https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPEIkkP0S4Y&feature=youtu.be

Despite the difficulty John Oliver seems to have believing it in this clip, Jorge Ramos is right: he and his peers – America’s hugely popular slew of comedy newscasters – aren’t just pulling in the ratings: they’re becoming a remarkably influential force in the political sphere. When Time magazine named Oliver in their top 100 most influential list, they cited reasons such as the $25,000 in donations collected by the Society of Women Engineers just days after his piece on Miss America scholarships, and the crashing of the American Federal Communication Commission website when he released his famous segment on net neutrality. (1) These anecdotal cases are supported by the numbers: in a study of political comedy and satire viewers, researchers Hoffman and Young found that “viewing satire or parody has a positive and significant effect on political participation through the mediator of political efficacy.” (2)

But why are these shows so influential, and why now particularly? Parody of current events and news is not a particularly modern phenomenon, so why are we only now seeing such a huge boom in their popularity and influence? I would argue that these shows are successful now because the post-broadcast era of TV allows them greater reach and accessibility.

Traditional broadcast TV is designed to be watched on a certain day at a certain time. Ellis discusses the importance of scheduling when he writes ” . . . scheduling delivers programs to audiences when they are most likely to want to watch them . . . so a narrative is constructed about the ebbs and flows of audiences for each evening’s viewing.” (3) William further expands on this idea when he discusses the importance not just of the way individual programs are scheduled but the way they are scheduled in consideration of each other: “This phenomenon, of planned flow, is then perhaps the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form.” (4)

This idea of flow and scheduling has always been particularly relevant when considering traditional broadcast news; scheduled at 6.00pm when the adults arrived home from work, your choice of news was considered the key to anchoring you to that station for the rest of the evening. But of course, the ‘technology’ that William references is changing, and many argue we live in a post-broadcast world. With the rise of web TV there is a push back against rigid scheduling and a preference for control of when and where you can watch TV. I would argue that it’s this environment that fosters the success of parody news.

Because these shows are mostly popular among young people, (5) and as such embrace the technology that the web has to offer. They are famous – Last Week Tonight in particular – for the way in which individual segments go viral, and the programs seem to almost be built for this web shareability more than the initial TV broadcast. When writing about the segmentation of broadcast TV, Ellis says that “the basic organisation of material is that of the segment, a coherent group of sounds and images, of relatively short duration that needs to be accompanied by other similar such segments.” (6) But Last Week Tonight and similar programs don’t rely on this sequence, instead contextualising individual segments with cultural touchstones and references (7) so that they can be watched on the web outside of the whole program. By not relying so heavily on scheduling and flow, Last Week Tonight and other satirical news programs are able to embrace new technology and give themselves greater access to (and greater influence over) modern audiences.

John Oliver was named as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2015

(1) Luckerson, Victor. “How The ‘John Oliver Effect’ Is Having A Real-Life Impact”. TIME 2015. Web. 14 Aug. 2016.

(2) Hoffman, Lindsay H. and Dannagal G. Young. “Satire, Punch Lines, And The Nightly News: Untangling Media Effects On Political Participation”. Communication Research Reports 28.2 (2011): 159-168. Web.

(3) Ellis, J. “Scheduling: The Last Creative Act In Television?”. Media, Culture & Society 22.1 (2000): 25-38. P29

(4) Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology And Cultural Form. 2nd ed. New York: Schocken Books, 2003. P86

(5) Hoffman, Lindsay H. and Dannagal G. Young. “Satire, Punch Lines, And The Nightly News: Untangling Media Effects On Political Participation”. Communication Research Reports 28.2 (2011): 159-168. Web.

(6) Ellis, John. Visible Fictions. London: Routledge, 1992. P116

(7) Yahr, Emily. “Why Amy Schumer Is Taking Over The Internet”. The Washington Post 2015. Web. 14 Aug. 2016.

When I first heard this quote on Friends, I had to laugh – what do people without TVs point their furniture at? At home, all our furniture is – and always has been – pointed squarely at the small screen, and just about everyone I can think of is in the same boat. The TV is the focal point of our living space.

If we go right back to the very start of TV, the box was accorded pride-of-place because it symbolised the resident family’s achievement of the middle-class ideal; the “shining centre of the home”, it was one of the must-have items of the ’50s.(1)

Fast-forward fifty years and in my humble childhood abode the television wasn’t so shiny: our first TV was a second-hand gift from my grandparents that was two decades older than me. It was brown, showed ABC in black and white, and even as an only child the lack of remote lead to several arguments regarding whose turn it was to get up. And yet this batty old gogglebox still sat proudly in the centre of the room.

Because the symbolic image of the family huddled around the TV hasn’t changed: the format of TV is bound up with ideas of domesticity and even the content of programming frequently reflects this theme. As Ellis eloquently puts it: “The particular ideological notion of the nuclear family in its domestic setting provides the overarching conception within which TV broadcast operates.” (2)

And yet this conception of the happy wife, husband and two children is becoming increasingly problematic: as Morley points out, this family dynamic accounts for less than 5% of households [in Britain]. (3) Certainly, my own parents divorced when I was fifteen, and our one household became two.

Further railing against this idea of the shiny family with their happy box is the persistent notion that there is something uncultured, mind-numbing and even dangerous about TV. I remember my mother insisting on a tech-free meal at the table until I reached adolescence, claiming that all the studies show TV over dinner tears down families and causes diabetes (or something, I wasn’t paying that much attention). This derision for TV has existed since its inception and can be seen afresh in most corners of the internet (think “the quality of TV today” and “they won’t be getting my viewership!”)

So with a not-so-unified family unit, at least five years of a static-y hand-me-down and a preference for (albeit sometimes reluctant) dining room meals, why did our family still keep the TV at centre stage?

I think the answer is conversation – the very thing my mother sought to inspire when we sat down together at the dinner table. We’ve all heard of ‘water-cooler moments’, the events that get you talking at the office the next day; but what about the conversations we have as the show’s still going? The ‘Oh My God‘s and the ‘No they didn’t‘s and, most importantly, ‘that reminds me . . .‘

Because some of the best memories I have of childhood are not of TV per se, but of the conversations and, more importantly, laughter that I shared because of it. Lull refers to the “comunicative substance which surrounds the viewing experience” (4), and my mind turns to political conversations sparked by the nightly news; stories remembered thanks to a visual cue; or even just yelling at my mother through the bathroom door after watching the genius of the IT Crowd.

Morley suggests that the shared possession of the TV is what defines a household (5), but I disagree. Shared conversation and experience is what defines a household – and to an extent a family – and TV is just one thing that helps to inspire those intimate and hilarious moments. That’s why the TV is at the centre of the room. And besides, what else would the furniture point at?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qs1qxasw5c

Footnotes

(1) Morley, David. Home Territories. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. P88

(2) Ellis, John. Visible Fictions. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. P115

(3) Ellis, John. Visible Fictions. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. P114

(4) Lull, James. “The Social Uses of Television”. Human Communication Research 6.3 (1980): 197-209.  P198

(5) Morley, David. Home Territories. London: Routledge, 2000. Print. P89

I’m back! Did you miss me? Awww. Thanks.

So I’ve been in India for the past two weeks, and though it was an incredible experience that was worth it all, it has put me a bit on the back foot in terms of my new studio, Go out Into the World and do Good Things.

The studio’s all about looking at documentary in a different light. Rather than seeing documentary as a hierarchical media form where a filmmaker creates a documentary about a passive subject, we’re focusing on the idea of participatory documentary (or ‘open space’ documentary, as it was called by De Michiel and Zimmermann in one of our early readings), in which the subject and the filmmaker collaborate to create the project together. This allows the subject to have more input over how they are portrayed.

Obviously, this type of documentary relies on the subject being a person or group of people (Sir Attenborough might struggle to ask the lions how they feel they are being misrepresented), and for me it brings up some interesting ethical questions. (Ethics was our focus in one of the weeks that I missed, but was explored also in that week’s readings from Patricia Aufderheide, Edwin Martinez and of course Bill Nichols – what kind of a documentary course would it be if there weren’t any Nichols in it?) On the one hand, there’s a constant push within the documentary genre – and a constant expectation from its viewers – for objectivity and ‘truth’. How many times have we seen documentaries criticized for being ‘biased’ or twisting the facts to suit their narrative? Famous documentaries Supersize Me, Nanook of the North and even crowd favourite Bowling for Columbine have all had their fair share of controversy regarding how ‘truthful’ they were. So on the face of it, it seems that allowing documentary subjects to actually control their own representation immediately eliminates the possibility of true objectivity.

But then on the other hand, can documentaries ever be truly objective? And should they have to be? I don’t think anyone watching Bowling for Columbine thought Michael Moore was attempting to be objective; he had a message to promote and he did it in an entertaining, persuasive way. Even documentaries that seem to attempt objectivity (such as expository or observational documentaries) often don’t achieve it simply because it’s only human for a filmmaker to be influenced by their own social context and values. If this is the case, is something like a participatory documentary actually more truthful for acknowledging and being clear about the influence of the subjects?

Obviously, the only way to answer these questions, and the others that will no doubt be posed throughout the studio, was to set about creating our own participatory documentary projects. We started small, with our first project brief in week three being a pitch to the class on our initial ideas for groups to collaborate with.

I was inspired by something I found in one of the Nichols’ readings: “Every film is a documentary . . . In fact, we could say that there are
two types of film: (1) Documentaries of wish fulfilment and (2) documentaries of social representation . . . Documentaries of wish fulfilment are what we would normally call fictions.”

I was fascinated by the idea that fiction could be considered documentary, in the way it demonstrates a greater truth. This reminded me of a film we’d watched in a documentary studies course I did last semester called Forbidden Lie$. Filmmaker Anna Broinowski’s portrait of serial conwoman Norma Khouri embraces Khouri’s lies and uses the interplay of fiction and fact to further highlight her deceitful nature.

Inspired to use a mix of fact and fiction myself, but in a lighter context, I thought of three groups who embrace fictions and alternate personalities: LARPers (live action role players), D&Ders (Dungeons and Dragons players), and cosplayers. I thought that collaborating with these groups could present an interesting opportunity to bring their imaginative fictions to life and to use those stories to say something about them as a group and as individuals.

And . . . that’s a wrap.

We’re finished! Finally, I can get that damn song out of my head!

But seriously, it’s a huge relief to be done and I’m really proud of what we’ve created. Which of course isn’t to say that it’s perfect, because it’s not, but I’m happy with it all the same.

It is worth looking at the aspects that didn’t work, however, as that’s part of the learning experience. So I’ll start my reflection by looking at some elements that I feel didn’t work, and then moving on to the lighter side of what did.

Downside no. 1: the storyline.

Ok, ok, ok. Rohan was right. I’ve said it and I’m not going to say it again! While the narrative of the girls chasing Elvis is definitely clear, and I think suits the tone of the song, the attempt to reference Disney characters is not as obvious. While I don’t actually think this hinders the audience’s enjoyment of the story, it is an element that we failed to create accurately. I think we were on the right track with trying to create a fun link between the different characters, but Rohan’s suggestion that they needed to be larger-than-life was right, as we underestimated how difficult it would be to establish characters in such a short space of time.

Downside no. 2: the colour grade (or lack thereof).

Right from our first conception of what our music video would look like we decided that a light tone could be created by a warm, almost retro-style colour grade. We stuck with this goal right until the end, and this week Jenny put the finishing touches on a bright grade to apply to various different scenes. Unfortunately, when taking a step back and watching the whole video from start to finish, it was clear that the grade (although looking very nice in small doses) was far too high on saturation, creating an aesthetically unappealing cartoonish effect. We had punched up the greens where, given the footage was so green already, we really should have focused on the yellow for that retro look. By the time we made the discovery it was unfortunately too late to create another grade so we went with our original footage, which was fortunately very pretty anyway.

Upside no. 1: the cinematography.

Which brings me to Jordan’s marvellous cinematography. While I had originally suggested the Royal Botanic Gardens as a location because I believe it is impossible for them to look ugly on film, Jordan’s shots really made them sing. His composition but I think particularly his use of the natural light gave us aesthetically pleasing shots that suited our bright, clean tone. The footage was particularly helpful in that it supported the slightly weaker narrative in keeping the audience engaged through its aesthetic appeal.

Upside no. 2: The editing

I don’t think I’m tooting my own horn here by saying I think the editing was quite successful, as it was truly a team effort with everyone pitching in and a lot of credit too going to Rohan for his feedback and advice at every stage of the editing process. As I mentioned above, conveying this narrative in such a short space of time proved much harder than we thought; it’s a bit ironic really because it’s a short time in which to tell a narrative but a long time to keep an audience engaged for with no dialogue. I feel that we were able to edit the video in such a way that it is engaging, visually interesting and also fulfils its obligations as a music video in that there is a focus on the artist, Abby, both as the main character of the story and as the singer of the music. When we showed Abby our fine cut she was overjoyed, and after all I think that is the most important thing as the video should ultimately be a tool for her to market her song and her brand as an artist.

Wow, have twelve weeks really gone that fast? No, they haven’t, it was a synthesised six week course. But still, it doesn’t seem like all that long ago that I rocked up to day one of the Belgian Egg Hunt (aka. Music Video 101, aka. Rohan’s crazy fun-times, aka. ‘It’s summer school!’) knowing nothing about music video. And now I know everything! Jokes, jokes, I’m not even close. But I have learnt a lot, and while I’ll do my final reflection on our music video at the end of the week, for the moment I’ll do a rundown on the most important things I’ve learnt over this summer semester:

1. The story of Ian Curtis and Joy Division is really sad, but makes for a really good film
2. Mishearing lyrics can lead to awesome egg-themed videos
3. Using small-budget items such as lego doesn’t mean your video has to suck
4. In the case of Bjork + robot love, two wrongs do make a right
5. Miley Cyrus may in fact be a feminist, but black women still can’t catch a break in the music video industry
6. Unless they’re Beyonce
7. Mumford and Sons do a great self-parody
8. Brunswick is a good setting for a music video
9. Pitching a music video concept is hard
10. “It’s summer school” is a valid excuse for anything
11. Colour grade = fix for everything
12. Shooting in slow motion is very popular, but also hard
13. Editing a music video is also hard
14. But rewarding J

We’re nearly finished with our music video, and yet it dawned on me the other day that I haven’t done my set report yet!

To be honest, the day didn’t get off to a great start. The night before we discovered that rain was predicted for the next morning, and so the shoot had to be pushed back to later in the day. We also had a bit of difficulty getting to the location: some of our actors couldn’t find any parking so we were almost two hours late from the get-go.

We were under the pump, but we pulled together. Jordan was our cinematographer, and he had looked at the photos of the Gardens we’d taken the week before and organised a shot list. He knew exactly where he wanted to film each scene, so we set up a base camp in one area and got started.

We went in reverse order, so we started with the group scenes and went backwards. Though we had taken a while to get started, Jordan’s organisation meant that we could move along at a good pace. The actors wore their own costumes, aside from a wig that we had bought, some ‘Elvis hair’ cleverly styled by Jenny and the balloons, also brought by Jenny.

As we moved along with the scenes, we reduced our number of actors so the job got easier as the day progressed. Blair had provided a speaker so we were able to sync certain scenes to the audio of the track as necessary.

We filmed at various different locations in the Gardens, and it proved to be a very workable location. The weather held out, with the sky just the right mix of sun and cloud and the rain forecast for later in the evening holding off. We also had no trouble with bystanders; although the mild, sunny day had brought a lot of visitors to the gardens, our locations were such that this wasn’t an issue (either they weren’t in shot, or were so far in the background that it didn’t make a difference).

A few times in the day we changed our ‘unit base’, but mostly we were able to just take the equipment and actors we needed to each location to save time and effort. One of the great advantages of the Gardens is that there are such varied locations in such a small space, meaning we could get an aesthetically diverse range of shots without having to move too much.

Although we’d had to rely on volunteering friends for our actors, we had in most cases picked people specifically who had experience on camera so while they were perhaps not Oscar-worthy performances, they were at least manageable.

Once we had filmed all of the narrative shots we took some time to film Abby singing along to the track. We picked a green, grassy location that would look nice on the Canon DSLR lens and got Abby to sing the song through. Unfortunately, as we were running short on time we could only do it through once. However, considering how late we had started we were pleased to have gotten through all the necessary narrative shots.

Overall, although we had a few mishaps to start off with, the day ran relatively smoothly and we got a range of useable footage to work with in the edit.

Below are some pictures we took while horsing around. It’s amazing how with the right camera and a pretty location even silly shots look wonderful!

If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while now you’ll have learnt that I can’t go more than three weeks without making a Simpsons reference, so here it is.

Of course, it is Grammys season, with the music industry’s night of nights set for 8pm Monday 15th of February. Unless you’ve got Foxtel I don’t think you’ll be able to watch it in Australia, but let’s be honest who wants to watch the whole thing through when you can read up on the highlights the next day? (I’m just waiting for the Buzzfeed article “194 thoughts we had while watching the Grammys”.)

Of course, as usual there’s an award for outstanding music video, and I was surprised that of the five nominees I’d only seen one. I’m pleased with this, because it means that the awards aren’t just pandering to the most popular artists but are actually looking for videos with artistic merit.

The only video of the five I recognised was Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood, which anyone who knows me will tell you I have serious issues with (Yay! Women fulfilling traditional action hero roles . . . in skimpy clothes, high heels and full make-up . . .). So I’m hoping it won’t win, but the other four all look really interesting and deserving of their nominations, so I think it’ll be a tight contest. Check out the nominees here.

I’ll be interested to see the result – and what Kanye West has to say about it.

Now that our own music video is nearly done, it’s time for us to think about how we want to start marketing it. Of course, how Abby wants to do her own marketing is up to her but obviously we want to get our work out there and seen as well.

In the age of online media, it would seem that all you have to do is upload something to YouTube and everyone can see it, but unfortunately it’s not actually that simple. A case in point from the last week is that of OK Go and their latest music video Upside Down and Inside Out.

You might remember OK Go from their famous Here it Goes Again Video – I mentioned it in one of my posts a few weeks ago. It was one of the first ever viral videos; a one-take of the band dancing across five active treadmills. It was first uploaded to YouTube just after the site’s inception in 2005.

Since then, OK Go have become famous for their one-take videos, and their latest takes it to new heights: collaborating with Russia’s S7 Airlines the group performed a one-take routine in a zero gravity aeroplane.

Now that in itself is worth writing about, but the reason I’m interested in this video, particularly in the wake of us distributing our video, is to do with the way it was marketed.

Despite the fact that many would say OK Go owe their fame to YouTube, the group abandoned the platform and decided to upload this video only to Facebook. In fact, when S7 Airlines uploaded the video to their YouTube account, the band’s management requested that it be taken down. This is why I can’t show you the video – I can’t embed a Facebook video without being on Facebook myself (but you can see it here).

I think it’s an interesting move. Supposedly the band are going to take the video down after 48 hours, so I can only assume their plan is to create hype and buzz to get more people interested. However, some fans have been disappointed by the decision, and personally I think putting your fans offside is one of the worst things you can do.

Nonetheless, it gives you something to think about. I don’t think we’d be able to go down the ‘create 48 hours of worldwide hype’ road, but looking at different media platforms and their different audiences is an important part of marketing our own music video.

Forgive me for a couple of quick posts this week – I’m moving out of home and when you’ve only got your own two hands and a Ford Fiesta to do it with it’s a bit of a process!

During Tuesday’s class the Egg Hunt turned its attention to one of the world’s most watched media events – the ‘Superbowl’, America’s NFL grand final that attracted one billion viewers worldwide and is famous for charging up to one million dollars for a thirty second ad spot.

With that in mind, it’s not hard to see why Beyonce chose it as the time to drop her new track, Formation. This is where we came in: at around the same time, she released the associated video and it’s a doozy.

In recent years, Beyonce has become ever more political, using her powerful influence to great effect. She’s a proud feminist, and sang at the inauguration of America’s first black president Barack Obama. And yet this new video is probably as strong a statement as Queen Bey has ever made.

It’s fiercely and in no uncertain terms a black pride song, with Beyonce singing about her heritage, typical African American physical traits, and her own success (“I might just be a black Bill Gates in the making”). The video backs up these messages, with powerful imagery of a drowned New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina, African-Americans presented as colonialists in a vintage setting, and a young black boy dancing in front of a row of armed, white policemen.

It’s a mesmerising video to watch and while there has been a backlash against the song, with some claiming Beyonce was disrespectful towards American police, I’m glad she’s taking the time to use her influence to make a strong statement and stand up for minority groups.

Plus, it’s a dead catchy song.

Once upon a time, TV was considered the inferior version of film – less classy, less cultured, and altogether just not as good. Nowadays, that perception has changed, and we saw the tide of good quality TV turning when it became acceptable for legitimate movie stars to make the move to the small screen. It seems that the same phenomenon could be happening to music video, with the last ten or twenty years giving us a few examples of some genuine stars appearing in clips. And yes, I’m aware my penchant for listicles is turning this blog into a Buzzfeed for music video but I’m OK with that!

1. Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice starring Christopher Walken

Christopher Walken is one of the most highly-regarded actors of our time, making it all the more hilarious to see him prancing about a hotel lobby. This video has gone down in history as one of the greatest cameos of all time and it still stands up today.

2. Ed Sheeran’s Lego House starring Rupert Grint

Proving once and for all that all gingers look alike, this creepy-but-kinda-sweet video from Ed Sheeran features fellow redhead Rupert Grint as a Sheeran fan who uses his physical similarity to the star to enhance his fanboy experience. Grint does an excellent job of toeing the fine line between humour and sweetness in this clip, appealing not just to his extensive Harry Potter fanbase but to your regular Ed Sheeran aficionado.

3. Mumford & Sons’ Hopeless Wanderer starring Ed Helms, Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Will Forte

This brilliant music video was brought to my attention by classmate Ella, who did her project brief two presentation on it. Having already set a precedent for star cameos with their previous video Lover of the Light, which featured British heartthrob Idris Elba, Mumford & Sons here create the ultimate self-parody by casting four well-known funnymen as themselves. The video lovingly mocks Mumford & Sons’ American vintage aesthetic and slowly builds to a ridiculous climax of instrument-bashing and intense bromance.

4. Weird Al’s Tacky starring Jack Black, Eric Stonestreet, Kristen Schaal, Margaret Cho, and Aisha Tyler

It’s a testament to Weird Al’s comic genius that when he puts out the call other comedians flock to get involved in his work. His brilliant parody of Pharrell Williams’ Happy stars a slew of recognisable comedians all doing their best to dance like fools and be as ‘tacky’ as possible. In the realm of Hopeless Wanderer, the comedic ensemble works fantastically to make a funny idea even funnier in practice.

5. Sia’s Elastic Heart starring Maddie Zeigler and Shia Labeouf

Let’s be honest: if a Sia video wasn’t completely out there we’d be disappointed. Having said that, this video certainly caused its fair share of controversy. Sia had already established a working relationship with pint-sized performer and Dance Moms star Maddie Zeigler, but the addition of eccentric actor Shia Lebeouf raised eyebrows as many found the video somewhat predatory and inappropriate. Personally, I think that’s reading too much into what is essentially a well-choreographed dance routine between an adult and a child, but I can understand why the video’s bleak tone might put people off.

Honourable mention: Carly Rae Jepsen’s I Really Like You starring Tom Hanks

You’ve got to hand it to Hanks for making a right fool of himself in this video. The video is just as annoying as the song but somehow it just works and I do get a few laughs out of it.