Presentation Criticism

In this weeks lesson of Media Studies we made a presentation on Waterloo Road, this was then uploaded onto my partners blog address; http://elliottwalsh96.blogspot.co.uk/. The criticism we recieved for this is listed below:

Good use of images
Good use of Terminology
Good links to the theories/binary opposites
Make more attractive (GIFS, Videos)
Could have used more on editing, mise-en-scene and music, but what is there is good.

Could make it better presented and more interesting
Should mention camera shots and sounds
Nicely laid out
Good use of pictures
Good technical language

Terminology is well used
Need more on mise-en-scene

Chunks of text need breaking up
Needs a conclusion
Needs to be more appealing

More terminology but good reference to the theories
Less heavy text

Good analysis of characters and detailed
Clear understanding of structure etc
A bit text heavy, needs more pictures
Flows well, a bit short. Needs more info.

I am quite pleased with this criticism on the whole, I would improve the blog presentation further by taking the ideas of improving the presentation of it on board like breaking the text up more and adding more images, videos and colour.

Questions on the Clip.

Today in Media Studies we were put into groups of four people and given these four questions to work through, the questions were based on the five minute clip of a drama programme that we watched last week.  The questions and our answers to them are listed below.

Why represent the police in this way?
They represent the police in this way because the creators want to make you side with the immigrants and make you see the police as antagonists (villains). This subverts the role of the police who are usually good. They also represent them in this way to show a sense of realism, this means that they do it to show that not everything has a happy ending and also destroys the belief that everything will be fine in the end. They may have also represented the police in this way to show them as faceless, unthinking robots as they don't seem to react to anything they're doing when they are ruining lives.

Why represent the immigrant workers in this way?
The creators of the programme represent the immigrant workers in this way in order to make you sympathise with the workers and again see the police as the villains. They may also have done this to send a message out that immigrant workers are treated unfairly in the UK like in the programme, in which they have to have low-end jobs even when they are qualified for better roles (e.g. Adam is a qualified doctor but is made to be a cleaner). The way that they represent the immigrant workers in some seems almost puts us in the room with them so you feel emotions for the workers such as fear when the workers are all hiding in the closet and fretting, Sympathy for the workers when Ibrahim gets caught and is taken away and grief when the character Sue is cleaning out Ibrahim's locker and sniffles as though she is crying.

What stereotypes are being adhered to or subverted from in this clip?
The Police - The police stereotype is usually one that is good, they are normally protectors of the society, but here on the other hand, they are subverting the stereotype by presenting them as nonchalant, uncaring, just "doing their jobs" when actually they are destroying peoples lives.
The Immigrants - The stereotypes of immigrants are usually a bad one such as unclean, de-humanised, stealing jobs, large families, unskilled and violent, but this clip attempts to de-construct this stereotype.
They do this with each character; Adam - Religious, caring and a trained doctor, Ibrahim - Treated incredibly roughly without provocation.

Can you hypothesise the purpose behind the mediation of this clip?
One reason this clip is mediated is to inform people more about immigrants and immigration and destroy the stereotype and made to challenge peoples pre-conceptions of not only the immigrants, but the police too. The main root cause however is simply to entertain an audience and make money from that.

Stereotypes

In yesterdays lesson of Media Studies we explored two main areas. One was looking at pictures provided by the teacher and thinking of "Connotations" of that picture. "Connotation" is a word of which we learnt the meaning of today; in the context of our lesson it basically means words we associate with that image. Our first image was that of a sunset or sunrise, the main connotations our group thought of were Relaxing and Calm. The next was an image of a rose, the connotations of this that were thought up by the group were that of romance and love. The final image we were shown was an image of Arnold Schwarzenegger dressed in his costume for "Conan the Barbarian", a lot of the connotations from this were about masculinity and strength, but some also came up as gay because of the outfit not fitting into today's modern age.

After that we took a short look at the study of signs; also known as "Semiology". This was done by our teacher showing us about twenty different signs and then asking us to name each, this was made harder by some hidden signs that did not exist. We were then asked how we knew what the signs meant, one way was for a stop sign in which somebody answered that the colour red can symbolise danger. We were then asked to think whether that concept would work in the east in places like China, this wouldn't because of the fact that the colour red is associated with luck in China rather than danger.

The next part of the lesson was spent on exploring stereotypes, we were shown various examples of stereotypes such as Germans cheating with their beach towels and grannies always knitting. We looked at stereotypes in two different ways. The first way was that the class were shown four images and we had to state the stereotype for each, one was; a hoodie, a phone, an MP3 player and some trainers with the stereotype being youths and young kids, another was a flat cap, glasses, a beard and walking stick with the stereotype being old aged man, the final images were a chefs apron, a frying pan, a vacuum and an oven with the stereotype being women. The other way we looked at stereotypes was by been told a stereotype like "Blondes" and then writing connotations that we associate with that stereotype such as dumb.

To end the lesson we took a look at a sample exam in which we are shown a clip of a drama programme a few times and we have to watch and make notes on different things in it, in particular we were asked to focus on the "Mise-en-scene" which looks at the props, costumes, colours and setting of the video clip. We were shown a clip in which the immigration officers raid a hotel and capture an immigrant that couldn't hide in time. The question we were given to this was "How did the video clip represent the immigrants and the police?". We worked on this for the remainder in the lesson and had to get ready to give a presentation for the following lesson.

A taste of Media Studies.

In our first lesson of Media Studies we had a few different discussions on various topics, our first discussion was a discussion of what "clever" means to us which was followed by a discussion to find the ways of teaching we prefer, enjoy and benefit from most. Our decisions as a class would decide which ways we are taught throughout the course. To start we were shown two images, one of Itchy and one of Scratchy from "the Itchy and Scratchy show" and we were asked which was more "clever" even though the both got the same grade in school. Next we were told the ways in which both of the characters got the grades.
Scratchy got his grades from copying work off the board and using essay plans from teachers and then re-using that information in the exams, Itchy on the other hand got his grades from finding his own ways of writing essays and making his own plans. We were shown both characters a few years later and found that Scratchy couldn't get a new job after losing his last one because he couldn't apply any knowledge from his exams, however Itchy managed to get a new job after losing his last as he could apply the knowledge into his work place such as group work.

After those discussions we were shown the syllabus for the year and the topics and layout of the exams and coursework for the course ahead of us, after receiving a few sheets of paper we watched some of the coursework of the previous year of Media Studies students. The pieces of coursework were each 2 minute clips to a fiction film that they had created in groups of 3-4 people. We were shown this to show us what we are expected to do.