Facebook and Twitter

To help advertise our production we have created two Facebook pages and one Twitter page. These will help to promote our series, give others information on the series and updates on the progress of the show. They are able to to become fans on Facebook, join a group on Facebook and follow it on Twitter. We have also started to advertise casting on the fan page on Facebook and we have managed to get quite a few fans. Below are images of the pages that we have created.

I think that is a good idea because it allows us to get a big audience very quickly and before we have even made an episode. This will be a great way in which we can give them information on when the next episode will be, how you can act in the show and pretty much any infomation they may want to know about the show.

Links to these pages;

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Detention-Deficit/240802514737?ref=ts

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=243769059394&ref=ts

http://twitter.com/anarchy_flow

Researching Opening Titles to TV Sitcoms

As I am working on the sound for the series, I thought that it would be a good idea to research what some other series have used. I will also look at the titles sequences as I will be helping Matt H with his research. I thought that the best type of series to research would be sitcoms as we are making a comedy series and the music that we use may be similar. The first series I decided to research was 'The Inbetweeners' and this series is about a group of school kids, who may be classed as 'nerds', and their daily problems. I like this titles sequence because it focuses on each character so you almost get an idea of what they are like from the titles. The effect which they have used is almost like a black and white comic so this is another thing that may suggest they are school 'nerds' and the music is popular in teenagers. This means that because of the content and the music genre that their main audience would be school/college students. This is the type of sound that we want to go for, maybe not the same genre but something that teens will listen to and will interest them.



Below is a video for 'Grange Hill' opening titles and they do the same sort of thing. It is a series about a school and the trouble that the kids get into. The music works very well and again has some teen interest. The titles are quite original and I like that they have used a comic effect to display the characters in the titles. This could have worked well with our series but I think that it maybe a bit too much for a sitcom and we decided it wouldn't work. Even though this isn't much of a sitcom, the concept that they have used will help us with our production.

January 8th - New Production Team Meeting

Our meeting today was very different to our normal meetings and Nick decided to chair this one. He has come up with the idea of splitting us into two different production groups and then each team would work on their own version of the original idea that we all came up with. We are still going to be using the same process so we have came up with a production name(AnarchyFlow) and assigned roles to each of the group and decided on what needs to be done and who will be completing each task.
The roles for the group;

James; will be working the script.
Hayden; has made a storyboard, will also be working on script and helping with editing and cinematography.
Matt H; is working on the titles and has already come up with an idea and drawn it out.
Alex; will be working on the websites we have created and part of the marketing.
Loz; will be our main editor and working on some marketing.
I will be working on the sound for the series, along with Matt, helping Loz with some of the marketing and I have also done some work with some Facebook pages that Hayden has put up.

I think that this was a good idea and that it may work out for the better. We will now have less people to organise and working in a smaller group will make our production run a lot smoother and quicker. Even though it may seem like we are running against the other group because they are working on the same idea, we are still going to be working with them when we share actors between the groups. This shall be a good experience for us and it has shown us that we will need some patience and other qualities to be able to work in a big production team.

January 6th - Meeting/Starting the Project

Today we started off with another meeting and started to determine what responsibilities each of our roles would include. I have the role of sound throughout the project and I gathered a few ideas of what I thought I would be responsible for doing. I would need to start researching opening title theme tunes from other comedy micro-series to see what kinda of thing works best and get some idea. I also thought that it would be useful for me to refer to the writers and title/credits editors to see what kinda of plan they had and that everything will work well together. Finally, I thought that at some point it may be good if I got feedback from everyone in the class to see what sounds they think would go well so I have lots of ideas and different views.

After this we then split into two groups, one group with the writers and editors and another with the marketing team and writers and editors started to write the script and the marketing started to come up with idea for what they needed to do. We managed to come up with a lot of idea for the first episode and also what other characteristics the character would have. This worked quite well until there started to be people who didn't agree with some of changes to the characters and the complex ideas of the episode. When then decided to have another meeting to fix these problems and make sure that everyone was happy with the decisions made. We also took this time to decided on a name for the series, which we decided was 'Detention Deficit'. I think that we all still need to keep to a good communication system so that everyone knows of the choices and has taken part in them.

My final task of the day was to work with Mike who is the casting director. We made a list of all the characters in the series so far and went around people within the class to see who would want to act and who they would want to be. From this, we would then know what characters were left and if we needed to find more actors and so we could organize the auditions.

Different Way In Which Creative Practitioners Have Exhibited Their Work In Different Media/Art Forms

Technology has helped the media industry to come along way over the years and each piece of technology has helped a lot of practitioners to expand their methods of the exhibiting their work to others all over the world. Before we were able to use the internet or send emails, we were very limited to how we could show off our pieces of work and not many people were able to show off their work. Pieces art work were put into art galleries, films were shown in cinemas but no low budget films and underground work. There weren't any graffiti artists who would show their work in public or internet websites were you could send around your latest home video. Times have changed and people have became more creative and finding more ways of getting their work around to huge amounts of people.

This process has happened over many year, as only five years ago YouTube was introduced and along with many social networking sites such as Facebook. By us having these sites we are able to put anything we produce on these sites for the whole world to view and without needing to be successful in the business. Even though this is an amazing step forward in the business, because of the mass amount of people who upload their videos, it means that it is now hard for many people to get noticed for their talents. As there are now more people putting their work forward, you have to be exceptionally good to get noticed by someone who would help you in the business and a lot of people are don't get noticed even though they may have years ago.

I have been looking into examples of practitioners who have done significant shows and what made them so different. However, rather then first looking at one specific practitioner, I thought that one of the memorable stages in technology at the moment is HD, Blu-Ray and colour editing. Only in the last few years we have been receiving high definition and before this we were watching everything in low definition. We are now able to get hold of HD channels and watch things which have been filmed in HD. Blu-Ray's have also been introduced which have brought a whole new range of DVD's to shop shelves. You now have to chance to see films a lot more clearer and when watching them it seems to look more real, rather than looking than an ordinary film. Also recently practitioners in the media have been able to spend some time colouring old black and white films to make them into colour and then re-selling them on DVD. This is very significant as we have never been able to see these old films in colour and when watching them you have always wished it. It will make the experience of watching these films a lot better as you will be more of an idea of what filming and the content was like back then. Finally, another similar significant stage was practitioners discovering how to re-touch Disney films so they seem more clearer and a cleaner colour. As these animated films were made ages ago, the colour seems a bit dated so cleaning it up a bit really changes the viewing experience.
I think that the most well known film which has been changed into colour from black and white is the film 'White Christmas'. The first video below shows a clip of the original black and white film and then the video below that shows the colour version of roughly the same part of the film.







I have also tried to look into the media more detailed and look a practitioners and I decided to look at Michel Gondry and the video for White Stripes 'Fell in love with a Girl'. This video is made using Lego bricks and StopMotion to create a moving image with bricks. I have chosen this video because at the time I think that it was something that had not really been done before and for technology is was really effective. Michel Gondry has been known to make very memorable videos but this one I think people always remember even if they aren't a fan of White Stripes or Michel Gondry. Below I have pasted the video for the song.

January 5th - Show Project Meeting

Today we thought that it would be a good idea for all of us to sit down and have a meeting to plan and make a few decisions about the project. We came up with a nomination and voting system, which would help us to make a lot of decisions that we need to make to get this project done. Starting with the decision on who would be chairman of the meetings, we held a nomination to who wanted to be up for chairman and then from that we all voted on who we thought would be best for the position. It started of with James, Alex, Tim, Kirk and Dave being nominated and as James and Dave got the least votes, they were taken out of the voting. Alex and Tim are now are chairmen and it has worked a lot better with two chairmen as we now have two people we can refer to and twice as much organization.
We then moved on to deciding on what the concept for our micro-series would be. This decision was made by us all writing an idea on a post-it note, sticking them on the board and we all voted by drawing a tic on the one which we thought was best. From this we got down to three ideas, we had a discussion and thought we would combine the concept of a detention room with secret agent and get rid of zombie apocalypse. This then made our concept for our micro-series, five regulars in detention(one of which is a secret agent trying to escape) and their daily problems. We had a brief discussion after this about the names of these five regulars and what they are like but it wasn't a very organised discussion and will need some more looking into.
Our final discussion of the day was to assign roles to each person in the class and we voted on who we wanted for director but the rest of the roles were done more loosely and without voting. Our directors are now Dave and Kirk and the voting was done in the same way as the voting for the chairman. Tim then made a list of what roles we think we will be needing and then went down the list and asking who would want to do this role. Below is a list of the roles and who now has those roles.

Directors - Dave and Kirk
Editors - Loz
Sound - Myself and Sam
Camera - Tim, Alex and Matt L
Title and Credits - Matt H and Hayden
Casting - Mike
Treasurer - Dave
Writers - James, Alex, Matt H, Hayden and Alie
Marketing - Alie and Tara
Websites - Ash

This last discussion I don't think was handled very well and I think it could have been as easy or more easier than the previous discussion if we had kept to the same rules as before. We had lost our system of one person talking at a time by raising their hand and being chosen. This then made it hard for other people to be heard and only the more dominant members of the class were heard. We also lost our nominating and voting system which meant that some people got exactly what they wanted and more but others may not have had the chance to have what they wanted as well. I think that this would have gone a lot better if we were all listening to one person at a time and using nomination and voting so that everyone would have the chance to have the role that they wanted. I think that we have learnt a lot from this meeting today and that we now know how things work best, we will now know how to work better together and get the job done a lot easier.

Researach Into Another Micro-series

I have also researched into other micro-series that we won't given to watch and I found Red vs Blue. From what I have watched I think that Red vs Blue is a games animation which consists of characters from the game Halo and each episode reds are battling blues, however, there are two characters who seem to always be having an odd conversation and not focusing on the battle at hand. The series also includes other characters who come in to play as time goes on but they get frustrated with these two characters talking all the time. This kinda of humour, I think is only funny to a certain extent. This is because it is game humour and you are more likely to enjoy the humor of the series if you have played the game before. The first few episodes are easy to grasp and are funny but maybe not as funny as intended.
Below is a video of one of the episodes - Red vs Blue - Episode 1

Chad Vader - Episode

In this episode of 'Chad Vader' it is mainly about his date with one of his colleagues but it also includes other incidents with some of the other colleagues and references to Darf Vader which go on throughout the series. I found this episode more entertaining than the first episode as it had a couple more direct references to Darf Vader's lines in Star Wars which I found really funny. This concept was a great idea but the more I watch the series, the more I think that they will run out of references to use and it may become a bit repetitive.

Today's Session 4/01/10

In today's lesson we had our first session for the show project and we were show a range of internet micro-series, which included 'Chad Vader - Day Shift Manager', 'Living with the Infidels', 'We need girlfriends' and 'The Guild'. All of these series had a comedy genre and I think that it wouldn't really have worked any other way because it is hard to make a internet series which would be serious and keep people hooked and interested.

'The Guild' is a series mostly shot with head on shots, from the view of where a computer screen would be and it is generated around an online game which all of the characters take part in. I think that this is a really interesting view shoot in and even though you have a really confined space to work with, it works really well and gives of a lot of 'nerdy' humour. They use an animated title sequence which is made too look like online game characters and basic credits are run at the end of the clip. They have also produced a website which display's their videos and they promote these with merchandised t-shirts which are advertised on the websites pages.


















'We need girlfriends' is a series based on three guys who have decided to live together but however, have all manged to loose their girlfriends and now are on a mission to get back on the field and find new ones. This storyline works well because it is a common storyline to a lot of American teen movies and would collect a wide audience with its comedy. They use a basic title sequence and end credits and so far I have found any ways in which they promote their series to their audience.


















'Living with the Infidels' is a series about a group of terrorists and their day to day happenings which involved the flirtatious girl who lives upstairs. This concept, even though it is stepping on thin ice, its quite good. The humour than comes across is acceptable and not many would take offense. As long as you have an open mind with humour, you will be able to experience the hilarious comedy of this sitcom. The series has an animated title sequence and basic end credits and these work in the same way as 'The Guild' has worked well. They have made up their own site which displays their videos and a brief promotion side of their videos.














'Chad Vader - Day Shift Manager' is a series about "Darf Vaders Evil Young Brother", who works in a supermarket. This micro-series references Stars Wars a lot, especially Darf Vader and this works very well as a comedy. This aims at a wide audience because many people can relate to this from watching Star Wars themselves and then finding the humour within the clip quite funny. They use a very simple opening title sequence which consists of just text and basic end credits. They have also created a site, which they then use to promote their series and display each video on there and YouTube.

Link to Main Show Blog

Here is a link which will take you to the main blog page for the show project. 

http://cmdiplomashow.blogspot.com