BFI Trip

I have recently made a visit to the BFI to watch a lecture on regulation. This included information about the exam board, the purpose of regulation and made reference to particular theorists throughout.

My notes:

• The purpose of regulation is to protect vulnerable audiences and hold the powerful to account. 

• We Media
• Dan Gillmore
• The citizen is the journalist and uses media such as Twitter, blogger and social online media to share their own news. Gillmore believes these types of media are a catalyst for a challenge to hegemony.

• Julian Blanc
• A Canadian man who is now band from the UK and Australia for his videos and talks on how to 'deal with' women. He advised aggressive techniques which has been frowned upon by many women as it is seen as disrespectful and follows traditional patriarchal views on how women should be treated, and how male dominance, even if violent, is okay.
• How did he get noticed?
• Used new media such as twitter, facebook, youtube etc..
• The stigma he got for being 'bad' helped create a greater sense of recognition through viral hype and talkability.

Point being that the internet is technically unregulated, traditional media is 'married' to a producer/institution. making it easier to regulate in terms of distribution.

Entrapment

• IPSO
• Sunday mirror journalist 'befriends' Tory politician without identifying who she is or what her job role was.
• She teased him, flirts with him and got him to send her inappropriate images of himself.
• After this she reports him and the story to her newspaper
• Tory was then forced to resign from his job.
• Alternatives
• Leveson inquiry
• IPSO - statutory regulation
• radical alternative complete freedom of press
• Mags and newspapers have a focused target audience and audience choice
• Dan Gillmor promotes citizen journalism and challenges notions of press regulation and censorship online.

TV regulation
OFCOM and BBC Trust

• OFCOM
• A Government organisation, office od communications
• receiving many complaints from TV programmes
• e.g Xfactor
• Lady Gaga dressed unnecessarily dancing around on stage, flaunting herself and objectifying women.
• Comic relief
• Rowan Atkinson mocking religion by saying 'praying doesn't work', offending many people who involves themselves in religious practices  
• Brass eye
• Paedophiles episode 1000, received complaints to ITC

These complaints are taken into account and apologies can be made and the programmes may be taken off some sites such as BBC iplayer if it receives a number of less trivial complaints. This has happened in some cases such as the Rowan Atkinson scene about religion, whereby it got taken off iPlayer, which in turn resolved the problem and OFCOM felt there was no need to further get involved with the matter.

Email to our band members

We have emailed our band members to confirm times and costumes for filming our pop promo. We have done this to make sure all runs smoothly on the day, so that we can capture as much footage as possible for a better quality outcome.

Costume and Makeup

Band members

The band members costume and make up will be:

• Stubble/beard
• gelled or waxed, neat hair combed back
• dark jeans
• chequered shirt
• black or white top
• smart/casual shoes or trainers

Victim/main character

• long dark hair over eyes
• casual wear such as a hoodie, T-shirt and jeans (skater boy image)
• scruffy shoes
• red eyes, we'll do this by using an onion to make him cry

Mum

• dark hair
• bruised eye, using makeup
• scraggy clothes such as an old cardigan
• lipstick smudged on her lips

Created by Kelly Simpson

Prop List

• Cigarettes
• Mirror
• Rope
• Piano
• Drum kit
• Ashtray
• Glass
• powder (for mum to apply over bruise)
• small, portable mirror

Created by Kelly Simpson and Francesca Carter

Feedback from treatment

We have spoken to an independent music director and producer, Ryan Mackfall to gather some feedback on our treatment. During our Skype call we have asked some general questions such as how he got to where he is now and during this we found out that he started from the bottom, going to gigs asking bands whether or not he can tour with them and shoot them while they perform live, the band which eventually gave him the opportunity was popular rock band 'EnterShakari'. This he gathered experience from and made a successful documentary video which he posted onto youtube.

We asked the question about how he considers audience in his work. He responded by saying that although the audience is important, stressing about them isn't necessary as there are people who deal with the audiences and at the end of the day the work is produced by him and if people do not like it then it doesn't matter as its his inspiration and taste which is portrayed through his work, and if the people don't like his music videos then they simply wont watch them.

We then went on to gather feedback on our particular treatment. We asked him 2 questions which were

- Do you think our narrative is too linear?

- Do you think it would look better as different visuals or a short story?

 

He responded to the first question with the idea that people get bored quickly and that we will need to add a few more shorter details within the narrative to make the audience feel more empathy. Such things as the boys having a loss of family in a war, or a bad relationship or passing of a family member, which will make the audience think 'why are these children being so horrible to this young boy', as the audience would've seen his past and home problems.

This has been very beneficial as we have gathered new ideas about the loss of a close father, which will also break up our narrative and therefore make it less boring and more busy.

 

To our second question he responded that he thinks narrative based music videos are different and Interesting, he said that our dark idea was good and he doesn't think that we need to do it as smaller visuals because our idea is different as suits our character. He said he cannot give us too in depth feedback as everyone has different tastes and ways of doing things, therefore he said to stick with our narrative, story based idea.

 

Within his notes which he has added around our treatment we can see that he is concerned about the length of time our music video will be, however we can resolve this by shortening the song as our music video has to be a maximum of 3 minutes.

We will need to take into consideration availability of different characters, however, being in a secondary school this shouldn't be too difficult as it is filled of students of the particular age group we need anyway.

 

Skype calls

This was our Skype call with Ian Haughton from Handsome design,

This was our Skype call with Ryan Mcfall from Crashburn media. I found that this was a very useful call as I found that the advise he gave on our music videos answered some of the questions which came up within feedback, such things as 'is our narrative too linear'. This was a big question as the narrative of our music video was the most important element. We need to make sure this is thought out properly as if the narrative seems too obvious or unrealistic, the dark, sinister idea which we planned to connote, wouldn't be implemented properly, therefore making our music video look amateur and unprofessional. I also think that getting an idea of his background is motivation to work hard, as he has worked his way up through directing his own music videos without much or any help.

Audience Theorists

My Audience and Band

Audience and our Band

Audience

Audience