Final decision on brief

After looking at each brief for a couple of weeks, I have decided on choosing the short film brief for my A2 coursework. My main reason for this choice is that I have had previous experience the year before, and find that it will be much easier to start this task and arrange filming days with my classmates. I will look into this brief further over the next few weeks.

Here is a link to my blog from AS, as well as my final piece:

http://jamiegerrish.blogspot.com

Advert brief production overview

Whilst researching this brief, I did not find too much content released by previous students taking the course. I did however look into popular advertisements over the past few decades- short TV sponsorship's included. These two tasks interest me as they both focus on persuading a customer to buy a product, a skill which I found useful and practiced greatly for my English language GCSE.

Through studying popular adverts either marketing famous products or ones that have gone viral, I have found that entertaining the audience using humor and action are very common. Moreover, many adverts contain bizarre, exaggerated and unrealistic scenario's in order to engage the audience. Engaging the audience appears to be the most vital part of creating an advert, followed by portraying that product as something the audience should invest time and/or money in.

I feel that, so long as I meet these two key goals, I can produce a good product. However, it is very hard to create something that seems unique and genuine because many forms and genres of TV adverts have already been produced by other companies.

Therefore, if I am to choose this brief, I believe the research and planning stages will be extremely significant over the practical stages of filming and editing.

Short film brief overview

For this brief I will have to produce a five minute short film along with a promotional poster and film magazine page. Although I think this brief takes the longest time to complete out of all of them, I have previous experience in making short films and think that gives me a huge advantage over the other briefs. Despite this, I feel that without a group the production of the video may prove very difficult in comparison to the others; I will need a lot of help for classmates in order to film my piece if I choose this task. In saying this, I will still research, storyboard, film, direct, produce, and edit the film by myself. The writing and screenplay is my favorite aspect of film-making, and I feel I will spend a lot of time working on this. I can also incorporate a lot of my year 12 learning into this stage of filming due to analyzing mise-en-scene in my theory lessons.

I have been watching many short films from various genres recently, and have discovered that short films can vary from a documentary on weight loss to a pure action flick (Narco). In knowing this, I believe I have more freedom with this brief than any others, although I already feel I would be more comfortable in some genres than others. For example, from viewing comedies and emotional dramas, I feel they would be very hard to write due to the complex scripts and pinpoint execution in order to make the audience feel emotion. I think my forte in this brief would be to focus on a thriller genre. Despite this, I may be over reliant on my previous experience in making a thriller, as last time I only had to make an opening. This brief however requires an equilibrium, disequilibrium, and re-equilibrium.

Music video brief overview

This brief consists of three tasks: 

• to create a cover for its release as part of a digipack (CD/DVD package)
• to create a magazine advertisement for the digipack (CD/DVD package)
• to create a music video for a song of my choice

I feel that if I were to choose this brief I would begin with the digipack after deciding on the song. This, being a fairly sort task, would leave me a lot of time to complete the other two tasks which appear to be far more time-consuming and difficult.
To get a feel of what a finished product should look like I decided to watch multiple music videos that previous AS students had made for their final piece. I have found that many of the music videos achieving high grades are very similar to short films as they tell a short story, and often times the videos seem to have a short and disappointing narrative which is hard to follow in comparison to a short film. Therefore I feel that the whole music side of the video is more a burden as it restricts creators from writing their own plot and giving their own meaning in some way- they have to follow the narrative of the chosen song.



Some digipacks I found were very creative and clearly had a lot of work put into them, inferring that this part of the course may take me a lot of time, possibly all Summer and more. However, after reading into the mark criteria I have found that to achieve high marks this task is more to do with professionalism and relation to my final music video product. Therefore, the work put into this task may be spread out over the whole year as oppose to what I previously thought, finishing it within a month or two.

Narrative theorists

In our first theory lesson we were given the task of looking into four theorists and how they affected media. In out next lesson we will self assess how we incorporated or challenged these theories in our AS media coursework. Here our the theories we researched:

Propp's character theory

Propp analysed 100 pieces of media and found that in each one there were 7 characters which drive the plot, they are listed as:

• The villain (struggles against the hero)
• The hero (reacts to the donor, weds the princess)
• The false hero (perceived as a good hero in the beginning but emerges as evil)
• The donor (prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object)
• The princess (person the hero marries, often sort for during the narrative)
• The helper (helps the hero in the quest)
• The dispatcher (the character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off)

He believed that in each piece of media created there was a character that could be described as one of these character types.

Barthes 5 narrative codes

Barthes was a theorist who suggested there were one or more of five codes found in each piece of text. These five codes are:

• Hermeneutic/Enigma code - This refers to text which drops some clues but never gives full answers to the meaning of a text, making the audience more intrigued and possibly frustrated to know what is happening/has happened.
• Proairetic/Action code - This code includes sequential action or text, commmonly used to build suspense.
• Semantic code - The use of text that connotes a further and deeper meaning to through the use of semes (the language which enables this).
• Symbolic code - This code features symbols which give text more meaning creating tension, drama, and character development. Symbols are also frequently used indexically to foreshadow an action that is going to take place later in the text.
• Referential code - This code refers to text which relates to further knowledge which is external in the text, this includes scientific, historic, or cultural knowledge.

Todorov's theory of equilibrium

Todorov theorized that all text narratives loosely follow five major steps:

• The equilibrium - This first step features most characters being content within a calm environment where everything is as it should be.
• A disruption - The second step introduces the audience to something that will disturb the calm environment and mood of the characters.
• Realisation - At this point the characters begin to notice the disruption, this often inflicts a tone of chaos which the characters must deal with.
• Restored order - In this step the characters initiate in dealing with the problem in order to restore peace/order.
• Equilibrium again - Texts end with either a return of equilibrium featured at the start of the film, or a new equilibrium with no disruption.

Levi Strauss' theory of binary opposition

Levi Strauss was a theorist who suggested the theory of binary opposites which I studied in my AS course. The theory states that our understanding of words depend slightly on what in contains, but mostly on the difference between the word and it's 'opposite'. The names for words opposing another are 'binary opposites'. For example, two words which are binary opposites to each other are 'life' and 'death' as our understanding of death is influenced heavily by our understanding of life and vise versa.
In media, binary opposition is most commonly used to present a contrast between two characters, environments, stages of narrative etc...



In our next lesson on Friday we will look more deeply into these theory's and use each one to self assess our AS coursework. Personally, I believe it is highly beneficial to understand when storytelling, be it a short film, book, or other source of media. However, last year we mostly looked at Levi Strauss' theory of binary opposition, other theories are often executed more naturally when storytelling, such as Todorov's theory of equilibrium. I think this is because in order to tell a full and engaging story Todorov's theory of equilibrium is almost required.

Introduction to brief

In our first lesson our teacher introduced us to the three brief's we could choose for our A2 course. These three brief's are to create:

- A music video
- An advert
- A short film

During the next three weeks I will look into what each of these brief's consist of and choose which one I will follow for the rest of my A2 course. Initially I would have picked a music video straight away but after the introduction I have decided that that may be the most difficult task for me to achieve a high grade in. However, after looking at other peoples A2 tasks on YouTube and the VLE I find the music video tasks to be the most impressive.
Despite this, I am still currently looking into all the brief's as the music videos do look like a lot more work. Moreover, both the short films and the adverts I watched fall in to many different genres such as documentary or action. The short films are also very similar to the AS course as we had to make an opening to a thriller; Therefore I already have some experience in making this type of film.