Television Studio

A big part of my time has been spent working on a television show, using the brand new studio in my university building. The project started a while back in September, where I was put into a group with Josie Webster, Emma Moreton, Pete Edwardson, Michael Shiells and Molly Dale.

We were given roles for the project and I volunteered as a Director. I chose this role because I am interested in a creative leading role in production and I had experience on a live shoot as a producer and floor manager. I did not enjoy those roles as I was too chaotic for an organised roles.

Things started off well, especially as we thought of a show from the start, Dark Side of the Noon. The show that looks into the world of the weird and wonderful. So this theme took us down the road into finding guests that relate to that world.

After a few weeks of practice shoots and training, where we each got a taste of our role, we pitched our idea to the lecturers. They loved the idea and gave us some advice into finding some guests.

We had some trouble into that field, as a lot of people in the weird and wonderful world were quite shy, and did not want to appear on camera. Emma however, found a pretty good guest, Pheobe Kelly, who was a local psychic and really wanted to help us out. So we interviewed her, got a sense of her story and were genially ready to go, when she had to cancel a week before the shoot.

We panicked. We went straight to our laptops and searched everywhere and anywhere. I didn't care who I asked, as long as they were a psychic of some sort. Still after two days of panic and searching, I got a phone call from Phil the medium, who said he was interested and would love to do it.

So after a brief meeting in Starbucks, we went to the shoot the next day and filmed the interview and demonstration, which was Phil giving Michael a reading. It went well, we rehearsed endlessly and got it recorded and done in one shoot. Afterwards I was quite relieved, as the hard part was over.

The next week was about making the title sequence and preparing for the music item for our show, which was to film TJ & Murphy perform their new song. I really enjoyed that shoot, even though I went a little crazy with the shooting script, but I am always ambitious, which I fell is one of my good qualities. I was really proud of the look and vibe of the shoot, it was smooth, gorgeous and really relaxing. I felt that we all pulled our best performances in that shoot and I think it shows in the final product.

So now its just a matter of editing all the footage together to create a short television show. I can't wait to see it and see what has been months of work finished. Still not all my work has been practical, I have been doing battle with one essay.

It has been about three months since my last post, but I seem to be back, especially with the start of another year at John Moores University. So this post was used before as a way to chronicle my projects, work and thoughts. But as we have started another module, this blog will be used for research in today's media. So I'll just post my thoughts on random pieces of media, both related and unrelated to my course. To know what I am doing, here's a little run down.

Media Student
Yes, I passed my first year of university, getting good grades and creating exciting pieces of work. So this means that I am back in John Moores for my second year, in a new building which is very exciting.....and shiny.

We have new modules to work on, such as TV Studio, where we learn how to create and film a professional live television show, Digital Media Cultures, which is a lecture where we study new aspects of digital media and Beyond the Camera, where we learn post production techniques, using different software such as After Effects and Photoshop.

We also have a module called Applied Media Research, which I'm sure you can all guess, is about researching media. This blog is generally for that module, but as I stated before, I will talk and discuss other parts of my life such as:

Space Cat TV

Yes, after a successful, experimental first year, the production group I am part off is back and we are even more ambitious this year, pushing ourselves to the limit, so that we can gain skills on comedy, filming and storytelling. I am very excited for what we have planned this year, I just hope our determination which meet success and we can actually show some of our ideas this year.





Photographer and Blogger.

Since I have stopped first year of university, I have not stopped my photography project of taking a photograph everyday and writing a post on that day. Its very exciting, I really feel like I have got a swing of taking an image and writing every single day. It just shows that I do have a lot on my mind and like to spill it out over the keyboard.

Though this project is only to last a year, I'm sure it won't really stop in a way, I will probably show my unwanted thoughts on the internet. What gets me really excited is that people do follow me and really pay attention to the blog. Sometimes its actually hard for my friends and I to talk, cause they would already know whats going on in my life.

But I will talk about the blog in more detail later on, as this is an introduction post.

New Age Folk Storyteller

I will leave this post with a thought on today's media age. Media has moved along way from print, television and radio. In fact media sectors are decreasing and just forming into one medium. Also the word viewers, listeners and audiences are hastily becoming erased, people are becoming users, creating and contributing to the media world.

So in my experience of blogging and filming, I am seeing more and more that though the technology of media is moving forward day by day, the way we use media is in a way going backward. No longer are we simply minds that are being told what is what by professionals, but we are moving back to the tradition of folk storytellers. Of going to a place, like a pub and hearing stories and songs about the world and the way it is lived. Everyone is now a new age folk storyteller, through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, we are sharing our lives and our stories.

As Frank Tuner has sung, "Not everyone can be Freddie Mercury, but anyone can raise a glass and sing."

The creation and life of John Place

Our last assignment for Contemporary Media Issues was an interesting one. We were to create a fictional character and give it life through the use of Facebook and two other websites. Channel 4 uses Social websites to promote shows by impersonating as their fictional characters.

I was to work with Ian Gardener, Joel Jerome Airey and James Dunn for this project. We discussed different ideas and stories, but were trending too deep into the lands of the cliche, such as a person being stalked or someone going through a bad break up.

James proposed an idea for a character that would be the image of the word pretentious. A man who listens to music by unknown artists, reads obscure books and has a very extreme, left wing view on the world. He would try to be a musician, but we were to aim for him to be terrible and to be hated by the online world. With the help of a random name generator, John Place was born.

We were given two weeks to make this character real and decided to create content, such as photos and a song, to make this character as real as possible. We did not receive much response from John Place, other than from different fake characters. We tried to provoke people on YouTube by abusing popular songs, but no one went for the bait.

None the less, a lot of people became Facebook friends with John Place, some of these people are those who I know from home. I was shocked how easily they decided to respond to a friend request on someone they didn't know. One person actually wrote on John Place's page, asking if he knew him or not.

I enjoyed this assignment, but I already experienced this form of storytelling with the Google Map Narrative, as my group and I created fake online characters to speak dialogue through email and blogs, so for this assignment, I simply followed the same format.

I was disappointed with the lack of response for John Place, perhaps if we had more time, we could have created more songs and Tumblr posts to further establish his character. But the biggest disappointment of them all was the lack of story for John Place. If I was to take on this task again, I would have planed out a story, so that our Facebook friends would be an audience and would follow the drama of John Place's life, much like a social network drama.

Still here is a link to the Facebook Page of John Place

Social Networking Wiki

Global Warming and Social Networking Wiki Page

Once again, our class was to make another wiki page with Wet Paint Central, but we were to make a page about Social Networking.

After having a lecture about Social Networking, discussing about the different communities and identities that can be created for it, we were to make a wiki page discussing a global

subject and how it was affected by different aspects of social networking.

I was in a group with Pheobe Ruddock, Nicholas Deas, Josh McDowell and Emma Daffern. The subject we were to discuss was Global Warming. We were also tasked with creating a 300 word thread about a certain aspect to Social Networking, these included:

Social Networking and Identity

Social Networking and Collective Intelligence

Social Networking and the Creation of Communities

Social Networking and Democracy

Social Networking and Distribution

I chose to write about how Global Warming can affect Social Networking and Identity. I decided to discuss how peer pressure from online chats and communities can stop a user from sharing their opinion.

The assignment was quite straight forward and simple to achieve, but what held me back was the fact that we were using Wet Paint Central. Wet Paint central is an awful website. It does not work on all web browsers; it does not give you the ability to post a picture, video or link on a thread. You cannot find your wiki unless you sign in and look at your profile.

The whole idea of a wiki is so that students can go on separate computers and produce their own work online, but Wetpaint central stops you from achieving this. When Josh and I were working on the wiki on separate computers, we updated the wiki page at the same time. This led to Wet Paint Central to crash and erase the work we just uploaded to the page. We were then forced to type the work out again and updated separately, which in my opinion, defeats the purpose of using a wiki.

After having two experiences in creating a Wiki page, I have discovered that I am more confident and comfortable with working on an essay. This may be due to the fact that the Wiki page can be seen by anyone and everyone, while with an essay, it can only be seen by my lecturer, myself and anyone I choose to see it. Maybe I would not have found creating a Wiki such a daunting task if I had used something other than Wet Paint Central, but I do feel that writing a Wiki is not in my comfort zone.

Weavrs

The Return of Christopher Kemp

https://twitter.com/#!/ChristopherKem4

Merseyside Man Missing: A Google Map Narrative

Have a look at our Google Map Narrative HERE

Before Christmas, we were given the brief for our next assignment, which was to use the tools from Google Maps to tell a story. This narrative could be fictional or factual and could be told in either a linear or non-linear structure.

Included in our brief was the location that would be the beginning of our story, ours was the Pier Head in Liverpool. The students that I worked with in this project were Josie Webster, Emma Moreton and Pete Edwardson.

After a brainstorm of possible ideas, we decided to create a non-linear crime thriller, about the last weeks in the life of a solicitor, Christopher Kemp, who was found murdered at the Pier Head. After deciding the narrative, we then created a series of locations that would be shown through a Google Map. On clicking each location, information on a different suspect to Christopher’s murder, was presented within its narrative.

Our first week consisted of deciding which locations would be used for the story, what motive each character would have for killing Christopher and choosing the character names. The process of the character creation was both interesting and fun. The fun aspect was from creating extreme characters, such as Christopher’s mistress, Chelsea Pierson, who was also the young, trophy wife of Tony Pierson, Christopher’s boss. It was also interesting because we assigned stereotypical roles for the characters that were needed for this kind of narrative. Much like putting the right pieces together in one large puzzle.

We used a random name generator to create names for the characters and was quite an entertaining process, as the names seemed to really fit with the characters. A good example of this would be the mistress, Chelsea Pierson. Once our characters had names and we planned the story, we started to create email accounts for the characters and a blog for Christopher Kemp.

We wanted to try and make the world of this story as believable as possible, so we decided to use fake emails and blog posts to tell the story, this way the story is being told by the characters themselves.

I really enjoyed this assignment, as I felt that we could be more creative with our stories and there were little restrictions for the creation of our narrative. I feel that we may have made the story too big and perhaps too complicated. If we had more time we could have worked more on the story, but other than that I felt that the project went very well.

I think the method of using Google Map as a narrative tool to be a great technique to practice one’s storytelling abilities. Perhaps it can be used as a tool to plan the story of a novel or a film, which I may use. In the future I may use this to plan out my next short film or I may try to create another Google Map narrative.

Paparazzi Game Video

This is a video that documents the trial run of the game, Paparazzi, that James Dunn and I created for University. The creation of this game and experimentation of the rules with other students was interesting, due to their reactions. I created this video to share this experience and to capture the tension that the players felt.  

Photo a Day Project

For the year of 2012 I will take up the challenge to take a photograph every day of the year, leaving me with at least 365 photographs by 31st of December. I've always wanted to have a go with this project and to improve my photography, so wish me luck and I hope you enjoy the ride.


I will be posting these photographs on my flickr account:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marknugent/


And my Tumblr account:
http://themadnessofmark.tumblr.com/