Tuesday 15 November 2011

Our Film

Appleby Street
Location
The location is set near a forest on Appleby Street. There are a lot of fields and there is a bunker which is a perfect location for our genre which is horror.
Plot
It is only 2-3 minutes long and so we had to leave it where the story could be carried on, the handheld camera is showing the event from his point of view. In the beginning Ben and Jacob go to Aimee’s house and knock on her door. The next time the camera is turned on they are walking to toward the fields discussing the party which will be at the bunker. The camera is turned on again and they are walking through the fields talking more about the party. Jacob then stops to pee while Aimee and Ben walk on. Jacob looks around with the camera still, hearing weird rustling noises, and then he hears Aimee scream. He then jogs in that direction and keeps looking behind. He then discovers Ben dead on the floor, he then hears Aimee scream again and carries on running, he trips over and hurts his ankle and then discovered that it was actually Aimee he tripped over, and she too is also dead. He then gets up and hobbles towards the bunker hoping there will be people there. Jacob then trips again and so the camera is on its side, then we see a mysterious figure walking towards the Jacob, the camera keeps turning itself on and off so each time the figure is closer and closer until it kneels down, Jacob is stabbed then we see the mysterious figure walk off, and carry the dead bodies with police sirens in the background.
Costume
Obviously the clothes are likely to get ruined so we are going to be wearing things we don’t mind throwing away. We will also be wearing lightly coloured clothes to see where we are injured.
Lighting
We will be only using torches for light as it looks as realistic as possible.
Sound
We will not be using music over the top because then it wouldn’t be as realistic.

Wednesday 2 November 2011

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is an American linguistic, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an institute professor in the department of linguistics & philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years.

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) is a documentary film that explores the political life and ideas of Noam Chomsky. It expands on the ideas of Chomsky's earlier book , Manufacturing consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which he wrote along with Edward S. Herman.

The film presents and illustrates Chomsky's and Herman's thesis that corporate media, as a profit-driven institution, tend to serve and further the agendas of the interests of dominant, elite groups in the society. A centerpiece of the film is a long examination of the history of the New York Times' coverage of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, which Chomsky says exemplifies the media's unwillingness to criticise an ally of the elite.

Chomsky's response to the film was mixed; in a published conversation  with Achbar and several activists, he stated that the film simply doesn't communicate his message, leading people to believe that he is the leader of some movement that they should join. In the same conversation though, he criticises the New York Times' review of the film, which mistakes his message for being a call for voter organising rather than media critique.

Tuesday 18 October 2011

Roland Barthes: Mythologies

Roland GĂ©rard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and post-structuralism.

Barthes's many monthly contributions that were collected in his Mythologies frequently interrogated specific cultural materials in order to expose how society asserted its values through them. For example, the portrayal of wine in French society as a robust and healthy habit is an ideal that is contradicted by certain realities (i.e., that wine can be unhealthy). He found semiotics, the study of signs, useful in these interrogations. Barthes explained that these cultural myths were "second-order signs," or "connotations". A picture of a full, dark bottle is a signifier that relates to a specific signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage. However, it can also be related to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing experience. Motivations for such manipulations vary, from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo. These insights brought Barthes in line with similar Marxist theory.