Hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year. Your second assignment — a 1,500 word academic analysis of a pop music video — is due in by Friday 16th January 2009, at the latest. Hand the essay in to the THS School Office at Gosta Green, before 4 p.m. See the blog postings below for guidance about books and online resources for the second assignment.
Here’s an interesting creative talking-point, in the form of a short video of a recent TED presentation in the U.S. by Jacob Trollback…
“What would a music video look like if it were directed by the music, purely as an expression of a great song, rather than driven by a filmmaker’s concept? Designer Jakob Trollback shares the results of his experiment in the form.”
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For those who may be finding difficulty in getting access to the library books for Assignment Two, here are some free full-text online resources…
A few online resources relevant to the history of the pop music video:
Critical Musicology. A free UK online academic journal, with full-text articles such as “‘I’ll Never Be an Angel’: Stories of Deception in Madonna’s Music“.
“Pop, censorship and subculture” (Powerpoint presentation).
Jones, Steve (2005).
“MTV: The Medium was the Message”.
Critical Studies in Media Communication. Vol. 22, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 83–88.
Narrative, spectacle, performance: a dramaturgical investigation into the relationship between an aesthetic event and the social world in rock and pop culture (2005). (A UK-oriented PhD thesis. Has a long chapter on Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys).
Rewind: artists’ video in the 70s and 80s (UK oriented).
And another book I found…
Lannin, Steve (2005). Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema. Intellect Books.
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Thursday 27th November 08, 6.00pm until 10.00pm
Birmingham City University, Millennium Point at Curzon Street, Birmingham.
Eclectic Electric: Creating sound for the screen
Public talk by the owner of the Electric Cinema and Sound Studios, Tom Lawes.
“…keynote presentation will focus on creating sound and music to picture, by exploring his career in the film, TV, music and games industries. Tom started his career as a live sound engineer, before a quirk of fate saw him behind a video camera, directing and writing music for his first low-budget horror film. In 2004, after 13 years of working with clients such as the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and SEGA, Tom bought and restored Birmingham ’s derelict Electric Cinema. This historic building now houses his recording studio and has also reopened to the public as a cinema.”
To join us for this FREE event, please email creative.networks _at_ tic.ac.uk
Also: the Light House in Wolverhampton has a big-screen Music on Screen season, starting now.
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Hello all. I’ve marked all your first essays, and they’ll be available for you to collect from the THS office (ground floor of THS, in the corner) from tomorrow at noon. Everyone passed, and there were only a few marks in the 40s.
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Your second assigned essay is on music videos. The two primary books for this are:
1.
Frith, S., Goodwin, A., Grossberg, L. (1993). Sound and Vision. Routledge, London and New York.
The BIAD library at Gosta Green has 8 copies.
2.
Williams, K. (2003). Why I (Still) Want My MTV. Hampton Press, Inc., Cresskill, New Jersey.
The BIAD library at Gosta Green has 8 copies.
Other books on the topic are:
Vernallis, Carol. (2004) Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context.
2 copies in our Gosta Green library
Reiss, Steven. (2000) Thirty Frames Per Second: The Visionary Art of the Music Video.
1 copy in our Gosta Green library
Austerlitz, Saul. (2007) Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the “Beatles” to the “White Stripes”.
2 copies in our Gosta Green library
Beebe, Roger. (2007) Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones.
Koch, Christoph. (2007) MTV: Gatekeeper for the Music Industry?.
Roberts, Robin. (1996) Ladies First: Women in Music Videos.
Lannin, Steve (2005). Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema. Intellect Books.
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Many thanks for the essays for the first assignment. Hopefully it wasn’t too scary.
I now have twenty-one essays, on a range of adaptions (sadly no-one chose Middlemarch or Desert Hearts, but all the others were tackled). I’ll hope to have them marked and returned to the THS office soon.
Next week we’ll start looking at music/pop videos, in anticipation of the second assignment. Although this is not due in until after Christmas, you may want to start gathering materials that would help you go about making an academic analysis of a pop video, and be considering which video you might want to write about.
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Two interesting reports on conference/festival talks, for those interested in ‘text to screen’ that goes in the direction of interactive entertainment media…
1.
The Narrative Design Exploratorium has a report on the AGDC08 session on Are game writers witnessing the death of three act structure?…
“Andrew Walsh presented the session posed on the question ‘Are game writers witnessing the death of three act structure? Mr. Walsh was alive, full of “passionate self-reflexive humor. His talk was a great postmortem on how layered interactive storytelling can further game experiences while maintaining their classical roots. Clearly defending the form forged by Aristotle, …”
2.
A report on the 4Talent Interactive Drama Inspiration Session at Birmingham’s Hello Digital festival…
“Interactive drama is still a bit about the gizmos, the product placement and dumbing down to the micro-attention spans of the teen and youth audiences, who for now are the only viable market for commercial sponsorship in this new found revival of brand-sponsored content.”
You may also be interested that there’s now a major effort underway to create a universal open-source videogame writing tool, based on Celtx which is now in version one…
“Celtx is the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production software. It has everything you need to take your story from concept to production. Celtx replaces ‘paper, pen & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.”
The authors of Celtx are working with the IDGA’s writers group to make Celtx the standard videogame writing tool.
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Hello everyone! Hopefully you’ve all been spending some of last week starting the first essay, and will spend some of this week finishing and polishing it. Don’t forget that the first assignment hand-in deadline is:—
Friday 7th November 2008
If you’d like last-minute email advice, now (Mon/Tues) is a good time to send your email — since I tend to stop answering emails from Wednesdays until Saturdays, due to the weight of my current teaching load.
Five last-minute points to remember:
1. Make sure your essay is double-spaced, as it is in the essay template available on this website.
2. Make sure there are short references in the body of your essay, as well as full references in the bibliography at the end.
3. Please use the standard BCU ‘Harvard’ referencing system, not footnotes.
4. I have no access to the Theatre/Performance office files to check who’s-entitled-to-what due to disabilities. So if you have a disability statement/report, I simply need to see a photocopy of the top page (the one with the grid) showing which dispensations you’re entitled to.
5. If you go over the word-count and yet still want me to see the material you’ve written, then you can remove the extra material and place it at the back of the essay as a clearly-marked ‘Appendix’. Appendices don’t count towards your word-count.
Good luck!
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In Week Four we have a 40-minute podcast (MP3, 10Mb) for you to download and play on your iPods or phones. In this podcast I read through the relevant pages in the week-by-week module guide, then go on to read most of the book chapter “Lesbian and Gay Film Studies”. This is useful because many of the films in Assignment One arise from lesbian and gay loves, desires and/or sensibilities. One might even see Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers as telling a variety of homosocial stories, not least the intense semi-romantic bond between Sam and Frodo.
This book chapter gives some basic (and somewhat simplistic) lesbigay film history, introduces ideas from the 1980s and 90s about ideology and stereotypes, defines ‘camp’ and examines gay and lesbian ‘re-readings’ of mainstream films. We end with short exemplary section from the chapter’s disussion of the film Desert Hearts (one of our assignment films), which sees a closely-observed discussion of clothing and mannerisms brought together with historical knowledge of U.S. stereotypes, in order to illuminate the portrayal of the film’s main characters.
In answer to a student query by email: for your Assignment One essays, please guard against simply “recounting the plot”. That is not required, won’t gain you many marks, and will waste valuable space in an essay of only 1,500-words. I have read all the books/plays/comics, and seen all the films/series, for Assignment One — so there will be no need to tell me what the plot was about.
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