Continuity Editing

Continuity Editing

 

Continuity Editing is a system of cutting used to maintain continuous and clear narrative action by following a set of rules. By using this it makes sure that the shots flow making the narrative easy to understand and the film simple to watch.

 

There are many examples of continuity editing which are used in all films and TV programmes to ensure that the clips make sense to the audience.

 

 

Establishing Shot
 



An establishing shot is a long or extreme long shot that shows a landscape. This shot is used to introduce and set a scene.







Shot Reverse Shot

 These are two shots edited together that alternate

between two characters. This is usually used when showing a conversation between two people.
Usually characters in one frame look left and the other frame look right.

These shot sequences often begin with a master shot which shows both the characters.

180 Degree Rule

This image also shows the 180 degree rule. This rule states that the angle between any two consecutive shots should not exceed 180 degrees, this is in order to maintain spatial relationships between people and objects in any given sequence.


Cross cutting

Cross cutting is when you have cuts between two shots that are occurring at the same time but in two or more different locations.










Match on Action

This is a cut between two shots that places two different framings of the shot next to each other, making it to seem to continue uninterrupted.









Re-establishing Shot

A shot that returns to a wide view of for example a house after a series of close ups



Eye Line Match

This is a cut between two shots in which the first shows
a person looking of in one direction and a second containing what he/she is looking at or another person looking straight back at the first character.













 

Log Lines for my Opening Title leader

Log Lines

 

-While investigating the murder of his partner, a lone police officer stumbles upon a deadly conspiracy.

 

-A police officer seeks revenge for the death of his partner, who was murdered by an infamous assassin.

 

-A policeman chases down a hired hitman to get revenge for the death of his best friend.

 

These are some log lines that I have created to describe and advertise the film that my opening title sequence will be biased on.

 



Log Lines #2

Log Lines

-While investigating the murder of his partner, a lone police officer stumbles upon a deadly conspiracy.  

 

I have chosen to use this log line to describe the film that I will be creating an opening title sequence for because it gives the reader an incite into the plot line of the film yet still managing to create an sense of mystery. This draws in an audience who wants to get more information on the story of hero.

This log line manages to get a reader interested in the film as it poses questions such as how was his (partner killed?) and (what is this conspiracy?).

This logline summarises the plot of the film very well as the film concentrates on a lone detective trying to find his partners killer.

Beginning: The film begins by showing the events of how his partner was killed while showing the opening credits (this is the part of the film that we will be creating for our coursework). When the opening credits finish the story will continue 2 years later, the police officer is now a detective working for Metro PD and the film sets up how he is obsessed by finding the killer of his partner, so when he gets a call saying that this hitman has killed another person he is determined to get the case.

Middle: The middle of the film shows the Detective following the leads from his case while he try's to locate the hitman and get his revenge. During this, there will be stimulus that trigger a flashback to when his partner was alive. It eventually comes to the detective tracking down and cornering the hitman. However just as the detective is about to avenge his partner the chief constable of his department reveals himself from the shadows. He then proceeds to reveal a huge conspiracy within the police department and many government officials, of which his partner had been a part of. He also reveals that he and the hitman are fighting to stop the conspiracy and bring those involved to justice.

End: The end phase of the film follows the detectives struggle to come to terms with the truth of his partners death. And shows how he helps to brig down the conspiracy that is plaguing the police department.

Preliminary Task Review

Preliminary Task Review

 

This is the Preliminary Task that we created for our AS Media coursework 



 

 

To create this we used a Cannon 700D camera mounted on a tripod to ensure that the shots where steady. The main aim of  the task was to ensure that we understood continuity editing and so when we filmed this we had to ensure that the cuts flow and made sense when edited together. I believe that overall our video maintains continuity very well with all the cuts flowing and the speech and eye contact of the actors lines up with one another, however I have noticed one mistake looking back over our video. in the clip when character A enters the room you here the door closing behind him which is fine but when we cut to the next scene when character A approaches character B the sound is repeated which would confuse an audience. there is also room for improvement on the close ups of character A during his conversation with character B as we left too much open space to his right in the shot and could improve by zooming in closer on the character.

Apart from these few mistakes I believe that our preliminary task was very successful.

 

While producing this piece we used and developed many skills that can be reapplied when creating our opening title sequences the main thing that I developed my kills in is filming. Even though I was acting in the preliminary task I learnt a huge amount of how to use the more high quality equipment used in media  an example of this the close up on opening the door.

 

 Another skill used was to ensure that our piece included the 180 degree rule, match on action and shot reverse shot. I believe that we managed to complete this task and include all these edits yet there is a moment where we specifically break the 180 degree rule in order to see what effect that had.

 

 Overall im extremely pleased with the outcome of our preliminary task, I think that we covered the necessary types of continuity editing required and that we successfully understood the task and as a result where able to create a video that fulfilled our targets.  

Media Distributions & Marketing

Media Distributions & Marketing

Distribution

Example of a film having multiple runs giving the audience a
wider choice of viewing time 

The distribution of media products is how companies ensure that their film or TV series is as widespread as possible this involves having their films to have as many runs as possible in a large amount of cinemas or broadcasting a show to more than one channel.
By doing this companies optimise the chances of making profit as having a film available at multiple cinemas makes it open to a wider audience and having as many runs of the film as possible it gives audiences a choice which time is most favourable to them increasing the chances of them seeing the film.


Another way of successfully distributing your film is to have it released at the most favourable time of the year for its genre for example if the films genre was horror then they may try to have the film released around Halloween.

Marketing
Film companies also use marketing to increase the profit from the film. They do this is marketing a film increases its status and peoples awareness of it.
there are two main types of marketing used by corporations to market their films:
Viral Marketing
This technique is mainly on the internet and involves the spreading of the film on existing social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Guerrilla marketing
This technique uses low cost and unconventional marketing strategies to raise awareness for a product e.g. unscheduled stunts before the products release.

An example of a film that has used this method of marketing is Borat, by holding fake press conferences and also released the first 4 minutes of the film on YouTube a week before the release of the film allowing it to be spread virally over the nation.

Media Institutions

Media Institutions

Media Institutions are the handful of companies that can develop high quality media texts and products and distribute them widely and easily.

Its outstanding how few companies have control over the mass of media that is produced each year for example in the USA only five major institutions have control over nearly all the 'visual media' such as TV and films.

Examples of leading media institutions:
(top) 20th century Fox
(bottom) Universal

Critics argue that the concentration of media ownership offers an individual or a company a huge amount of influence and could result in a loss of variety in media products.

 

These media institutions are able to stay dominant in their fields by making the largest profit from their film. They do this by making their films seem more professional than others in order to make audiences more willing to watch their product. For these large corporations there are simple steps to ensure that your film looks professional to an audience one of these steps is to advertise your film often to a large target audience which I will cover more detail in the next blog.
An example of a media institution is Warner Bro's which buys up companies that produce and distribute films so when they have created a film buy using the film producing companies they can then use the sister company to distribute the film with ease.
For a list of the biggest six media institutions click on this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_conglomerate

How men are represented in the genre of thriller(pending)

How men are represented in the genre of thriller

 

In Thrillers the dominant characters are male and are very stereotypically presented as strong, tough and heroic. In these films the male is shown as the hero, for example in the taking of Pelham 123 the main protagonist (Denzel Washington) manages to deal with the hijacking of a train by using his intellect to save the lives of the passengers enhancing the stereotype of men being clever and cunning. 

Audience Research Methods

Audience Research Methods

National Readership Survey- http://www.nrs.co.uk/
the NRS provides readership estimates for the UKs biggest newspapers.

American Broadcasting Company- http://abc.go.com/
ABC is a broadcast television network created in 1943.

Broadcasters Audience Research Board-  http://www.barb.co.uk/
BARB is the official source of television viewing figures in the UK. They continually develop new ways of measuring what the UK are watching.  

Bookseller- http://www.thebookseller.com/
Bookseller is a company that provides news on the book publishing industry and provides the latest press reports about he publishing sector.

New ways to measure audience is using new technologies such as social networking sites, online forums and YouTube which help give media companies to easily compose an accurate measure of audience.






Types of research
Quantitative-  quantitative research is mainly number based, has closed questions to generate exact answers and very factual e.g. questionnaires

Qualitative- qualitative research includes an analysis of  existing products, open questions to generate answers open to interpretation and individual preferences e.g. interviews or focus groups.

Considering Audience
Audience Engagement- this describes how an audience interacts with a media text. different people react in different ways to do the same text.

Audience Expectations- these are the ideas the audience have in advantage of seeing a media text. this particularly applies to genre pieces. don't forget producers continually play with or shatter audience expectations.

Audiences

Audiences
An audience is an individual or group of people who read or consume any media text.
Audiences are important because without them the film would produce no profit meaning there would be no media.
The mass media is becoming more competitive to attract more audiences in different ways and stay profitable.
the belief that audiences receive messages during viewing films is long gone. Two theorists Katz and Blumler proposed from their research on audience behaviour that audiences use media for different reasons

1.Information
Finding out events, satisfying curiosity and gaining a sense of security through knowledge.

2.Personal identity
Reinforcement of personal values, finding models of behaviour and an insight into ones self.
e.g. Facebook or twitter

3.Integration and Social Interaction
Insight into circumstances of others; social empathy, identifying with others and gaining a sense of belonging, interaction, enabling contact with family, friends and society.

Demographic- is the age, race ,gender, class/status and nationality of the audience.

Psychographic- audiences interests, beliefs and habits.

Niche films are ones that would not have as much marketing or the resources to spend on the production of their film and so they have a small target audience.

Mass films are one that have a large audience and are usually created or backed by the large film companies biased in Hollywood, America.
Mass audience those who consume mainstream or popular texts such as soaps and sitcoms or media and communication that targets a very large group of people. e.g. Top Gear or Friends

The introduction on new technologies such as mobile phones and the internet is meaning that media texts are harder to notice this impacts the people marketing the products and so the media text must gain attention to itself by being louder and more extravagant than the competing media sites.

Audience research is a major part of any media company's work. they use questionnaires, focus groups, pre-film screenings and spend a great deal of time and money finding out who would be interested in their product.

from this link
http://www.thinkbox.tv/server/show/nav.914
I have learnt about how audiences are categorised.

Group A
-lawyer
-doctors
-scientists
-well paid professionals

Group B
-teachers
-middle management
-fairly well paid professionals

Group C1
-junior management
-bank clerks
-nurses
-'white collar' professions

Group C2
-electricians
-plumbers
-carpenters
-'blue collar' professionals

Group D
-manual workers such as:
-drivers
-post sorters

Group E
-students
-unemployed
-pensioners

Narrative

Narrative
Narrative is the structure and organisation of media texts in short it is the way the parts of the story are put together and presented to the audience.
in order to analyse the narrative, there are series of codes and conventions that need to be considered because of this when looking at the narrative we examine the conventions of:

• Genre
• Character
• Form
• Time

Roland Barthes describes a text as

"a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signified; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..."  

what he is stating is that a text is like a tangled ball of thread that needs to be unravelled and that once we do this we encounter a variety of potential meanings.

Narrative Enigmas
These are codes that limit the information given to the audience and forces them to work out what's going on in the story. Because the audience have to figure out the puzzle of the plot it keeps their attention on what their watching.

Technical code sound camera angles editing
verbal code  way language is used to convey the story
symbolic codes clues in the story
structure beginning middle end three part structure
character protagonist antagonist heroin sidekick mentor

Narrative conflict
All narrative is caused by narrative conflict and the battles between characters moves the story along

An example of how the narrative(structure) helps create the story and make it flow

• crime planned
• crime conceived
• crime committed
• detective investigates
• crime discovered
• detective identifies the criminals

Iconography
Iconography is the genre changes over time e.g westerns & musicals
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iconography

Hybrid Post

Hybrid Genre
A hybrid is a combination of the two or more genres
hybrids can have larger audiences due to appealing to more people through their multiple genres. this would be more lucrative for the film companies. some people consider them more exciting and creative.
horror movies are perennially popular, film makers might start with a set of horror paradigms to guarantee interest, before throwing other tropes into the mix.
this gives us genre hybrids like:
horror romance (twilight)
horror war (dead snow)
horror historical drama (pans labyrinth)

Combining two genres will pull both audiences for the separate genres to watch the film this gives the film a bigger target audience and increases the enhances of the film making the company profit.
genres are not static, but evolve. therefore their common attributes change over time. most films are hybrid genres, since they possess the common attributes of more than one genre. -Warren Buckland

Sub-Genres

Sub-Genres

Sub-Genres are identifiable sub-classes, almost like a sub heading within the larger film genre with their own distinctive subject matter, style, formulas and iconography, an example of a sub-genre film is Skyfall which is an action adventure

in the case of Skyfall & James Bond films can fit into subgenres like action adventure, but there are many other sub-genres such as:

• spy
• espionage
• political thriller
• martial arts films
• race against time

This is a link which should give you a better understanding of sub-genres.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre

Media Genre

Genre
In this blog I will talk about what I have learnt in my AS Media lessons at sixth form.

Genre is way of  categorising films or other media products that have similar techniques or conventions such as content, structures and themes.

there are many different examples of media genre such as:
action, horror, thriller, comedy, war, rom-com, adventure, drama & documentary.

Action
An action film is film genre where one or more heroes are thrust into a series of challenges that require physical feats. They often include fistfights, gunfire, explosions & car chases. action films are one of the biggest source of income for movie studios 

Horror
Horror is a genre that aims to create a sense of fear, panic & alarm for the audience. These films are often unsettling and rely on scaring the audience through a portrayal of their worst fears and nightmares which means that the films incorporate a lot of violence and gore into the plot. Horror films usually centre on the arrival of an evil force, person, or event and often include mythical creatures such as ghosts and vampires.

Comedy
Comedy films rely on humour as the driving force of the film & they do this by creating laughter from the audience through entertaining characters and stories. A comedy film is the most likely to slip into other genres as humour can easily be incorporated into other genres. comedy films attract huge audiences creating vast profits for movie produces however the success of a comedy film is usually reliant on the success and popularity of one star. 

Adventure
Adventure is a genre that revolves around the conquests and explorations of a protagonist. The purpose of the conquest is usually to retrieve a person or treasure, but often the main focus is simply the pursuit of the unknown. These films generally take place in exotic locations and incorporate on historical myths. Adventure films incorporate suspenseful puzzles and intricate obstacles that the protagonist must overcome in order to achieve his/her final goal.








Genres function according to a to a set of rules and conventions, which govern their capacity. they respond to these set rules by developing paradigms (the over all pattern created by a film that helps to categorise it)& over time these formulas and patterns may change or influence the ways of seeing and representing the world around us. 
the categorisation of films grew with the evolution of the film industry, but was particularly developed in hollywood in the 1920s/30s when major studios where being established.
these new studios wanted to attract large audiences to films to create a large profit. to do this companies needed to establish what films people liked and produce them in larger quantities. marketers could then give films a label so audiences knew what to expect and genres became formulas consisting of predictable conventions that audiences liked. 

the producers or marketers of films use genre so that they can work out what films are most popular so they can produce more of them. they also use genre so they can correctly market a film meaning the right type of audience to produce more profit. 
another reason that film marketers need to categories films so that people have the right expectations of the film when they go and see it, if the marketing is done correctly and successfully then people will be more likely to recommend the film and result in a larger profit for movie makers.