when we've redone it i'll post that up too so that you can see the difference between both stop animations. 

As a prefect i volunteered to help the Media Studies department during prospective post-16 evening. This presentation took place the night of the trip so i stayed the evening to help out. I provided parents with advice and information about the Media Studies course at Enfield County School and answered any questions they had by applying my past and current knowlege about this subject. I also showed parents and students previous music videos and film openings and talked them through the process of making these. I also informed them about the written part of the exam and gave advice for when it comes to revising and taking notes in class.

Richmix Education

Today we went on a media trip to Richmix in Bethnal Green in order to gain more knowledge about music videos and to meet music producers and directors themselves, this gave us a chance to ask any relevant questions. It was an eventful and very useful day as i managed to take quite a lot of notes and advice in order to help with making our own music video.

Our day consisted of many speech's starting with a morning session with Pete Fraser who is the chief examiner of OCR media studies, he talked about the history of the music video codes and conventions and gave us some top tips for making our own pop promo.

Pete also spoke about equpitment that was used to show voyeurism, he spoke about scopitones which is a type of jukebox usually seen in music videos especially a while back when artists first started to create music videos.

The chief examiner Pete showed us a range of examples showing the use of voyeurism and the male gaze.
We found that these codes and conventions are used in a wide range of music videos.

Here are some of the examples we were shown:



At 0:20 we are shown the use of voyeurism where we see a frame within a frame (on the scopitone) of the artist looking back at himself. Then at 1:14 we are shown an example of the male gaze and how it has been used. We are shown this with the use of a downwards panning shot of the lady and her bare legs.



This particular video of 50 Cent's - Candy Shop is another example we were shown which uses a lot of male gaze throughout. This is presented with the use of revealing clothing, sexual innuendos such as the whip and the bath (two females pouring chocolate over themselves).

Voyeurism is also used very much in the music video for example, at 2.55 when the photo frame on the wall shows the female artist singing, again this is a frame within a frame.



At 0.36 voyeurism is used where we are shown the artist Jay-Z through the station screen. We also really like this music video as it is very snappy, various different camera angles have been used which are very effective for example, panning shots, point of view shots, zooming in and out, close up shots etc.

In the afternoon we were shown clips by Liz Kessler who works in the industry and produces music videos, followed by Corin Hardy who works as a music video director. They both showed us clips and gave us advice and useful information. 

I particularly enjoyed watching some of Corin Hardy's clips and was amazed at what he was able to produce with the limited budget he had at times.

Here is a few of Corin Hardy's work that he had time to show us:







Here are some photos of us on the trip:

Stuart Hall's Theory

Audience Positioning - Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall developed the concept of audience positioning as a result of examining news reports on industrial strikes. 

He claimed that media representations established a framework for possible responses – this is like setting an agenda for issues to be raised with audiences.

The responses to an audience watching a media text would be likely to fall into

three main categories:

 Dominant readings:

Audiences respond to the way narrative is constructed and adopt the points of view implied

Oppositional readings:

Audiences reject the way the narrative is constructed, question and challenge the points of view implied

Negotiated readings:

Audiences partially accept the way the narrative is constructed but can see both points of view:

the dominant and oppositional readings

Aberrant readings:

is an additional interpretation: where the text is read in a deviant and largely unanticipated

manner, the preferred reading not being recognised at all

Final Cut Express Training

On Friday 9th December a visitor will be coming in to our media class to teach us a few skills and answer any questions we may have. I'm really looking forward to learning new skills and asking questions. I know Final Cut Express is quite hard to get the hang of when you have no experience but hopefully I will be more knowledgable after the visit. I have a few questions prepared already that i would like to ask.

Here are a  few questions i would like to ask:

1. How do you create various different split screen effects?

2. Can you speed up or slow down a few things in the same shot and keep the rest normal?

3. Is it possible to create a blurry effect as well as keeping some areas normal in the same shot?

4. How can add different colour effects?

I always look through a particular website to find pictures that are relevant to my work because they have the best pictures I've seen. I searched for the ones below and thought it would be good for me to post  them on my blog because they have relevance to our music video. Some of them are ideas that i would like to explore for our music video, such as the water droplets on the fingers, bubbles and creating words out of petals. I think all the pictures are really pretty and would like to use still images in our music video in order to add a different effect and make it more interesting.

I came up with a really good idea which i shared with Andrea. My idea was to create something like the photo below but as a stop animation. So basically having the tears run down the fingers in a break-up verse. I think it'll look quite cool, quirky and fun which is the style of our theme. I've done quite a few stop animations before so I'm not too worried about how it will turn out.

Our initial idea was to sing in red petals but then i thought a forest would be a better location for singing about a break-up. This is because there are dry brown leaves that would work well with the idea of a break-up and will contrast well from the red petals. So now we are going to use the red petals during a happy verse/chorus and the brown leaves after to represent the break-up.

I like the idea of creating words out of petals for our opening, maybe to write our names seeing as we're going to have a lot of them. I think this should also be a stop animation. I mentioned this idea to Andrea and she liked it too.

I aslo shared the idea of having various idfferent split screens with Andrea near the end of the music video when the couple get back together, which by the way is not expected at all. I think it will look very effective and it will add a different element to it. Plus it'll be good to learn how to create split screen effects. After i shared this idea with Andrea she contributed one of her ideas which was to have different shots in each box, so something going on in each box in a sequence. In this case it'll be the build up to the making up.

This picture is an idea both Andrea and I thought would look really good in our music video. We are hoping to go  up to Southend and draw a heart in the sand and hope for the sea to wash it away. I think this will look really effective.