Production
What are the pre-production issues for the production company when making films?
Whose idea was the film? Did the idea start with the writer, or were writers brought in to develop a preconceived idea?
What are the issues with the genre of the film?
Where did the idea come from? Was it an original idea, or perhaps a book first, or TV series, or comic strip, or from some other source?
Who wrote the original script? Did other people become involved in the writing as the project progressed?
How easy was it to arrange the financial backing to make the film? Who were the financial backers? Why?
Casting – who were cast in the main roles and why? What other films featured the stars? What were the associations they brought with them?
Who was the producer? How did he or she become involved?
Who was the director? How did he or she become involved?
Who composed the film music and why was he or she chosen? Consider the sales of the CDs on Amazon, etc. Seek out reviews.

§What were the issues for the production company during the production phase?
Was it an easy ‘shoot’? If there were difficulties what were they? Were there tensions between any of the creative personnel, often known as ‘the talent’?
Was any part of the film shot on location? If so, where? Why were some locations chosen over others? Were costs a factor?
Where there any difficulties with casting or with acquiring the stars/actors the producer wanted?
How significant was casting to reach specific audiences?
What did the studio film cost to make? How much did the stars get? Where did the budget go? Was the film shot within budget? Was it ever in any danger of going over budget?
Were there any changes to the script during production? How many changes or re-writes? Did the same scriptwriter(s) stay ‘on board’ all the time, or were some replaced?
List some of the key people who made contributions to the production and highlight some of their individual contributions.

In what way do the institutions involved in your films try to connect with and empower their audience?

My films all have different techniques in which they use to connect and empower their audience with. I have chosen the films of Knight and Day, Skyfall and Source Code and looked into what the institutions have done to make the audience more involved.

In terms of E-Media, all of my films obviously benefit from social networking sites such as twitter and facebook. Skyfall specifically uses twitter to gain a larger fanbase and encourages audiences interactions by using quizzes and competitions. This in turn makes the audience more active. Source Codes presence on facebook (in which has over 500,000 'likes' currently includes exclusive photos of scenes, information about the actors etc. Institutions benefit from User Generated Content highly online. Knight and Day does not have an official Twitter page, but as it's a fairly low budgeted movie it comes under the Fox official twitter. There are seperate fan-made pages that have 1.5K + followers that offer additional audiences to comment and review the film. Although Source Code does not have an official website, it does in fact have many fan sites linked to it. 'Source Code fansite' being the main one, featuring more behind-the-scenes information avaliable to the audience (According to uses and gratifications for surveillance reasons). There are specific fansites for the actors in the film, Jake Gyllenhaal has a large fanbase and so all of the websites created for him feature Source Code and promote it.

In terms of print, Fox distributed only one Knight and Day official poster that featured the silhouettes of Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz both carrying weapons. This was to immediately connect with the audience; as they can identify the celebrities in the film and also the genre of action. Skyfall used the typical silhouette also of the 'James Bond' pose to catch the audiences eye and allow them to know straight away what film it is referencing.Source Code did a similar thing with the posters that they distributed. The poster featured Jake Gyllenhaal smashing through glass with a gun indicating action, danger and mystery. This would intrigue an audience and encourage them to investigate more into the film. All of the posters feature weblinks at the bottom, which helps the audience gain access to the information on the e-media platform. They all link to the institutions websites rather than any official website for the films, this helps to promote the company as much as possible and make the audience more active within the whole film franchise.

In conclusion, all three films have in some way, connected with the audience through the different platforms and allowed their films to be accessed in many more ways than just on-screen. There is a higher demand for the background of the films and for exclusive gossip and information, and the Institution must adapt to meet these needs.

Case Study MEST 1

Case Study MEST 1

Year 12 Work Wednesday and Thursday - planning a case study answer and presenting it.  A walking talking exam answer.

To do:

• Brainstorm initital thoughts on the question
• Decide your key idea in your essay.  For example:  I am going to say that the advertising industry has a huge amount of power over the media products, and that the synergy between them is completely necessary in order to drive sales and audience figures. 
• Find examples from all of your films to illustrate the question (for each platform)
• Make sure you've used Media terminology in every sentence
• Prepare a 3 minute presentation of the question and your case study to the rest of the class

More on reception theory.

At the same time that audience-centered theory was attracting the attention of U.S. empirical social researcher, British cultural studies researchers were developing a different but compatible perspective on audience activity.

 

Birmingham University Centre for Contemporary cultural studies headed by Stuart Hall is most prominent in this regard. Hall argued that the researchers should direct their attention toward:

• Analysis of that social and political context in which content is produced (encoding)
• The consumption of media content

The essence of the reception approach is to locate the attribution and construction of meaning (derived from media) with the receiver. Media messages are always open and polysemic (having multiple meanings) and are interpreted according the context and culture of receivers.
Stuart Hall emphasized the stages of transformation through which any media message passes on the way from its origins to its reception and interpretation. It drew from the basic principles of structuralism and semiology which presumed that any meaningful message is constructed from sign which can have denotative and connotative meanings, depending on the choices made by an encoder. He accepted some of the elements of semiology on these two grounds:
First, communicators choose to encode messages. For ideological and institutional communicators choose to encode messages for ideological and institutional purposes and manipulate language and media for those ends (media messages are given a preferred reading, or what might now be called spin.
Secondly, receivers (decoders) are not obliged to accept messages as sent but can and do resist ideological influence by applying variant or oppositional readings, according to their own experience and outlook
In laying out his views about decoding, Hall proposed an approach to audience research that has come to be known as reception studies or reception analysis.
A central feature of this approach is its focus on how various types of audience members make sense of the specific forms of content.
Hall drew on Semiotic theory to argue that any media content can be regarded as a text that is made up of signs , these signs are structured; that is , they are related to one another in specific ways to make sense of a text- to read a text- you have to be able to interpret the signs and their structure. Example when you read a sentence you must not only decode the individual words but you also need to interpret the over-all structure of the sentence to make sense of the sentence as a whole.
Hall argued that most texts can be read in several ways but there is generally a preferred or dominant reading that the producers of a message intend when they create a message, as a critical theorist, Hall assumed that most popular media content will have a preferred reading that reinforces the status quo.
But in addition to this dominant reading, it is possible for audience members to make alternate interpretations.
They might disagree with or misinterpret some aspects of a message and come up with an alternative or negotiated meaning that differs from the preferred reading in important ways, and…
In some cases audiences might develop interpretations that are in direct opposition to a dominant reading. In that case, they are said to engage in oppositional decoding.
So media reception research emphasized the study of audiences as sets of people with unique, though often shared, experiences as in charge of their own lives.
The main features of the culturalist tradition of audience research can be summarized as follows:- The media text has to be read through the perceptions of its audience, which constructs meanings and pleasures from the media texts offered.

Research for reception theory

Reception theory provides a means of understanding media texts by understanding how these texts are read by audiences. Theorists who analyze media through reception studies are concerned with the experience of cinema and television viewing for spectators, and how meaning is created through that experience. An important concept of reception theory is that the media text—the individual movie or television program—has no inherent meaning in and of itself. Instead, meaning is created in the interaction between spectator and text; in other words, meaning is created as the viewer watches and processes the film. Reception theory argues that contextual factors, more than textual ones, influence the way the spectator views the film or television program. Contextual factors include elements of the viewer's identity as well as circumstances of exhibition, the spectator's preconceived notions concerning the film or television program's genre and production, and even broad social, historical, and political issues. In short, reception theory places the viewer in context, taking into account all of the various factors that might influence how she or he will read and create meaning from the text.

MERCH WEBSITE

TO DO/DONE LIST

MOVIES I'M ANALYZING: SOURCE CODE, KNIGHT AND DAY, SKYFALL (last two newly added)

1) Analyse trailers -> Source code trailer analysed, Knight and Day analysed (not uploaded)

2)Analysing websites -> Most of them don't have a website apart from skyfall. Need to analyse fan sites. (Have already done for source code)

3)Find out the impact that the films have on social networking sites-> (Done for source code, need to do other two)

4)Find out about the institutions behind the films (Read about Summit Entertainment, need to read about other institutions)

5)Find sites selling merch for the films (No site for Source Code/Knight and Day, but viewed the one for James Bond and need to analyse in further detail)

6)Find out about the marketing of the film (Looked at this for Source Code only)

7)Answer practice questions about each of the films, looking at past papers and answering questions based on my films (need to do)

8)Find out who produced the film and what else they've produced- Done for source code, need to do for others

9)Look at the theories that apply to each film, linking in media language - Need to do

10)Look at the mark scheme for exam questions -  Need to do