THE BUSINESS OF FILM

Sign up for a FutureLearn MOOC starting 17 October 2016 called THE BUSINESS OF FILM. This will be a huge support in both your summer exam question on the film industry and also provide you with evidence of research for your film production module (questions 3 and 5 on distribution and attracting & addressing audiences).

Your current PREP is to complete the Infographic on AUDIENCES started yesterday. We look at Stuart Hall and reception theory today as well as BFI exit polls.



Our starter activity yesterday was the Guardian's award-winning video advertisement HERE We discussed the importance of intertextuality. The meaning of this video ad depends on the audience's knowledge of the original story.

Our starter activity today was watching and discussing the screening of The Mass of Men by student film makers from the National Film and Television School.
This short film is set primarily in one location (a benefits office) and opens / closes outside at a bus stop. Its editing is striking as tension builds, marshalling the audience's sympathy for the wronged, desperate man who is trying to be a good person but thwarted at every turn. The opening soundtrack (Dido's Lament by Purcell) makes poignant ironic reference to the closing words of Henry David Thoreau: the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

 
 
Today we also viewed and discussed award-winning AL film openings screened at the Media Magazine Production Competition Awards at the BFI in 2015 and 2016, where we at Claremont have had a number of short-listed entries. 

Arising out of these film openings is the way that dystopias can feature in films. We look at the concept of Jerememy Bentham's Panopticon.




 It has been used as a metaphor for internalized self-policing in, for example, the writings of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1977).
'Foucault shows the development of the Western system of prisons, police organizations, administrative and legal hierarchies for social control - and the growth of disciplinary society as a whole. He also reveals that between school, factories, barracks and hospitals all share a common organization, in which it is possible to control the use of an individual's time and space hour by hour.' (Wikipedia)

 We also looked at collecting wild sound for movie making and uploading it to SoundCloud.

 Another good idea is to start thinking about visuals for making your production company ident: we looked at two or three exhibits from exhibitions (fishes) to remind you that you can 'collect' ideas that will form the basis of visuals.