Week 6 Summary 15th - 21st FEB (Faraz Maqbool)

This week we took a really big in depth look at the opening sequence that we are going to be creating and we uploaded the production brief which outlines everything that has to be considered in creating the opening sequence such as who the target audience is and where we can distribute the film and so on. We were also able to upload the storyboard so that the viewers can see what we are trying to achieve and what shots we are going to use. Alongside all of this we also uploaded the treatment which also looks at the target audience and the product that we are creating among other things. This week we also talked about possible filming dates and checked the dates we chose aginst the ones that our cast was free so that we could film with no problems, we also made sure that we had a few dates set aside just in case we had to do emergency filming or re film.

Production Brief (Faraz Maqbool)

Production Brief

Treatment (Gareth Hawkes)

Treatment

Storyboard (Faraz Maqbool)

Storyboard

Shot List for our film (Gareth Hawkes)

Shot List

Week 5 Summary 8th - 14th FEB (Faraz Maqbool)

This week what we did was find the props that we are going to use in the opening sequence. We took a long time finding some of the props such as the knife that we are going to use however it was originally supposed to be a big machete, but we were unable to find one. So we have to settle for a knife. We also were abe to round up our xast and this was mainyly down to Marian as she was able to recruit the cast memebers and get notes and pictures of them. We also looked ovr our blog and made changes, not very big ones just some that made the layout f th blog look more nicer to look at.

Theories (Faraz Maqbool)

Mcquails Uses and Gratification Theory
This theory is used as a way or means to understanding mass communication. This theory puts more emphasis on the audience rather tha the actual media product itself. It does this by exploring what people do with the media products they view rather than what media products do to people. It suggests that people choose to view and use media products to meet their own needs. Mcquails theory assumes that the audience are not passive but do take an interest in what they want to watch and make their own decisions regarding what they want to watch.

An example of this is that a person may feel more comfortable and confident to talk to others when they have facts or stories from a certain media product. This in turn will lead them to want to view the media product because they want to and so this is their own choice.

Vance Packards Hypodermic Needle Theory
This theory is actually quite straight forward and easy to understand. It states that the audience of a media product will clearly know the intended meaning of it and that they will accept this intended meaning completely. This theory however is actually very old going back to the 1930s and 1940s and is considered as being obsolete today. However it was quite popular when it was first introduced and the evidence for it was the war and the propaganda and how everyone easily and openly believed what they were told about the war by the media through Radios and TV's. It was not heavily questioned and people just swallowed, however things are different today and people choose what they want to watch and what they want to believe and even then we now know that media has a selective influence on different individuals.

Narrative Codes and Theory of Media
Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. he was able to create a theory which stated that in every story there were five major Narrative codes which are all connected together and that these codes once brought together created meaning. We have only so far learnt of two of the codes both of which are shown below.

1. Hermeneutic Code (The Voice of Truth)
The hermeneutic code is associated with enigmas of the text. So to reveal the truth you would first have to be able to solve the enigmas.

- Thematisation. What in the narrative is an enigma?

- Positioning. Additional confirmations of the enigma.

- Formulation of the enigma.

- Promise of an answer of the enigma.

- Fraud. Circumvention of the true answer.

- Equivocation. Mixture of fraud and truth.

- Blocking. The enigma cannot be solved.

- Suspended answer. Stopping the answering after having begun.

- Partial answer. Some facets of the truth are revealed.

-Disclosure of the truth.

Because the hermeneutic code involves a move from a question to an answer it is one of the two codes (the other being the proairetic or action code) which Barthes calls “irreversible”. Once a secret is revealed, it cannot be unrevealed—the moment of cognition is permanent for the reader. TV Shows like "Lost" use the Hermeneutic Code very clearly.


Proairetic Code (The Voice of Empirics)
A Proairetic Code is a plot action that does not directly raise particular questions -- it is simply an action that is caused by a previous event and which leads to other events. It is not inherently mysterious. An example would be like a person walking down the street or a tile falls off the roof of a building.

Where the proairetic code creates tension in a story is in the anticipation it causes with regard to what might happen next. When we read stories we may try to read the mind of the author and hence wonder why what is happening as it is. This effect can be used by the author to lead the reader astray and hence create further tension.