Outline of project, Beginning of Character Development

Outline

This is the outline of my edited FMP story, I decided to change the majority of the story but still keep a lot of the themes from my previous idea, as I found the character of Nate easier to write for, I aim to make him a not very likeable character who is blinded by his own ego and his lack of care or understanding for those around him.

1. Band plays to packed club, they are doing well tonight, there is a large smile on the face of Nate (the lead singer) as the band finish off their set.
2. Band meet backstage at the end of the show, Nate enthusiastically suggests getting some money together to finally record an album and then get some real money out of it all., The rest of the band aren’t quite as enthusiastic and asks him to think it over. Nate suggests paying for all of this himself and then later taking the majority of profits.
3. The band meet as a practice session (or maybe pub instead) a few days later, Nate reveals that he has quit Uni to focus his efforts on the band and finally recording this album, The rest of the band are shocked that he was serious for once, but then immediately worry (for nate’s sake) If he has told his girlfriend. Nate reveals that he has not and heads off to tell her in person (before they told her maybe?)
4. Nate returns to home to find an exhausted Jess that has just finished her day at work, He reluctantly reveals the news he has quit uni to focus solely on the band. Jess is not at all happy about this, She gets angry at his choice of words which suggests that it will finally bring some money into the house. Nate sleeps on the couch for the night.
5. Some time has passed and we now see the band in a decent recording studio, the band question Nate’s business senses. Nate again refers to his ideal that an album has to be made, it needs to be sold in record shops to be big. Again the band questions him but carry on regardless because why not it’s not their money he’s wasting. A montage plays to show the progress of the last few days/weeks of recording and Nate and Jess’ detariating relationship.
6. Nate tells the band that they have got an interview with a major record executive, he tells them all to dress smart as this could be it for them.
7. The band arrives in a smart business meeting room, Nate is seen wearing a suit the others in smart casual clothes. They meet an executive from the major who essentially says he likes but he wants to market it differently, he wants to change the image and the style and to lose the self indulgent instrumentals in the middle, (he wants an album full of singles). Nate accepts but this causes an argument the rest of the band feel quite strongly against it, they argue with Nate until they decide to just quit. They leave Nate in the room with the executive. The executive is seen putting away the contract.
8. Nate is seen making a call to Jess and invites her to dinner to make up for how he’s been acting recently, he promises to make up for everything.
9. The couple meet up and although things start out awkward, they both seem to eventually enjoy themselves, until it comes to Nate paying the bill, he checks his wallet to see it is empty so he decides he’ll pay by card. The card is denied. Jess is seen to be angry at Nate as she reaches to her purse to pay for the meal, Nate realises he has nothing left.

10. The Two return home and Nate apologies for what he has done, he realises he has messed up and wants to make things better, but Jess has other ideas. She packs his clothes says He can pick up the rest another time, but they are over and she wants him out of her house.
11. The short ends with Nate outside the house with a defeated look on his face

CHARACTERS

nate

jess

drummer

bassist

executive

waitress

extras…

LOCATIONS

Club/Pub .1 .2 (maybe repeat the place for .3 meetup scene)

Cafe/restaurant .9

House or Flat .4 .5 .10 .11

Recording Studio .5 .6

Meeting room .7.8 (outside shots will be needed aswell)

Character 1 – Nate? (temp name) 24 year old Music Production student, still living with his parents. In a rock band that he thinks is much better than it actually is. (dilution of grandeur) He thinks this due to better than average attendance and support at his local venue. This combined with his ‘partial’ musical education makes him think he is ready to leave university and promote his music… ‘his way’

He initially puts some of the bands music up online to download in an ‘anti-establishment way’, but secretly he harbours dreams of being signed by a major label, His plan of action is to invest the university money he’ll get from dropping out just after payment and using that to fund a ‘proper’ album, this will be the album ‘he’ feels will get the band ‘out there’ and ‘shake things up a bit.’ All of this is a major problem for his girlfriend ‘Jess’. His parents are very disappointed to discover his decision especially because he took a lot of persuading to get to there

(?? good enough grades at school but dissapointing to parents that expected better??? they have highly respected careers?Could they be doctors/nurse/scientists???)

Character 2 – Jess 25 year old. Been going out with Nate for three years Jess is less idealistic and much more mature than Nate, she supports him where she can but she does wish that he would just get a decent job and settle down, despite this she supported his decision to go to university as it meant him moving closer to her. She is not very happy to discover that he will soon be dropping out to pursue his ‘dream’ as she is already supporting him with some money and paying the bills despite him getting a full loan.

Charcters 3 & 4 – Bassist Mike 25 and Drummer Rob 24 both are quite well backed people in serious relationships (kids?) and have full-time jobs, but still find the time to occasionally perform. They are more than happy to go along with Nate’s attempts to take them to the big time but refuse to put any money behind it because of what they cite as ‘family reasons’ (but in reality they don’t see the same enthusiastic approach to it as Nate does) hence why Nate takes all his savings and the loans he can get from his education. Mike and Rob get along with each other really well as if they were brothers, Nate not so much, although they like him they don’t feel they would risk a lot for him due to his own inflated ego.

Character 5 RL executive. (34) This man is only interested in one thing and that is money, He does genuinely see some talent in Nate’s band but he thinks that it needs a major image rehaul for them to make ‘HIM’ any money, this is a character who is experienced in the business and knows what he wants, which is a major obstacle for the band to overcome if Nate wishes to see his dream come true.

Potential Influences on my short film

Although my film has only recently taken a form that I am happy to move forward with I have been looking into how I would like the movie to ‘look’ like and how certian pieces I have seen before will have an influence on my film, be it in the style of the production or in some of the narrative themes. below is a list of a few pieces and how they will hopefully influence my final piece.

Black Mirror: 15 Million merits

This piece was a major influence on the initial idea of my proposed film, It’s running theme of the cult of celebrity, The impact of modern technology and advertising was for me very well executed. The style of filming is something way beyond my expertise and budget unfortunately, but I felt that narratively I could take a lot from this piece, It was obviously very well researched but also had a very strong view on the types of shows it was parodying (TV talent shows such as X Factor and Light entertainment shows such as Total Wipeout) this film presented a very dark vision of a dystopian future where image is everything and if you don’t fit into societies norms then you are effectively cast out. Although very extreme in it’s execution it’s underlying themes are certianly relate-able to the route I wish to go with my short film piece.

Cemetery Junction

This film although a comedy is quite an interesting film to consider in relation to this piece as it follows a character similar to how I see nate will end up, In this film the main character Freddie seems to have got everything settled at the start of the film, he’s an apprentice in a job he could see himself doing for a long time and he feels that he has made it in his chosen profession, however as the film goes on, he discovers that not only is this having a massive effect on the company he keeps around due partly to their lack of success but also because of his changing attitude, but it is also not the job that he really expected, he realises that he really doesn’t want to grow old selling insurance to people that don’t need it and get little to no recognition for it. His love interest in this film Julie harbours a strong love for photography and wishes to make a career out of it, against her fathers wishes (who also happens to be Freddie’s boss) This film I feel is relevant to my short as it themes heavily on the idea of teenage/ young adult dreams, the main characters despite all there problems aim to keep idealistic and let their heart rule their mind in the end. It also has a strong theme of escapism and how no matter what happens you can always get a train straight out of there, but it also helps you to appreciate what you had before leaving it all behind.

All of this is relevant to the character of Nate in this film, although he would be much older than the protagonists of this film I feel that the character traits of Freddie and a little bit of Julie have helped to inform me of how this character could be done.

Modern Life Is Rubbish

Daniel Jerome Gill

http://www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/films/p00g6n0y

This is a film that has been described as a breakup story for the ipod generation, which follows a recently seperated couple that go about splitting their music collection. The title takes it’s name from an album by Brit-pop act ‘Blur’. At 13 minutes in length this is very close to the timeframe I would be aiming for with my piece and this film has taught me a great deal about how I could develop my two main characters within that timeframe. The little subtle movements and emotions really make this film and really make you care for the characters despite the short amount time we have to get used to them. The male lead in this piece is also interesting in my character development as he refuses to live in the present he is happy and the past and quite frankly scared of how the present day works, He holds onto CD’s and refuses to listen to ‘drag and drop’ playlists and very much against piracy. The film moves quite slow considering how short it is and only features one location, but this is ok due to a fantastic script.

Again this piece asks the audience to question the value of an artist and music but also how this has an affect on us as human beings, The ending with the passing on of the Radiohead CD is a highly symbolic move in this film that speaks volumes about the characters. This is a much slower built film than the one I would aim to make, but it is certainly an important one for me to watch when it comes to how I plan to develop characters and also how a lack of dialogue can say a lot more than words at times.

Script and Revisions

Before heading to Germany for my professional practice I decided I needed to get a first draft of my script finished, I was honestly quite annoyed it had taken that long. I managed to get a first draft that at the time I was fairly happy with but recognised it would need feedback and improvement, I sent my script off to be reviewed by Clifton Stewart but was unable to receive proper feedback until yesterday.

Aswell as this I decided I wanted to allow my fellow students to cast their judgement on my script so I handed it in to be photocopied this morning (all be it the copy which had some notes from Clifton’s critique) as I wanted to get feedback from those in the same situation, fortunately this gave me a chance to see other people’s scripts as well. I also gave a copy to Laura Meades (without notes) to have a read through.

I dont know how to feel but all 3 groups mostly picked up on the same problems, Problem #1 being the ending. They all felt like it lacked ‘a punch’ a reason for the audience to care, I had to sadly say that I agreed with this, There were several suggestions of ways to improve this, some being that instead of the money going from fairly secure sources they should come from less secure sources such as remorgating the house to gain the money or emotional sources such as selling an engagement ring. There was however, another suggestion which also solved problem #2 which was lead characters motivation, but I would like to leave this from my blog until I have wrote my next draft to see if it will work for myself.

Other criticisms about my script were that it was too rigid, improperly formatted and a couple of characters were too one dimensional, again I found it hard to disagree with these points but knew they were part of my weaknesses in scriptwriting (hence the need for feedback)

My main concern is that I should have done this sooner and hopefully won’t need to drastically alter too much, I have started the casting stage of this piece and I am due to hold auditions soon, I will be posting another blog in the next few days updating progress in that area.

but for now I have taken the feedback I have been given and will draft my new script, I’m hoping that this will solve most (unlikely to be all) of the problems from the first draft that I shown.

 

[PICTURES TO FOLLOW OF CRITIQUE AND SCRIPT]

Presentation Notes

 

What was the problem with SOPA and PIPA and why should we care? 1^st slide

A lot of you will probably be aware of SOPA and PIPA but why did it draw such a strong reaction from sites such as wikipedia and a vocal amount of internet users?

2^nd slide Problems

The idea of the stop online privacy act is to give copyright holders control of their work that is hosted on non-US sites, the purpose of SOPA is to give tools to the Copyright holders to do something about this. But the problem with this bill is that it gives them the power to also do a lot more

3^rd slide problems

Now Sopa aswell as the bill written by the US senate PIPA seemed to imply that this could also filter to sites that are seen to be enabling copyright infringement, as the US can’t nesscerialy go after foreign sites but they certianly can go after sites which host the foreign content and here lies the main problem which most see with the bill.

4^th slide Problems

Because with that in mind, that would mean anybody using a site hosted in the U.S could be affected, Facebook users could be held accountable for posting an illegal upload of a song they like gamers for playing hacks of popular games or games unattainable physically (such as old atari games for example)

5^th slide search engines

Now this would have a huge impact on search engines because obviously they link to and make profit from linking to sites that ‘may or may not’ host illegal content. How dangerous is that if copyright holders can force google to block access to sites?

6^th slide problems

This may seem reasonable to some people, as it will lower the rate of illegal content being displayed on the internet. But this is very much a shoot people and ask questions later bill and content linkers may be forced to act before a foreign site is even proved to be illegal

7^th slide

imagine the impact this would have on the foreign business legitimate or not if search engines were forced to cut off all ties until the site proved it’s innocence and if the search engines don’t comply then the legal action turns to them forcing US sites to be regulators on things they really can’t control.

8^th slide Print screen

The vague wording is a problem as it gives no clear inditction as to what exactly is ‘enabling’ access to illegal sites, if you link to a site on the media blog that’s illegal are you an enabler?

9^th Slide

Based on this definition then the site the comment was uploaded to would be responsible for the link so sites such as you-tube could be fined for a comment or video that You upload, as you can imagine there is little way to manage this.

10^th slide

So if sites like you-tube can’t manage the content that appears on it, then it could be shut down under the wording of this law, then almost any site could be shut down. How many of you could cope without networks like Twitter or facebooks or online news outlets.

11^th slide

There are of course laws already in place to stop copyright infringement on youtube as i’m sure you all know, where holders will notify the source of the material and then they can investigate. SOPA would allow holders to again shoot first and ask questions later.

12^th slide

A court order could theoretically be placed to take down any site that holds User generated content so that could mean the whole of facebook could easily go down under this law if left the way it currently runs.

13^th slide

So I hope you can see why people would be angry over this proposed law, this would seriously harm all free speech and creativity online, when a site can be taken down over ‘alleged’ copyright infringement.

14^th slide

Also if a site goes down from mistaken identity then under this law they can not sue the copyright holders over lost revenue due to the wording of the legislation as rights holders can only be sued if they knowingly misrepresent their copyright rights.

15^th slide

Wikipedia made a very infamous protest last week when they went ‘offline’ for 24 hours in protest to this bill, Wikipedia would be one of the sites most at risk if this bill went through as of course the whole site is UGC.

16^th slide

One of the most worrying part of this bill is that people can even be guilty of breaking it simply for doing actions that make it difficult for the government to see whether or not you are breaking copyright infringment (punishing people for locking doors)

17^th slide

Now of course this was a US proposed law but I’m sure you can all see how this would affect us in the U.K how many sites from the US do you access daily that this could affect.

^18th Slide History

On January 20^th 2012 House Judiciary Committee Chairman Smith postponed plans to draft the SOPA bill seemingly putting an end to the need for protest from sites such as wikipedia right? SOPA’s dead? That’s not quite true.

19^th ACTA

There is a european equivelent that is being secretly pushed through known as ACTA, this is essentialy the european equivelent to SOPA and is currently being phased in across europe. And SOPA itself may be brought back after the US elections

20^th slide

I hope that you can all see the damage that these bills could cause. I have a link to petition against ACTA on my blog. Thank you and hope you enjoyed this presentation.

ACTA petition (IMPORTANT TO ALL READERS)

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/20850

above is a link to a petition to stop ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) this has a worryingly low amount of signitures, I will be talking about this bill and the recently cancelled SOPA tomorrow in an inspire style presentation (notes uploaded soon)

 

Ignite talk for inspiration and because it’s video game related

For my piece I shall be looking at this as an inspiration and will probably do a video game related talk, this will be on a similar (but more focused) subject matter similar to my 260MC what matters to me project

but where to focus is my struggle I am looking into possibly doing something about SOPA, PITA and ACTA but I feel there’s probably too much there to fit into a small talk like this, also for the sake of how little time I have left to do this (two evenings) I will probably do something more trivial but which may cause further debate (but no sony vs xbox arguments)

I’ve been following extra credits and the gameoverthinker for a while who always have interetsing arguments in presentations not too disimilar from this format, I would be looking into researching into similar areas as these two internet ‘celebrities’

Assessing The Competition – (AKA where I need to improve)

So this is the start of 361MC which means I am on the final stretch of this 3 year course, It’s very easy to do some reflecting at this stage of the course, but it’s essential that I look forward to what is to come, part of doing that is seeing what I will be able to do once I leave uni but also preparing my ‘calling  card’ to the industry which will be my final project.

My research on my project so far can be seen throughout the blog, but there is still room for a lot of change in the final film, I’ve decided to have a look around at a number of ‘rival’ universities to see how their students have done and so I can judge how much work and progress I need to make with my own projects, not all of these will be the same style of module or have the same context as our module but I feel this is an important step to compare my skills to those of the many media graduates that will be on the market with me searching for work in 6 months.

Lincoln University (TomSka)

This man may already be known to a few of you reading this blog but to those who are unfamiliar, the above is work by Thomas Ridgewell ‘AKA’ TomSka, he is responsible for the ‘hugely viral’ ‘asdfmovie’ and ‘University of Lincoln’ series of videos and his videos regularly receive over a million views each (his channel views are an astonishing 161,476,714 views) why this is important to consider is because Thomas was at my position last year at the University of Lincoln and  like his videos or not he has clearly found a market for them which although may not have been financially massive so far I don’t know have been very popular and I’m sure has lead to work elsewhere including appearances on BBC’s One Show and Channel 4′s Rude Tube

Although I am not really looking into the same artistic style as tomska and I find the quality of his videos to be great particularly his later ones, the videos are lit well and well composed. This has got me inspired to make some short films to both practice my cinematography but also for the fun of it again, I am currently aiming to write a few 5 second sketches (may end up longer but the idea is they will be quick and to the point) to test my skills at comedy but also to focus and better my cinematography skills.

another competing university is Staffordshire university which has some of it’s films available here http://vimeo.com/channels/staffsuni2011

The above video I really liked in terms of style and cinematography It was a beautiful film to watch but I felt that in terms of a message it could have been improved upon, I believe that this is a theme through a number of videos (that I have seen) I’d (certinanly like to) think that the skills I have gained from the Research and development module will have allowed me to create more in depth stories even if I can hold my hands up and say my visuals are lacking at times.

TO BE CONTINUED!

FMP proposal Higher Quality

Same as post before but this is at a much better quality, please watch this video and ignore my earlier post, thank you

Test Footage – Stylusboy

For my test footage which can be seen in my 360MC pitch presentation, I filmed stylusboy at his show on Wednesday 18th January at Taylor John’s House, Coventry during their wednesday acoustic night.

The reason for me choosing to use this for my test footage was because I wanted to get a realistic gig lighting effect in order to see how my filming should accomidate it. I booked out a 5D from the loan shop but unfortuantly there was a late return so I had to settle for a Nikon D90 for this shoot. At the shoot itself it seemed to go well but I was unhappy with the lighting on the camera, this has shown me that if I were to record a similar  shoot for my project I would need lighting much more suited to my film, I also decided that I would need to run at least a two camera set up one for a safety shot and one for more experimental shots, or risk facing a ridicolously long shoot and having somebody on red alert for continuity mistakes. Aswell as getting footage for my test shoot, I have promised stylusboy that a decent edit of one of the tracks will be online soon and I also made contacts with some photographers and video makers there that work within the coventry community, hopefully more on that one later.

 

Presentation cw2 360MC

At this moment the quality is poor, I will be uploading a higher quality version later on but this video is here just incase this video is not ready in time for assessment deadline.

Interim Proposal (OneUP)

This is my proposal form I created for OneUP which I later decided not to go with becuase I couldn’t focus on the idea enough and did not feel I could confidently produce due to my lack of comedic background.

Title and Pitch
A clear, brief title – which can be modified at a later date if necessary – but which gives clear idea of the nature of the project
1up (One Up)

Pitch
Sum up your idea in 2 lines. Include the genre, format, duration, usp (unique selling point) and intended audience.

Series of short 3-5 minute web based comedy shorts intended at tech-savy/gaming culture young adults

Rationale
A brief description of the main issue/subject which your project will examine and the approach you intend to take.

This series would be a series of small sketches which would parody certian parts of gaming culture or the games themseleves, this would also but up an eposodic narrative.

Context
What question/s does your PROJECT answer or what new idea does it offer? Where does your PROJECT fit in the current Media environment? Give evidence of the research and opinion that support your claims.

This project would ask questions about the culture which an increasing number of people find themselves in, It would question the importance of the internet for this culture to exisit and it would also challenge the impression that the ‘nerd’ must always be the bullied rather than the bully. I have been looking into research from famous people in this field including ‘MovieBob’, ‘Film Critic Hulk’ and ‘the team from extra credits’

Distrubtion
Where do you think your PROJECT is going to play/reach an audience? Show evidence of your research into LIKELY sources of distribution.

This piece would likely be spread online at a monthly rate over the internet, I would aim to get this series on a site where gamers already go to such as the escapist magazine or screw attack.

Budget + Skills Audit
Give a realistic budget breakdown of your project and make sure you can afford to make it. Also explain here why you are the right person to be making this project – what skills, knowledge and experience will you be capitalizing on?

I believe I am the right person for this job as I have the skills in order to make this work and I have a huge interest in gaming culture, I know enough in this area to be able to focus on it’s strengths and flaws and hopefully will be able to use that to comedic gain.

I believe this project would be fairly cheap to make and will set aside £300 to cover the costs of acting and locations if needed.

Research into changing media habits.

For this film if I am going to be making my character discover that the music world has changed from what he would expect, I need to personally understand how it all works myself and how the character of Nate is always doomed to fail in his attempts to achieve his dream. Some of my research has stemmed across form My Project Mixtape idea I had during the last term and this got me to consider how old mediums and ways of creating content had all but died and how their could be a gap in the market for things from the past.

This lead me on to consider the future of the music industry and to the outsider eye, it certinanly seems that Streaming services such as Spotify are the way the industry is headed with it’s ease of use and the users ability to access Millions of albums and compilations from an on-line database instantly as well as instant access to their own music collection, but this got me thinking about how much said artists make from services such as spotify, Record label contracts are noutriously complex and difficult to understand but according to Infomationisbeautiful.Net an artist on a high-end record deal can expect to see 10% of a sale of any album, this would be £1 for every album retailing at £10 (which is getting increasingly more unlikely) this may seem bad but when we move into online territories things appear even worse. Albums sold from iTunes will likely see a 9% cut going to the artists involved (all of these statistics are assuming the artists write their own music the percentages is lower when songwriters need royalties)  but in this modern age people are more than likely to just buy a single online rather than a whole album  for that artists would receive also a receive a 9% cut but remember that the average song on iTunes costs 79p so this would equate to just 7.9p per song download to the original artist. With this in mind an artist would need to sell 12,399 singles via iTunes to reach the US minimum wage of $1,160 (£758.27) but this is going on the legal downloading route which of course is very popular but streaming services are also taking away alot of this market and also a lot of people away from radio. Looking into how much money an artist would make from a service like this must be quite depressing as a musician, It emerged in 2009 that Lady gaga had only been paid $167 for plays of her hit ‘Poker Face’ this song had reached 1 million plays on the relatively new service. (link) because the music on spotify is marketed like a radio rather than owning the song it is marketed and financed very differently to a service like iTunes, however i’d imagine that many would be shocked that in 2010 the value to the artist of a song per play was valued at £0.0012p

The data in this research may be slightly outdated, at the point of this data coming out Last.FM allowed radio and streaming to all users now it is a subscriber only option (£3pm) and spotify claims that the amount the give to rights holders has changed since the release of this data. although it still doesn’t seem to be enough for some as artists such as Mercury award nominated Jon Hopkins receive what they consider less than satisfactory rates. (He received £8 for 90,000 plays made via the service and claims he receives £50 for each play he gets on radio 1) this has again raised the debate of spotify and it’s value to independent musicians especially as an alternative to piracy. [Guardian Article]

All of this data has been very interesting in setting up the ‘world’ my character will be trying to get into, further research will be taken during the pre-production stage of the 361MC module. I’d be looking into researching how much money spotify makes as a business and how viable the model is in the long-term and if it is a good alternative to piracy.

The full data table can be found here and although services such as spotify have updated their artist shares it makes for some very interesting reading in how much a song is actually worth online https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aqe2P9sYhZ2ndE9iZHhWc0pMcDlCdmxNdmFRQXRPY3c&hl=en_GB#gid=0 there is also a handy graphic version covering the main points below