Trailer Lesson Monday 25th Jan

We had a lesson in aspects to viewing many different film trailers all about youth culture, the earliest trailer was from 1938 and was not very realistic, but still for the time was a very good trailer, the trailers all represented youth as "up to no good" and some included sex, drugs or fighting or a combination of all 3. We compared the film trailers to the most current film trailer we saw that lesson "Bullet Boy" and they all had the same basic principles which shows that there is a clear template for a film trailer for a film which deals with youth culture.

Most Recent Practical Lesson

In our last double lesson on Thursday 21st January me and Luke discussed ideas that we had for the music video for Foo Fighters ‘Best Of You’, we came up with a good range of ideas, with one thing we are sure we want to, which is the singer of the band alone in a field with a microphone and microphone stand, this would give us the opportunity to get all the lip singing done in one big shoot, we would film the lip singing for the whole song 3-4 times and certain bits from different angles and distances so we would avoid the problem we had when we made the ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ music video where we didn’t have enough film to go through the whole song so we decided it will be a good idea to play it safe and get more then we need. The ideas we had for this part of the music video included filming long shots to establish the setting and lots of extreme close ups of the singer lip singing. We also had ideas to play flashing images representing a past story line in black and white throughout the song to show the song's meaning which we researched and found that the song is rather vague about a clear meaning and can be taken in aspect of losing a partner to someone else and they are getting "the best of them" and the song could also be taken as "getting the better of someone" where as a former partner is being abused, we haven't decided which route to take when telling the storyline in the music video but we want to include a storyline in some way, whether it be through still images or very short clips flashing up now and again linking in with the musicality.

Essay Introduction

Explain how stereotyping in British TV drama and British film contributes to a sense of collective identity.

Collective identity groups many people together and stereotypes them all as one, whether that will be the average of the group an extreme example such as saying "all teenagers carry knives" when they clearly don't, or saying "all men love football" when that again isn't always true. This is often shown on British TV. People may not realise that people are being stereotyped and they just take it in with out realising. One show on BBC "Waterloo Road" is about a school when almost every episode the students are doing things that either illegal or against the rules of the school, some of the story lines include bringing a gun to school, gangs within the school and other stereotypical teenager habits such as gossiping for the girls and fighting for the boys. This show stereotypes the teenagers as 'up to no good' when it is clearly extreme situations, the show is shown all over the country on BBC1 and influences all ages.

So Far In Year 13

Since we have come back in September, we have had practice at practical work including making a short film for Alcohelp, making a "sweded" film trailer and making a music video.

Our alcohol awareness video was planned very well, we had a group of 3 and knew exactly what we wanted to do, the problem we had was actually getting around to do it, we ended up doing it at short notice but till got all the work done to a good standard, i feel that if we sorted out where, when and how we were going to film the video we would of come out with a much better final product. The editing went very well and we didn't have any problems at all. In the end I feel that because we did very well in the editing saved us from making a poor film as I feel we edited the film very well. This film was for the competition http://www.alcohelp.com/consider/

We then had a practical that was influenced by a recent film out, "Be Kind Rewind" in this film the main characters accidentally erase all the videos in their film rental store because of magnets, because of this they have to make the films again themselves before the boss finds out. We had to choose a film trailer that we could copy and make ourselves. My group decided to do the film "Prom Night" this film is a horror based on a school prom. We chose this because it looked realistically possible to do re-create because there were no massive special effects or explosions, and we could film it in school. We filmed during a media lesson one Thursday and got it all done within 2 hours and it only took 2 hours to edit completely as well, in the end I feel that we re-created the trailer very well considering we don't have access to around 100 people all dressed smartly in a massive hall with disco lights, DJs etc.

Our most recent practical task was making a music video, I was in a group with Luke and we were given the song "Kung Fu Fighting" to make a video for, we knew immediately we wanted to include comical kung fu fighting, we thought we could use the school gym and trampolines etc for making some effects, we had to ask the PE department at our school, they let us use it but the only time we could film was a Wednesday lunchtime unfortunately this meant we could only fit in around 30-40 mins of actual filming and due to illness we only had one week to film it. We got as much filmed as could of done withing the time we had done, but we quickly realised during editing that we didn't have enough film to last the length of the song. We had filmed some lip singing of a line that we wouldn't be able to reach within the video so we found 2 parts of the song that were exactly the same and cut it done, I feel we did this exceptionally well as unless you knew it was done, no one would have any idea, apart from this rather large problem i feel we made a very good video which was relevant with good editing effects in including reverse filming, aged film and we made some still images saying "BANG", "POW" and "BOOM" that we had seen in cartoons and kung fu spoofs before and on YouTube during research. I feel that if we had another week of filming we would of ended up with a very good video, but we didn't and I'm still happy with the result in aspect of the problems we had.

After we have done a film trailer, short film and music video in practical practice and now I have decided I want to do a music video for my final coursework, I am in a group of 2 with Luke again and we have agreed on doing the song 'Best Of You' by Foo Fighters.

We have recently looked up both the lyrics, and the song meaning on Google and found significant results.