planning a successful evaluation..

the following questions must be answered:

1. in what ways does your media project use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
4. How did you used media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation.

the key to a successful evaluation which will pick up marks is the ways in which i show them. If i just write them out in four separate essays, it will be informative and have all of the information, yet will not show my creativity, which in media is a great trait to have. I have been thinking of different ways i can put convey my final evaluation, and conclude my project.

The different ideas I have come up with are as follows: a directors interview script, an actual interview which could be set in a local television studo such as BBC's look east, a radio broadcast and video commentary. I think these different ideas will stop the evaluations being laborious for me to do and the examiner/moderator to mark.

narrative..

Vladimir Propp-

looked at eight diferent characters that are used in lots of folk tales to begin with, and foccused on them rather than the individual person.

the hero, villain,donor, dispatcher, false hero, helper, princess and her father.

There are of course, many texts which do not conform to this, and films and stories where there is a protagonist who is the hero and the antagonist who is the villain.

Is Propp a useful way of looking at texts?



Claude Levi Strauss-

how our world was described in binary oppositions e.g night/day, good/bad, light/dark. These oppositions tended to structure texts such as stories, plays and films.

E.g Washing powder adverts rely on 'before and after' contrast to convince you to buy the product.



Rolande Barthes-

interested in concepts such as negotiated meaning between institution and audience. A reader produces new meanings when reading a text, making use of previous experiences as well as the actual text. The cultural context of consumption becomes as important as the text itself.

Most famous for his enigma code- it is the hook or mystery that makes people want to watch, so could be a trailer, or at the end of one episode, exciting clips from the next one which will want to make people come back and watch.



Tzetvan Todorov-

he worked out that there were five stages to a narrative.: equilibrium, a disruption of this equilibrium by an event, a relaisation that a disruption has happened, an attempt to repair the damage of the disruption and a restoration of equilibrium, which may be a new equilibrium. This structure can be applied to both fiction and non fiction and makes it easy to identify the structure of a text.



Lev Kuleshov-

experimented by showing shots of an actor in between shots of different objects, food, a dead woman and a baby. The audience interpreted the actors expressions, although it never changed, as being hungry, sad and affectionate. This is because our brains try to make continuitive sense of what we see. This is called montage.



Sergei Eisenstein-

believed that if consecutive shots werent linked, the audience were forced to think and interact more to make the mental jump from shot to shot., and that this si more effective. Often used in propaganda, and more light-heartedly in pop videos and advertising.

narrative and my programme...

In Western culture, in the movie industry it is the norm to have a protagonist who has to face obstacles to reach a happy ending. However, over more recent years, this tradition has been toyed with, experimenting different conventions, including ambiguous endings, which leave the audience to make up their own ending, or even room for a sequel. In Eastern culture, when watching their representation of film, or story telling, it is very different, and for most of us who are adapted to the western story telling, the linear, straight forward style, it is often difficult to get to grips with this alternative order of events.

It has been established that to make a successful story or film, that there needs to be an order at the start, some kind of equilibrium, a calm before the storm. This is often interrupted by an event, or a person who is different to interrupt the calm, and cause chaos. The disequilibrium. This leaves the ending open for the chaos to be fixed and put right. In my children’s programme, I used a state of calm at the beginning, with the introduction, before it had been established that there was anything wrong. It was the missing animal that caused the chaos before an important visiting relative comes to visit, causing nerves and rushing in an attempt to find him. Whether the problem shown is resolved or not, the end often contains a message subliminal or not, that teaches people something. In my case, the message is to be selfless, and treat people well, and as the target age is around five years old, it is a valid lesson that should be taught at a young age.

A montage is also an effective way of story telling, a mixture of clips from different events to set a scene, or even convey some kind of emotion. My montage is for my titles, and by watching that alone, the audience will understand the basic foundations of the show, three characters, a human and two puppets, one good and one bad. This montage will give the audience, in this case young children the chance to see what the programme contains, whether it makes them laugh, or whether it interests them. The montage contains every day activities such as driving a car, or cooking, activities that young children can relate to, and come to realise the consequences of their actions if they behave badly.

A linear form of story telling, in my opinion is the easiest to follow, and because of my young target age, this is the narrative I did adopt, simply because if there are flashbacks and cutting from one time to another, it would have to be done in such an obvious way to make the children fully understand it, and the changing lapses of time could become confusing, and this could cause the children to potentially lose interest, which is not what I would want to happen.

The conventional approach at story telling, is a potentially boring one, but I believe if it is backed up with an interesting story with a plot that is exciting and dynamic, then it will not lose any of its popularity as a story or film.

my progress..

over the christmas holidays, i did my filming, and the still photos from the filming are below. The filming went really well, the whole thing only took about six hours to do, which included the filming, and different attempts at it, as well as the theme tune being sung.

The montage was really fun to do, but also quite challenging as it was hard to place the puppets somewhere where the puppetteer couldnt be seen, this was especially challenging in the car as the space was limited, and two people had to be hidden, but the puppets had to be on show. It was also difficult when outside to film without showing the person as you could see them, so a way round this was just shooting the main characters head and shoulders, so you could see the puppet on the shoulder, and not the person controlling it.

The theme tune also i thought would be hard to do, because none of us are vocally trained, but it worked really well, and sounds really good.