And in the end.....

I made a new blog a couple of weeks ago and forgot to mention it here. Fail.

Can't wait for a new venture, la la etc.

-HM

Right, that's that one out of the way

Representation seemed to go okay, though I feel my A&I response was pretty mediocre (which to me feels worse than an epic fail).

Fun.

-HM.

Finishing touches...

This is the slightly confusing space which we call our timeline...

Am currently working on finishing off the last few pieces (mainly sound - RAAAAAAGE), I believe this is nearly done.

-HM.

SIR

I left your hard drive in Rm 57, wasn't able to find you as I left. Sorry about that.

-HM.

Reasons why Disney is terrible

Sir, I'm aware that you suggested I keep my thoughts towards Disney to a minimum for the sake of letting people enjoy living in their little fantasy worlds, and hey... I've lasted ten minutes and now have to continue. Sorry! I'll try and get some relevant audiences and institutions stuff in here but can't really guarantee the success rate.

DISNEY IS TERRIBLE


There are a number of reasons why I simply have nothing nice to say about Disney as a company. This is due to personal opinion as well as my complete bafflement at how society reacts to Disney and its products.

Firstly is the actual content of the products themselves. This squeaky-clean image the traditional Disney animated films have (think Lion King, the Little Mermaid etc.) does nothing to help me take them seriously, because at the end of it all they are are just dumbed down forms of entertainment.

That may sound like total blasphemy to the Disney worshippers out there, but it's true on the basis that all Disney tend to have done is taken a traditional fairytale (which are bland enough as it is) and dumbed them down so much that nothing of interest happens - so that there is nothing to upset all those little kids out there.

I'm not saying this blindly, I was forced to sit and watch a whole load of this rubbish at my primary school and even as a child I could see right through it. The only thing any of the Disney animated films have going for them in my eyes is "look at how bright and colourful and child-friendy our animation is!". Bringing me to the next point -

Child-friendly = good?
One of my biggest annoyances with Disney is the way society reacts to its products. This is especially the case with parents bringing up their children with Disney products as a norm. Picture this: you have a small child who is currently far too young to think for themselves, and is also too young to have received any kind of education about the way the world works. Surely you'd want to encourage them to develop an intelligent, logically-thinking outlook on life? Right? So why does it make sense to plonk them down in front of films which give them the generic "blah blah princess blah blah mild danger blah blah hero blah blah NOW BUY ALL OF OUR MERCHANDISE" message? It's as though parents are deliberately encouraging their children to take a consumerism-driven lifestyle where they buy whatever is put in front of them.

I genuinely believe that because of this Disney are a much bigger threat to society than any other media agent - including the likes of representation in drama and News International etc.. Why is this?

Because Disney gets to them before they are able to think for themselves.

If someone is older and reads a completely biased news report, there's a fair chance that they'd sit back and think "yeah, this is a load of [word of choice goes here]". If it's a small child becoming more and more obsessed with Disney they will have no way of working out that it's just consumer exploitation, but will instead think "I've got to get mum/dad/etc to buy ALL the Disney products!". This vast range of synergy sells a whole load of pointless products which only boosts Disney's power further. By this, I mean that the child will not just want to watch the Lion King film. He'll want the toys, he'll want the soundtrack record, he'll want the posters, he'll want clothes with the characters on them, he'll want pretty much anything with Lion King branding on it.

Society's attitude to this doesn't help. If you ask pretty much anyone about Disney (with myself being the extreme minority) they'll give you the same comment about how wonderful the films are, with no accompanying reason other than that they're "classics". What they mean by this is that they themselves went through this consumerism-fuelled brainwashing as a child and are still unaware of it. It is also likely to be because they just have this pleasant memory of their childhood where all they had to do was sit down and watch near-infinite numbers of children's films. This also annoys me, because I honestly believe that all the childhood phase of life is is being a less intelligent version of your adult life.

Let's look at this advert for the Disney theme parks.

This shows just how much brainwashing Disney have done to children over the years of them being alive. Although they are just staged scenes for an advertisement, one can see from the reaction of the children that this whole "Disney is a great thing. All hail Disney." ideology has been bullied into them from before they could talk, with the idea of being surrounded by Disney characters wherever you go in the theme park being the ultimate goal of which they've been trained to aim for.

All this does is - yet again - make Disney more and more powerful, controlling more and more of society's ideas.

Obsession-building

I mentioned this a bit earlier, but Disney rely on the concept of building obsessions around certain things as their primary marketing technique. This means that we have a bunch of kids who religiously hand over their money for merchandise/soundtrack CDs/T-shirts for the High School Musical nonsense. The problem? They're completely oblivious to how terrible it all is. Anyone who has even the most basic musical knowledge can tell that soundtracks from the likes of High School Musical and Hannah Montana are just manufactured digitally for the sake of selling the stuff, as opposed to having any musical skill put into them. Heck, they even manage to make Nickelback seem talented, and that definitely takes some doing. It's as though someone at Disney has identified a hole in the market for beyond-terrible music and thought "okay, we can dedicate our new programmes to this for the next few years!". 

There is actually a whole ton more I could say about Disney being evil, but for the sake of avoiding even more wrist pain I'm going to stop here - so tl;dr: Disney is a massive threat to society as it can socialise people into consumerism whilst they are vulnerable.

-HM.

I am a terrible person.

(off-topic post)

Need to apologise for the missing posts I should have done analysing the opening few minutes of some films. I'm not going to try and get out of this with some pathetic excuse about my DVDs getting eaten by a dog or the internets breaking etc., the fact that I haven't done it is unacceptable, especially considering that my existing film/institutions study work as of yet already leaves a fair bit to be desired...

On a slightly more positive note, I've talked my brother into lending me a few of the DVDs he had in his room and I'm going to analyse these by Tuesday's lesson the very latest.

-HM.

Lost my USB flash drive...

Possible chaos could have occurred here but thankfully a) most of the stuff we've been using has been running off Sir's hard drive and the camera, and b) I have a backup on my computer at home of the stuff that hasn't.

Because of this it doesn't matter in regards to coursework (except for however much that thing cost me, can't remember...) but I do need to find an additional backup device for the .fcp file itself (and resources) -  previously  I'd been saving on the hard drive, the memory stick and the Mac's internal hard drive. Obviously the Mac's HDD is unreliable as heck because anyone who happens to use the Mac can access it and make their own artistic contributions to it, but I'd just been saving it there as a potential last resort. Now going to have to either acquire a new memory stick for backing up the work or find the old one (I think I lost it in school though, so it possibly has a new owner now...)

tl;dr: I fail big time.

-HM.

SOPA - Effect on the Industry?

This post is particularly off-topic, but it kind-of relates to film distribution, and I needed an excuse to have a rant. Here goes!

For those not in the know, the US Stop Online Piracy Act is a proposed legislation designed with the intention of preventing online piracy, thus stopping potential revenue being held away from intellectual property owners. However, it just so happens that the proposals appear to have been written by people who know nothing about the way computers, the internet or pretty much anything works.

Instead of just targeting those who share copyrighted files with those who do not own a license to use them, the legislation would target everything on the internet that happens to use copyrighted media.

So why is this a problem? Well, it's pretty clear that nearly all media production companies have made great use of online hype to market a product. For this to work, fans of the company will need to be allowed to talk about it on the internet, be able to share previews and leaks, make their own graphics/videos based on it, start up fansites etc.. If this law passes it will be extremely difficult for this to work, which will make media marketing even more of a challenge than it currently is.

On top of that, attitudes towards media consumption have changed significantly over the last few years. People no longer want to just sit back, watch a film and then forget about it. The influence of online culture now means that people want to take constant interest in the product and its company; they want to be able have easy access to media relating to it, and they want to create their own fan work. It's more or less an unwritten rule now that your product hasn't made it until there is an autotune remix of it on YouTube. This kind of behaviour not only maintains existing fans, but also brings in new ones - meaning that the company has a great chance of success with potential sequels.

Even the big-names would be affected by the legislation; think of all the big American-based film websites out there who review all the new releases. They often have short clips and screenshots from the film, right? That'd be illegal. The new ruling gives copyright owners the power to have sites which share even small fragments of their material taken down, meaning there is massive potential out there for production companies to make copyright claims for the sake of spiting those who give unfavourable reviews for their products. As if media journalism wasn't biased enough already...

It should also be noted that if one inspects the wording of the bill carefully, posting a link to or embedding an official film trailer on a blog/webpage would be a criminal act. A criminal act which could lead to prison time. I don't really need to explain why this is ridiculous.

So in short: if the act is put in place, online fandoms will be destroyed. If online fandoms are destroyed, media owners' chances of marketing a product will also be destroyed. As much as I would like to break up the BVB Army and get the band to stop making their "music" forever, this is most definitely not the logical way to do it.

-HM

Sexuality Storyboard

It's official: I am the world's worst artist. This is a storyboard showing the first few shots of a clip depicting heterosexuality.

(I did kind of recycle the chair; this is because it was so awkward to draw the first time around, I didn't really want to have to do it again...)

A note

Should probably make a post here explaining the current situation - the fact my group have yet to start filming is solely my fault right now; I've been ill over the entire holiday and have been unable to do much at all really. Apologies to the group for this, we're going to have to spend a lot of time catching up as I'm aware other groups have filmed a significant amount of material already.

On a more positive note, the talk at the HRC has given me a fair understanding of Final Cut and I have all the materials still saved so it shouldn't take too long to put the prelim together when we get access to the Macs.

(I also need to get hold of a half-decent hard drive, will hopefully have a chance to pick one up after work Wednesday if anywhere in the Cross happens to sell them...)

Common Room Photos

These are photos from a small area of the sixth form common room - a potential area to film our prelim. Not 100% certain, but might be possible. Lighting may be a potential issue, other than that it has the right kind of atmosphere for an interview room.

EDIT: This is the room we have used.