Tuesday 17 May 2011
Tuesday 26 April 2011
YOUTUBE examples from Mrs T
There are LOADS of examples here (48 at time of writing) --> you need to flick through them and choose a few as your examples for the exam. Of course this does not preclude your finding your own - this is just to get you started!
I've put a lot of older ads in here to get you thinking about this idea of postmodernism as being something modern - intertextual, parodic, anarchic texts have been being made for quite a long time now - check out the Boddingtons or Carling Black Label ad campaigns for example....
Miss :-)
I've put a lot of older ads in here to get you thinking about this idea of postmodernism as being something modern - intertextual, parodic, anarchic texts have been being made for quite a long time now - check out the Boddingtons or Carling Black Label ad campaigns for example....
Miss :-)
Thursday 24 March 2011
Wednesday 23 March 2011
Monday 21 March 2011
Encoding and decoding - Stuart Hall
For those of you who still need printouts, you'll have to see me as this is an optimised pdf (i.e. small so not top quality for printing)EssentialResources encoding decoding
Sunday 20 March 2011
Introduction - to Semiotics - everything that goes with the powerpoint part1
If you want to print this article - it's best to go to the LEARNING GATEWAY and download the big file for printing or see me as this is an optimised pdf (i.e. small so not top quality for printing) Essential Resources Semiotics
Wednesday 16 March 2011
Monday 7 March 2011
Postmodernism 1: Introduction
Postmodernism 1 intro
View more presentations from Juliestarchild
Here are the videos as they won't run in the powerpoint above
This is the signs video, below is the Pink Floyd video, 'Welcome to the machine'
and here is the extract from 'The ONE show'
Monday 31 January 2011
Scooby Doo! Yummy
Homage? Parody?
What do YOU think?Here's the original:
and the same sequence runs at the end with this addition (NB NOT the original HB logo)
And here's the copy...It's from the recent Live Action Prequel - "Scooby Doo - The Mystery Begins" (2009)
and If you read this from Wikipedia...what do you think now..SIMULACRA?
Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins is a movie that was first aired on September 13, 2009, the 40th anniversary of Scooby-Doo. It is a television movie produced by Warner Premiere, directed by Brian Levant and distributed by Warner Home Video based on the hit Hanna-Barbera cartoon classic, Scooby-Doo. It is the third installment (chronologically, the first) of Scooby-Doo Live-Action film series. The film is an origin story for Scooby and the Mystery Inc. gang, revealing how they met and the events of their very first case. The music is scored by Academy Award-nominee David Newman, who had previously scored the theatrical films. The MPAA gave the film a PG rating for "some mild peril". The movie is non-canon as it contradicts the television series on several points, which is within the same canon as the previous two movies as confirmed by the previous film.
Tuesday 18 January 2011
"Takers" 2010 - Pastiche?
"TAKERS" (2010) is a patchwork of stolen ideas?
Heat. True Romance. The Italian Job. District B13. All are fine films in their own right. They are also all films that get heavily ripped off by Takers, a new film about bank robbers, the cops who try to track them down, and the empty, empty world they all apparently live in. A film without character or substance, it is forced time and time again to fall back on its style for something, anything to shine through the murky waters created by all the derivation. Not even that is slick or fresh enough, and the explosion caused by all the shakiness begins on frame one and doesn't end until the credits roll. It's okay, though. It's an explosion without heat. That's why it's so easy to walk away from in slow motion.
The team of bank robbers at the center of Takers is made up of Paul Walker, Idris Elba, Michael Ealy, Chris Brown and Hayden Christensen. The cops coming after them are Matt Dillon and Jay Hernandez. There are character connections strewn throughout. A couple of the robbers are brothers. Ealy's character has a relationship with Zoe Saldana. Elba's sister is in rehab. Dillon and Hernandez's characters have their own respective problems, too.
It's hard to go into detail about it all, because, frankly, there's very little care put into anything. The relationship between Elba and his sister comes off as the only engaging fork found in this road of pointless dust. Much of that is helped by Elba and Marianne Jean-Baptiste who plays the sister.
Much of it is hindered, though, by the constant self-aware direction by John Luessenhop. The man simply cannot hold the camera still for five seconds. This goes for each scene and each and every shot of Takers alike. Within the shots he composes, even during scenes of down-time, where people are having civilized conversations (civility evidently running out of the world of Takers like gasoline in a post-apocalyptic film), nothing is steady. The camera is constantly jerking back and forth in an effort to create some kind of intensity. It doesn't work. If this is how the shots are composed during conversational scenes, you can only imagine the jerky nightmare that comes when the action heats up. That is, if you cant keep yourself from unintentionally laughing at the sight of Chris Brown performing parkour. Here's a hint. It's not really Chris Brown leaping and jumping between buildings, and you can tell.
The collaboration between Luessenhop and his editor, Armen Minasian, creates some of the most difficult scenes to follow, too. As the camera is batting around the room, trying to find an actor to focus on, we're constantly cutting and cutting and cutting to a different shot. It doesn't matter that we cut from a side shot of someone to a shot of that same person in 3/4 profile, there seems to be some kind of edict here that states we can't hold on the same shot for more than a heartbeat. There is a scene early in the film where T.I., playing a former member of the gang who has just been released from prison and wants his cut of the action (the only real sense of a focused narrative the film has), is addressing the crew. There is literally a cut after every line of dialogue spoken. It's unnerving. It's distracting. It is the worst case of self-aware editing seen in recent memory.
By the time the action decides it wants to kick in, we're completely removed from any idea of story, and we could not care less for any of these characters. The action just doesn't matter. More so, it's all very predictable. You know precisely when someone is going to walk into the room, how each and every gunfight is going to end, when each and every character in this stylized piece of action is going to bite their respective bullet. It ends up being sad that nothing original could have stemmed from a film that has some respectable talent in front of its camera.
Speaking of which, the acting in Takers, more precisely the acting from each performer in Takers, is exactly what you might expect from them. Luessenhop doesn't seem to have any magical skills as a director that is going to make Walker or Christensen any more believable. T.I. and Chris Brown stumble through their lines as if acting isn't their first profession. Elba and Dillon are perfectly fine here, but you know judging from the acting seen elsewhere in the room that all stemmed from what they brought to the table.
Takers is a film in need of an identity. The action is there conceptually. Even if the parkour chase scene comes out of nowhere and seems thrown in just because that's the "cool thing" now ("now" being two years ago when Takers was actually shot), there are ideas within the action that might have worked had we been given a director who knew how to shoot it.
Basically, all you really need to know about Takers comes in a very early scene. The robbers have just gotten away from a heist by commandeering a television news helicopter. They land thechopper up in the Hollywood Hills. They plant a bomb, walk away, and as the helicopter explodes close behind them, they don't even bother to turn and take notice of it. It's a slow motion shot we've seen 8562 times before. It's something films have even made fun of, films in very recent memory. It's lazy. It's dumb. It's headache-inducing. Kind of like Takers as a whole. It makes you angry at the people who conceptualized it as much as the people who decided to fund it. The people behind Takers steal so many ideas from other films, they make the bank robbers in the actual film look like amateurs.
Heat. True Romance. The Italian Job. District B13. All are fine films in their own right. They are also all films that get heavily ripped off by Takers, a new film about bank robbers, the cops who try to track them down, and the empty, empty world they all apparently live in. A film without character or substance, it is forced time and time again to fall back on its style for something, anything to shine through the murky waters created by all the derivation. Not even that is slick or fresh enough, and the explosion caused by all the shakiness begins on frame one and doesn't end until the credits roll. It's okay, though. It's an explosion without heat. That's why it's so easy to walk away from in slow motion.
The team of bank robbers at the center of Takers is made up of Paul Walker, Idris Elba, Michael Ealy, Chris Brown and Hayden Christensen. The cops coming after them are Matt Dillon and Jay Hernandez. There are character connections strewn throughout. A couple of the robbers are brothers. Ealy's character has a relationship with Zoe Saldana. Elba's sister is in rehab. Dillon and Hernandez's characters have their own respective problems, too.
It's hard to go into detail about it all, because, frankly, there's very little care put into anything. The relationship between Elba and his sister comes off as the only engaging fork found in this road of pointless dust. Much of that is helped by Elba and Marianne Jean-Baptiste who plays the sister.
Much of it is hindered, though, by the constant self-aware direction by John Luessenhop. The man simply cannot hold the camera still for five seconds. This goes for each scene and each and every shot of Takers alike. Within the shots he composes, even during scenes of down-time, where people are having civilized conversations (civility evidently running out of the world of Takers like gasoline in a post-apocalyptic film), nothing is steady. The camera is constantly jerking back and forth in an effort to create some kind of intensity. It doesn't work. If this is how the shots are composed during conversational scenes, you can only imagine the jerky nightmare that comes when the action heats up. That is, if you cant keep yourself from unintentionally laughing at the sight of Chris Brown performing parkour. Here's a hint. It's not really Chris Brown leaping and jumping between buildings, and you can tell.
The collaboration between Luessenhop and his editor, Armen Minasian, creates some of the most difficult scenes to follow, too. As the camera is batting around the room, trying to find an actor to focus on, we're constantly cutting and cutting and cutting to a different shot. It doesn't matter that we cut from a side shot of someone to a shot of that same person in 3/4 profile, there seems to be some kind of edict here that states we can't hold on the same shot for more than a heartbeat. There is a scene early in the film where T.I., playing a former member of the gang who has just been released from prison and wants his cut of the action (the only real sense of a focused narrative the film has), is addressing the crew. There is literally a cut after every line of dialogue spoken. It's unnerving. It's distracting. It is the worst case of self-aware editing seen in recent memory.
By the time the action decides it wants to kick in, we're completely removed from any idea of story, and we could not care less for any of these characters. The action just doesn't matter. More so, it's all very predictable. You know precisely when someone is going to walk into the room, how each and every gunfight is going to end, when each and every character in this stylized piece of action is going to bite their respective bullet. It ends up being sad that nothing original could have stemmed from a film that has some respectable talent in front of its camera.
Speaking of which, the acting in Takers, more precisely the acting from each performer in Takers, is exactly what you might expect from them. Luessenhop doesn't seem to have any magical skills as a director that is going to make Walker or Christensen any more believable. T.I. and Chris Brown stumble through their lines as if acting isn't their first profession. Elba and Dillon are perfectly fine here, but you know judging from the acting seen elsewhere in the room that all stemmed from what they brought to the table.
Takers is a film in need of an identity. The action is there conceptually. Even if the parkour chase scene comes out of nowhere and seems thrown in just because that's the "cool thing" now ("now" being two years ago when Takers was actually shot), there are ideas within the action that might have worked had we been given a director who knew how to shoot it.
Basically, all you really need to know about Takers comes in a very early scene. The robbers have just gotten away from a heist by commandeering a television news helicopter. They land thechopper up in the Hollywood Hills. They plant a bomb, walk away, and as the helicopter explodes close behind them, they don't even bother to turn and take notice of it. It's a slow motion shot we've seen 8562 times before. It's something films have even made fun of, films in very recent memory. It's lazy. It's dumb. It's headache-inducing. Kind of like Takers as a whole. It makes you angry at the people who conceptualized it as much as the people who decided to fund it. The people behind Takers steal so many ideas from other films, they make the bank robbers in the actual film look like amateurs.
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