TEST ESSAY THURSDAY 28 APRIL 2016

We have spent a good deal of time preparing for the examination essay on the film industry in class. Here is advance notice of recent exam titles: select ONE to do as a timed essay for Thursday's lesson.

You have been given the following guidance about exam technique. We have covered it many times in class orally and it is on my class blog HERE. 
You have been emailed copies of marked exam scripts written by good Claremont students as well as OCR exemplar scripts (check your emails 18.04.16).

The mark scheme has been on the left side of the classroom whiteboard all year: 50 marks

2EAA    (explanation, analysis, argument ) out of /20   

2EG     (examples)  out of /20           

2TM    (terminology) out of /10
HOW TO STRUCTURE YOUR EXAM ANSWER:

• State your area of study ('I have studied the film industry.') 
• Define the key words in the title ( 'By media ownership, I understand...')
• Set out the case studies that you intend to use ('I intend to illustrate my points through the following case studies: Disney megafranchize (Jurassic Park, Avengers), British Film medium /low budget (Legend, '71), micro-budget indie (Tortoise In Love)'
• Use the 4 stages of film making (conception, production, distribution/marketing, exhibition) to step through your points
• Prepare sentences on your own viewing habits & your peers' and family's
• To reach level 4 marks, refer to trends

ALL OF THE ABOVE IS ON MY CLASS BLOG: LOOK AT THE LINK HERE 
There are many pages of guidance on G322 Institutions and Audiences question 2 on the blog, all of which we have studied in class.

TEST ESSAY THURSDAY 28 APRIL 2016

Answer ONE question below in relation to the film industry, making detailed reference to examples from your case study material to support the points made in your answer.

June 2015 

To what extent does media ownership have an impact on the successful distribution of media products in the media are that you have studied?

January 2014  

The increase in hardware and content (= proliferation) in media industries has been significant in recent years. Discuss the effect  this has had on institutions in the media area you have studied.

June 2013

Evaluate the role of digital technologies in the marketing and consumption of products in the media area you have studied.

January 2013

What impact does media ownership have upon the range of products available to audiences in the media area you have studied?

June 2012

"Cross-media convergence and synergy are vital processes in the successful marketing of media products to audiences.” To what extent do you agree with this statement in relation to your chosen media area?

 

COMPLETING Eval.Q 1 FORMS & CONVENTIONS

1 FORMS & CONVENTIONS

 In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

• PRESENT THIS THROUGH YOUTUBE ANNOTATIONS
• Start with a Word document so that you can put down the analysis, look at it critically, cut the words down so that the text box won't be too large on YouTube
• YOU ANALYSE YOUR FILM OPENING AS IT RUNS
• HALF OF THE MARKS FOR YOUR THRILLER ARE FOR TITLES, so make sure that you explain in what way what you have used titles and BRING IN WHAT YOU LEARNT FROM THE ART OF THE TITLE WEBSITE
• Step by step through your own work
• Discuss the way your thriller incorporates generic conventions. Specify other thriller scenes / magazine pages
• How does your product develop or challenge (break new ground; do something different) conventions?
• Do any of the codes & conventions in your product indicate its sub-genre or hybrid identity?
• Does your use of conventions point to other thrillers that have influenced your work? Be specific.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? 

Add a screenshot to explain how to view annotations to your moderator

It is time to finish the Word documents in which you write about the codes and conventions of your production.

G322 AUDIENCES AND INSTITUTIONS (FILM): LEGEND

Link to last year's blog here

Film

Mark Kermode's film of the week

Tom Hardy divides and conquers as the Krays

Legend review by Mark Kermode 

3 / 5 stars 

Tom Hardy is bang-on as both Ronnie and Reggie in a cartoonish but entertaining account of the Kray twins’ East End reign.
Any retelling of the over-mythologised Kray twins’ tale walks a thin line between the glamorised cliches of Ronnie and Reggie nostalgia and the pin-sharp parody of Monty Python’s Piranha brothers’ Doug and Dinsdale sketch. A “combination of violence and sarcasm” fuelled the Piranhas’ reign of terror, and the same could be said of these latest screen Krays, with writer-director Brian Helgeland deploying much deadpan humour amid the beatings, stabbings and shootings of East End folklore.
Hinging on the double-barrelled blast of Tom Hardy’s bang-on central performance(s), Legend is a brash, cartoonish affair, happy to bask in the reflected glory of its subjects’ bizarre cultural icon status. With an eye on the international market, Helgeland (who co-wrote the screenplay for LA Confidential) tips his hat to Scarface, White Heat and Sunset Boulevard, investing his British anti-heroes with a stateside pizzazz entirely befitting their Rat Pack aspirations. This may be a British-French co-production, derived from John Pearson’s insider text The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins, but Helgeland’s worldview is more Goodfellas than The Long Good Friday, a portrait of glittering London as artificial as the Krays’ star-struck vision of themselves as the last of the famous international playboys.

‘The film’s real sucker punch’: Tom Hardy as Reggie Kray in Legend.

We begin with the Krays already ruling their East End roost, eschewing the traditional traipse through childhood, leaping straight into their turf war with the Richardson gang, which would come to a head in the Blind Beggar pub in 1966. Frances Shea (Emily Browning) proves our unlikely narrator, recounting the twins’ glory years through her relationship with Reggie, of whom she declares “it took a lot of love to hate him”. As a character, Shea is fragile and understated, but her voiceover puts the ripe in tripe; it’s a credit to Browning that she gets through its hackneyed “gangster prince” cliches without laughing. Meanwhile the screen is a heady swirl of shiny streets and spangly nightclubs, with Duffy belting out Timi Yuro’s Make the World Go Away to celeb-packed crowds as flat-footed cops (Christopher Eccleston’s uptight Leonard “Nipper” Read) and lairy villains (Sam Spruell’s nicely drawn Jack “the Hat” McVitie) drift in and out of carefully choreographed frames.

Niece of Kray wife 'mortified' by new Tom Hardy-starring biopic

The film’s real sucker punch, however, is Hardy – both of him. Having originally offered Hardy the role of Reggie, Helgeland was persuaded to let the actor wrestle with Ron as well (both on and off screen), a dual role to which he brings the same commitment – physical, intellectual, emotional – as Jeremy Irons essaying both Mantle brothers in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. The result is a striking portrait of a single divided self: Reggie, the calculatingly cool charmer, whose sharp suits mirror his businessman’s mind; Ron, the paranoid schizophrenic, whose lust for random violence is matched only by his passion for handsome young men (“I’m homosexual, but I’m not a poof”) and his dear old mum’s tea and cake. With his pursed lip, protruding jaw and bulldog absurdism (he parades a dinner-jacketed donkey through a nightclub), the heavily bespectacled Ron occasionally resembles Matt Lucas doing an unkind impression of Mark Lamarr, with a touch of Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge and Patrick Marber’s Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan thrown in for good measure. In Hardy’s hands, Ron is a tragicomic character, a madman whom Chazz Palminteri’s Angelo Bruno wants muzzled, but to whom Reggie remains devoted, even as the pair are beating seven bells out of each other.When Gary and Martin Kemp played the leads in Peter Medak’s 1990 film The Krays, both were overshadowed by Billie Whitelaw’s matriarchal Violet, the true focus of Philip Ridley’s script. There’s no chance of anyone overshadowing the mesmerisingly physical Hardy here, not least because the supporting characters remain just that – thumbnail sketches of secondary roles, albeit elegantly filled by the likes of David Thewlis and Paul Bettany. The Krays always longed for the spotlight (David Bailey told the BBC that “their big mistake was posing for me”) and that’s exactly what this faintly ridiculous but undeniably entertaining movie gives them. From the title down, Ron and Reg would have loved Legend. Whether that’s a criticism or a compliment remains a moot point.

For your essay:

OWNERSHIP: A Working Title film. 
AUDIENCE: "Legend is a brash, cartoonish affair, happy to bask in the reflected glory of its subjects’ bizarre cultural icon status. With an eye on the international market, Helgeland (who co-wrote the screenplay for LA Confidential) tips his hat to Scarface, White Heat and Sunset Boulevard, investing his British anti-heroes with a stateside pizzazz entirely befitting their Rat Pack aspirations. This may be a British-French co-production, derived from John Pearson’s insider text The Profession of Violence: The Rise and Fall of the Kray Twins, but Helgeland’s worldview is more Goodfellas than The Long Good Friday, a portrait of glittering London as artificial as the Krays’ star-struck vision of themselves as the last of the famous international playboys."
Would YOU see it? Many did:
"Now arrives Legend, which lands with a stunning £3.70m plus £1.49m in Wednesday/Thursday previews, for a five-day total of £5.19m. Brian Helgeland’s film certainly benefits from the UK audience’s existing awareness of, and interest in, the film’s subject – the Kray brothers remain the most notorious London gangsters. However, Hardy is also a key selling point: given his reputation as a highly committed actor, his performance in the dual roles of Ronnie and Reggie Kray exerted a powerful curiosity factor.

The success of Legend shows once again how a film can achieve more than the sum of its parts – as happened last autumn when Benedict Cumberbatch took on Alan Turing with The Imitation Game (£16.4m at the UK box office). Hardy may have picked up fresh fans with Mad Max: Fury Road (£17.4m UK lifetime), further stoking interest in his Legend performances." Source: The Guardian

MARKETING AND DISTRIBUTION Article from Film Screen Summit

Screen Film Summit: marketing 'Legend', '45 Years', 'Beyond Clueless'

10 December, 2015 | By Tom Grater

Insight was given into three of the year’s standout British film campaigns.

The people behind the releases of three of 2015’s standout British film campaigns discussed their processes at the Screen Film Summit today (Dec 10)
Hugh Spearing, head of marketing at Studiocanal, presented Legend, which stars Tom Hardy as the East End’s notorious gangster twins Ronald and Reggie Kray.
The film opened to £5.1m over 5-days and went on to take £18.2m in the UK, the company’s second highest-grossing film behind Paddington.

A legendary concept
When approaching Legend, Hugh Spearing and Studiocanal believed from the start that they had the concept for a hit.
“The reason we got involved in the film was the central idea of Tom Hardy, who was becoming an iconic British actor, playing both of the Kray twins, iconic figures themselves,” said Spearing.
The company took the project to Cannes, showing rehearsal footage of Tom Hardy in character at the festival, an approach Spearing described as highly successful: “It sold incredibly well before it even started shooting.”
In the first week of production, the company released a still of Tom Hardy in character as both Ronald and Reggie Kray; even though the image wasn’t a part of the actual film, it proved very popular, particularly online, and is still used to promote the film today.
The next step was releasing an initial teaser trailer for the film, which quickly became Studiocanal’s biggest trailer ever in terms of online interest. “That meant we knew there was interest” recalled Spearing.
As a result of the buzz generated, he said the company felt confident utilising “a big budget across all types of media”.
In particular, the social media campaign for Legend proved highly successful. “It was our most successful and engaged campaign to date,” recalled Spearing.
The company also managed to make use of the burgeoning stardom of Tom Hardy, who Spearing notes is often reluctant to do much press or social media but in the case of Legend was very engaged.
The resulting hype saw the film open strongly and go on to be one of 2015’s top 20 releases in the UK.  “It didn’t just work in London,” noted Spearing, referencing the film’s success in locations such as Portsmouth, Norwich and Sheffield.

MARKETING LEGEND: P&A and Benjamin Lee's two star review (The Guardian 9.09.15)

 

 

G322 TV DRAMA

Welcome back. In today's email, you will find exemplar answers for G322 (former Claremont student scripts). More are on the way. Please create a folder on your laptop labelled G322 for them. We read through one example and practise exam techniques (terminology, examples, explanation / analysis / argument).

We then watch the BBC TV drama Murdered By My Father and analyse the representation of ethnicity. Description from website:
Every parent wants the best for their kids, and Shahzad is no exception. Ever since his wife died he’s been trying to keep his two kids Salma and Hassan on track. Salma is growing up quickly, and Shahzad wants to make sure she’s set up with the right guy to settle down with. It’s a promise he made his wife, and part of what he considers his duty as a dad. But what does Salma want? Unbeknown to Shahzad, she’s caught up in a whirlwind romance with charismatic charmer Imi. Salma knows Imi is not what her dad is expecting, but can she find a way to make everyone happy? A hard-hitting drama with a devastating finale, Murdered by My Father is a story about the power and the limits of love in communities where ‘honour’ means everything.
Review by Ceri Radford in The Telegraph:
"The father in question, Shahzad (Adeel Akhtar), did not start out as a monster. A widower, working hard in the building trade and raising two children alone, he had a touching bond with his teenage daughter Salma (Kiran Sonia Sawar). She teased him, he slid a gift of hair grips onto her bedside table as she slept. But he had expectations that she would honour the marriage he had planned with her late mother, linking their family to his business allies by settling down with the gormless Haroon (Salman Akhtar). Meanwhile, Salma had fallen in love with someone else: the charismatic charmer Imi (Mawaan Rizwan), who was very far from Haroon, and very far from the match her father felt he needed to be able to hold his head up in his community....Murdered by My Father, which followed in the same vein as 2014’s Bafta-winning Murdered by My Boyfriend – a drama based on a real case - could easily have strayed into stereotypes. But in the hands of the young screenwriter Vinay Patel, the story felt both nuanced and unbearably heart-breaking. His script drew on testimonies from those involved as well as input from charities expert in this area to paint a portrait of a tragic clash between tradition and individual freedom." 

Kasia Delgado writes in The Radio Times: "Written by young screenwriter Vinay Patel, the drama is based on the 12,000 cases of so-called "honour-based" violence reported in the UK since 2010. These include abductions, beatings and an estimated 60 murders, with around 9,000 calls made to helplines. If you've always taken for granted that you could love whoever you want, it's hard to get your head around the idea that young women are killed for defying their family's wishes – but this drama goes a long way to explaining the psychology behind these murders, without in anyway justifying them. "

By next Tuesday, please watch the 2013 exam extract Fingersmith (please collect your disc on Wednesday). You must be ready to offer oral textual analysis using exam techniques (terminology, examples, explanation / analysis / argument).


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