Representation of Youth in Cinema

Today in cinema youth are depicted in many ways, but a majority of them are negative views. Everyone has a differnt view on youth, to what they do in society, to the age. To me 'youth' is from around 14 to 28/29, most people will go out and party, have fun, act irresponsible - of course there are execptions a lot of the time but TV and media stereotypes youth into this narrowminded view.

I have been watching several films which represent youth:

Attack the Block - Muggers, agressive, rude > nice on the inside and don't really mean any harm.

Human Traffic - Good guys, enjoy a party

Juno - Get preggers, quite mature for the age, responsible (ish) American and not British, could that have an affect?

Trainspotting - Similar to HT just a bit darker, maybe the characters are a little older too

All are from different ares of the world but a marjority are from the UK as that is more representative of the youth cultures I'm looking at. In these films youth is normally looked down upon and the people are taking drugs and/or doing things they are not meant to be doing (mugging people/getting pregnant at 16).

Youth Culture - Punks

Punks first broke into the scene in the 60s with bands such as 'The Sonics' who could neither sing or play instruments very well, but it was different to the other genres and sounds that were going around at the time (The Beatles, The Kinks, Motown) and the youth of course wanted to rebel. They broke the conventional rules, and once one band did that and whole flood of them joined in with people such as Iggy Pop & The Stooges and The Ramones. The audiences and bands wanted to be as different as they could be to anything else around at the time (The Beatles, The Kinks ect).

Not only with music, but also in fashion and so the most outrageouss fashions came about, this shocked the older generations and they disapproved of this. One of the most famous fashion designers of the 70s is Vivienne Westwod who is still designing today.

Punk music is one of the biggest revalations that has broken all the bountries. Youth saw this as an outlet and, as well as breaking the rules of music, they broke the rules of the law at times as well. This produced many riots and lots of violence - of course this all got blamed on youth which is a little stereotypical.

Many of the punks believe in 'Anarchy in the UK' (also a song by the Sex Pistols) and joined riots against the police and the government for many reasons, such as not having a enough freedom.

Our first draft!

Click here to take survey

Please take the survey, it will only take a minute!

We edited it on iMovie, but for the final we will be doing on Final Cut Pro as it is more precise. This is just a quick one to get feedback to see if the audience will like it and to just see how things would work out. As it goes, things worked out pretty well and nothing went wrong!

Filming Progress!

Wednesday 23/11/2011

Yesterday we started our filming of Kiefer playing guitar, luckily it was a nice sunny day, though a little chilly, and we sat out on the benches.
We used the big Sony camera and a tripod to keep it steady, it took us about an hour to get all the footage we wanted and we filmed it from many different angles so that we have lots of footage to choose from and to edit.

Our filming is now completed and the only thing we have left to do on the footage front is to do the stop motion of our male actor writing the letter, as Frankie did in our other stop motion. After this we will start editing!

16th November 2011

Today we wanted to start filming our guitar scene using a Sony HDV 1080i, but unfortunately our actor didn't turn up so we couldn't. Luckily though we have planned ahead and allowed plenty of time, and also brought in the equipment for another scene so we worked on that instead.

Today we did the stop motion for the letter the girl writes 'My dear I'm so confused, cos lately I've been thinking a lot about you' and we completed that. While doing this we decided we will use a male actor to write his part of the letter as well and will hopefully make progress on this later in the week.

Lists

Props
Sony HDV 1080i
Tripod
Guitar
Sony DSLR A350
Desk
Paper
Black felt tip pen
Chair

Characters

Kiefer - Playing guitar to the song so we can get shots that are in sync with our music.

Someone writing the letters (Abi/Claire/Amy/Katherine)

Locations

Benches

We will be using these benches for the guitar scenes where our actor will be performing. We took lots of photos from different angles so we could see the backgrounds and we will try this out on the day of filming as it depends on the light and weather.  As well as filming it on the camera we will also be taking photos on the DSLR to create a stop motion so we can see which one works better.

Desk

 For our stop motion and writing scenes it will all be done using the Sony DLSR, we may use this desk once we have cleared all the clutter off it as it has a desk and a plain background so it wont distract the audience. 

Schedule for Music Video

Start filming - 16/11
Start stop motion - 16/11 (if possible)
Finish all filming and stop motion - 23/11
Make rough draft - 26/11
Start editing - Whenever we can
Finish editing - 10/12
Final video - 16/12


Meanwhile handing out questionnaires asking the audience what they think of the ideas and progress and what could be improved.

Very very rough draft!

To make this we just used the camera on an iMac as we were just trying it out, and miming along with the guitar. Then for the stop motion we used a Canon DSLR and our friend just to write something out on paper, like a letter, to see if the camera would pick up the writing on the page. We then used iMovie to edit, in our final edit however we will be using Final Cut Pro. We had a few difficulties such as the images kept moving and zooming in and we just wanted them to stay in the same place. We soon relized though that it was the 'Ken Burns' effect and we removed it from all frames and that sorted the problem. We also added the 'Romantic' filter on the stop motion as we really liked the effect, this subtley contradicts with the lyrics of the song as it's not at all Romantic.
The start of the song has an introduction which we wanted to cut out, we thought we had on iTunes, but when we added it to iMovie it turned out we hadn't. So we cropped it down on Garageband and that was fixed. This video is the final product of our rough draft and we hope to start filming the actual video very soon!

Media Addiction

With more video games and consoles than ever before, parents are becoming worried about their children gaming too much and becoming addicted. Many children and teens go through this and spends hours, days, week and even months locked away playing computer games in their room. This becomes their reality, and their constant craving. When they are playing games they are fully involved in it and are content, when they are taken away from it for school/work etc it is all they think about and is the first thing they do when they return home.

Most people see addiction as a bad thing, but for some people gaming is an escape from their reality, they become an alter ego and are un-defeatable - this is where post-humanism applies.

The Pros and Cons of Gaming

 

Pros

•  Encourages co-operation
• Relives boredom
• It's fun
• Socialize with people online

Cons

• People may become secluded and shut off from the world
• Create an alter-ego in the gaming world and live vicariously through that.
• Will not socialized with 'real' people
• May encourage violence (Columbine High School Massacre)

M83 - Wait

M83 - Wait from Boris Winter on Vimeo.

The reason I posted this video is because it uses stop motion which is what Caitlin and I will be using in our music video. All of this video is set in black and white which I think emphasises the song as it's quite abstract, if the video was in colour I don't think I'd find it as effective. However, because of the nature of our song being more up-tempo will will be using colour.

As well as stop motion this video using filming as well. My partener and I are also looking into this as well, so that we have a mix of stop motion and movie. We have made an extremely rough draft of what we hope to achieve and the basic idea of what we will be doing.

Ghostwatch

In 1992 the BBC made a TV program where it featured several celebrities talking about a house that was haunted and they treated it like a documentary.

At the very beginning it showed a notice saying that all of the following footage was fictional, but people who tuned in after the message was shown did not know this and thought it was real. All the people who starred in it gave the impression they were taking part in a 'reality show' and not a stage drama. The presenters of the show were famous people such as Micheal Parkinson and Craig Charles, and at the time were quite popular and looked up to, because of this the audience would trust them and believe all they would say.

When it was finally aired on Hallowe'en a lot people wrote in complaining about the show and that it was too scary, especially for the time it was being aired at, and was not suitable for such ages.

Since the last post, Caitlin and I have decided to try a bit of stop motion in our videos and we have started planning our 2nd and more in depth storyboard which will be posted soon.

As well as this we are also coming up with ideas; we have thought about a narrative where the couple in the song are writing letters to communicate to one another and we're watching them. It will also have someone playing the guitar parts in it to fill the instrumentals.

We are going to start casting our roles in this and choosing our locations and our equipment during the week. A large majority of the video will be shot inside as the weather is getting a bit grim and chilly so this means we can use the larger cameras which shoot in a much better quality.