Insomnia 43 (i43)

So me and my friend Steve recently visited i43 as press for Gamebanana, and made a ‘Spakumentary’ video of our exploits there! Please watch and let us know what you think!

Physical Music + Digital downloads

The inspiration for this post came from a friend of mine (on facebook, of all places). He stated that he was ‘suprised’ to see that a band had a Vinyl release of thier record, that included a code that you can use to download the same album onto a computer, and recieve it in digital MP3 format aswell. Vinyl does seem to have been making a comeback in recent times, reducing further the amount of CD sales, already heavily affected by the digitalisation of music.

Bill Daly, the owner of Crooked Beat, is part of the trend.

“Since 2007, vinyl has grown to where it is now, 99 percent of our sales,” Daly noted.  “In 2007, when they started introducing new vinyl releases, a free MP3 download card with it, that is when the sales started surging.”(VOA News, 2011)

This just begs one question, is this a good thing? Admittedly it could be affecting piracy, as people are buying the vinyl record as a fashion statement, and aren’t happy with just the digital copy anymore. I’d love to hear you’r views on the topic, so please feel free to comment!

More updates and personal content.

So I have decided to start keeping this blog more up to date. I will now start blogging my views and uploading more of my work. Thanks to everyone who comes to view my blog!

Porter’s Five Forces – Disney

Degree of Rivalry
- Direct competition between Pixar / Dreamworks
- Themeparks etc
- Brand must always make animation – foundations
- Disneyland/world unique
- Most famous animation brand
- Exit barriers, cant leave a market without affecting other products

Supplier Power
- Due to high prices charged on merchandise by Disney, suppliers up prices
- Lots of different revenue streams, high cost to switching suppliers
- High amount of merchandising
- Supplies to parks, tv, merchandise, shows etc

Threat of Substitutes
- Buyer has low differentiation between companies
- Buyers switching to Dreamworks
- Low threat from other film companies – always a market for animation
- TV Channels

Threat of new entrants
- 2 Huge superpowers in the market in Pixar and Dreamworks
- Costs a lot of money to create
- Disney Dominates the Market
- Disney TV

Buyer Power
- Hugely established brand
- Lots of wings of the company, involved in lots of markets
- Lots of revenue
- Household Name
- Lots of Controversy

Wuxia – Asian martial arts film survey

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=U8tU9uIzqOQbjssWs_2bQmAA_3d_3d

How well does the current system of film classification and censorship serve the British public?

• BBFC
• http://www.sbbfc.co.uk – Students
• http://www.bbfc.co.uk
• Complaints http://www.sbbfc.co.uk/Site%20Articles/whatareyoucomplainingabout.asp
• How well the system works
• Who does it, how, does it work
• How films are classified http://www.sbbfc.co.uk/student_guide_classification1.asp
• Examiners normally view video and DVD submissions on their own – called solo viewing.A large proportion of works suitable are for solo viewing are episodes from TV series or works aimed at young children that have already been broadcast on television. Films for cinema release, video games and pornography submissions are classified in teams of two. Controversial works, such as extreme reality material, will also be programmed for team work.
• Difficult or controversial material can also be referred to the weekly Examiners’ Meeting, where they can be debated further to obtain a wide range of valuable opinions. Ultimately, the work will be referred to Senior Management.
• If a work contains material which is illegal or unacceptable under the Board’s Guidelines, Examiners will draw up a list of cuts which will be sent to the distributor. If a work as a whole is unacceptable, it can be rejected, but this happens only on rare occasions. The Presidential Team will be consulted on difficult works, especially those which may be refused a certificate altogether or which raise serious policy issues.

The process for cuts, briefly, is as follows:

• Cuts specified by Board in writing, by examiners in the first instance.
• Checked by Senior Examiners.
• Choice of category offered to reduce needs for cuts.
• Company free to find own editing solutions, for artistic or technical reasons.
• Resubmitted work is viewed by a second team to check that the cuts have been made.
• Copy of cuts deposited with the Board.
• In-house trial cuts may be made to check technical feasibility of proposed cuts.

• http://www.sbbfc.co.uk/student_guide_legislation3.asp VRA
• More recently, the Board’s decision to award The Dark Knight the ’12A’ category resulted in much press coverage and complaints from members of the public, who thought the violence was too strong to be contained at that category.
• Obscene publications act http://www.sbbfc.co.uk/student_guide_legislation2.asp
• 9 songs, ACWO, hot fuzz, Cannibal holocaust,
• Video Nasties – http://www.sbbfc.co.uk/student_guide_videonasties.asp

Discuss some of the problems that might arise in the scheduling of news and/or current affairs programmes

There are a few ways that problems could arise from news scheduling, which I will be exploring.

Scheduled news broadcasting has become a cornerstone of peoples every day lives. Many people rely on programmes such as ITV’s News at 10 and the BBC’s BBC News at 6. People rely on these scheduled programmes to give them day to day updates of things that have been happening. Of course, this has its drawbacks because something newsworthy does not happen every single day, so this means that they have to pad out their shows with old news and interviews, rather than actually reporting news.

Another drawback is that they only occur at that single time. For example, if a news programme is scheduled to run every few hours, then all of the things that have happened in that time period won’t be reported till the news starts. So if something important happens, you will not know about it until the news broadcasts again, which could be hours.

On the other hand though, if something majorly important happens, they normally have breaking news interruptions, therefore putting the news on immediately. This kind of breaking news only occurs for large scale events, such as 9/11, when Princess Diana died etc.

Another problem with scheduling programmes would be that if it is at a certain time of the day that you cannot see it, then it will be on at the same time every single day, so you will always miss that certain channels news broadcast. Which an inconvenience, although the same news is most probably being broadcast on other channels.

This is also an advantage to some people though, because people would rather get the whole day’s news in one go, rather than having to keep switching back onto the news now and again to see if something new has happened.

Another disadvantage to it could be that, because it is live, there are quite often a lot of ‘human errors’. A lot of mistakes can be easily made on a live broadcast, which probably would not occur on a normal show. Although this is the only way to broadcast this type of programme, because if it was pre-recorded all of the news would be old, and no-one would want to hear it by the time it is shown.

Another reason that scheduling could be at a disadvantage is that the content has to be changed depending on the time of day. For obvious reasons, during the day you cannot have graphic content, as the audience could consist of children. This sort of content can only be put after the watershed, which restricts the viewing audience to adults.

Either by reference to contemporary cinema or an earlier period, discuss how regulation and censorship have been challenged by social, cultural or technological change.

Censorship laws have been challenged by almost every technological change in the medium. There are always new films ready to come out on new or existing formats, ready to challenge the regulations of the industry.

For example, the video nasties. When these films first came about, there were a minimal amount of regulation and censorship laws. The only films that would be looked at were the ones that would be released in cinemas. This meant that the new technology of the VCR, which was becoming more and more readily available, was a prime target for the video nasties.

They were released solely on VCR to bypass regulation, and were often very low budget, horror films. These films would contain some brutal and gruesome images, on a format that anyone could get their hands on, even children. And as there were no regulations, the content just continued to get worse and worse.

This forced the BBFC to have police go out and seize videos, then take the publishers to court for creating the films. The films, whose publishers were successfully prosecuted, were put onto the list of Video nasties.

Then the Video Recording Act was bought in to stop these films bypassing the cinema and being released straight onto video. With this act, all films had to be submitted for review before they were released onto any medium, and films that had already been released had to be resubmitted.

There was also a second case of video nasties. This was for the sudden outbreak of ‘copycat crimes’. This was where people would say that they watched the film so much, they then went out and copied the films content, be it murder, robbery etc.

One of the main cases was the Jamie Bulger case, where two young boys brutally killed the 2 year old boy. The defence of the two boys was that they had been watching the Quentin Tarantino film, ‘Natural Born Killers’, and then went out to copy it. There were many different controversies surrounding the film, and then more and more ‘copycat criminals’ were blaming the film for what they did.

Another film that was blamed for copycat crimes was Stanley Kurbrick’s a Clockwork Orange. There was widespread controversy because of the common depiction of rape, sex, violence and murder in the film. This was an unusual case as it was pulled by the director himself, after he started to receive death threats from people and threatening messages. It was then re-released after his death.

One way that they were challenged culturally is by the film ‘the exorcist’. This was challenged by various cultural groups and religions because of its content. Because of the way that it seemed to be ‘anti-religious’ it was damned by religious groups, and they called for it to be banned. This made it become one of the first films banned, but not actually becoming an official video nasty.

The BBFC decided to ban the film outright, because of the controversy surrounding it. However, the film was re-submitted to the BBFC and was approved and released with an 18 rating in 1999. This signifies a relaxation of the censorship laws, and could also mean that the viewing public is becoming more and more de-sensitised to shocking films.

Critical Research Mock – Question 2

With detailed reference to your research findings, analyse and discuss the portrayal of Protagonists and Antagonists in Asian Martial Arts films.

I set myself the task of researching how Protagonists and Antagonists are portrayed in Asian Martial Arts films. At first, I thought that this question would be quite difficult to answer, but it didn’t turn out to be too challenging.

Within the online interview that I conducted, many topics were discussed, including the question I am answering. I asked the question:

How do you think Protagonists and Antagonists are portrayed in Asian Martial Arts films?

To which I received the reply:

In the above films (my 3 focus films), art house martial arts tend to offer shades of gray in both the Heroes and the Villains. For example in Hero, the ruler of Qin was in reality a ruthless dictator who practiced genocide and book burning, similar to Nazi Germany’s Hitler. It was actually shocking to see him portrayed as a somewhat sympathetic character in the film to Chinese audiences. Generally Asian cinema is pretty black and white when it comes to heroes and villains. A lot of this is due to heavy censorship of anything critical of the Chinese government.

This answer intrigued me a lot, generally because of the fact that he thought it was because of the government that they were portrayed in the way that they are. This made me go on to research some information about the Chinese censorship laws, and I found out that in China, you cannot have anything ‘anti-government’ in any form of Media. This made it clear why the Protagonists and Antagonists are portrayed in a certain way in most films.

Also, the way that he noted that the ruler of Qin was comparable to Adolf Hitler in some ways, the audience was made to feel sympathy for him in the film, even though he commonly committed mass murder. This would be another example of not attacking the government, and another way of showing the censorship laws.

Critical Research mock – Question 1

Give an account of, and evaluate the research methods you used to investigate your chosen area of study.

My chosen topic for this investigation was World Cinema. Within the topic, I decided to focus on how Protagonists and Antagonists are portrayed in Asian martial arts films.

For my investigation, I would have to combine Primary and Secondary research, so I can get a broader picture of the topic. Primary research allowed me to go and gain my own findings, while the secondary research allowed me to compare my studies to previously undertaken ones.

One example of primary research that I conducted was an interview with a man through e-mail. I stumbled across his blog by chance, and saw in his ‘about’ section that he said he was a very avid fan of the Asian martial arts genre. I sent him an email asking him if I could ask him a few questions on the subject, to which he agreed. The interview can be found in its entirety at http://dougkerr.wordpress.com. As a result of this interview, I found out why this person was so drawn to Asian martial arts and who his favourite actors/actresses were. He also gave me a mini review on all of the 3 films I will be looking at, and he also gave me his point of view of how Protagonists and Antagonists were portrayed in the genre. He said that he thought that the Asian martial arts genre is quite ‘black and white’ in their portrayal of ‘good and evil’. He also recommended me some films to watch on the genre. This interview helped a lot, as I gained a lot of first hand knowledge on the genre.

An example of secondary research was using a search engine on the internet. I decided to use http://www.google.com as my main search engine. At first I searched “How protagonists and antagonists are portrayed in asian martial arts films”, but the search was much too defined and only got irrelevant results. Then I changed my search to “how good and evil is portrayed in asian martial arts”. This allowed me to find the website http://www.shaolintiger.com. The site had small but concise movie reviews about many different martial arts films, including some of the ones I was looking at, which proved to be very helpful with my research.