Theories/ Critical Approaches

Hypodermic Needle theory

The Active/Passive viewing theory states that there are two different types of audience that watch television. The active audience are people who know what they want to watch and why they want to watch the chosen show.  The passive audience are people who flick through channels and don't really mind what they watch just as long as it passes the time regardless even if they do learn something new.

 For example if I rushed home to watched a documentary and learnt things from the show, That would make me an active audience for that show because I knew it was going to be on and I would have had some sort of reason to want to watch it but if I was just flicking through channels and watched while doing something else I would be a passive audience for that show.

The matrix is filled with things that relate to media theories and Passive and Active audience consumption is one of them. In the The Matrix, most of the human population are in fields hooked up to machines in little pods unaware that they are connected to the matrix and living an artificial or fake digital life. Some of them are fortunate to escape the digital world while others don't. In relation to the Passive/Active theory, the humans that are free from the matrix can be seen as active people because that have chosen to see and realize the reality of the situation. As for the people that live their lives in the matrix, They could be seen as passive people because unlike the active people they have not broken free and can not chose to go back and forth from the digital world to the real world like the active can.    

The Hypodermic needle theory states that people are or can be heavily influenced by the things they see on TV and that TV had a direct effect on viewers. This idea came from the 1940s to the 1950s because the media available around those years were perceived as powerful influences on the way people. This is probably to do with all the propaganda things that were shown on TV around that time period to americans to get them to do certain things like joining the army and also turning some into American patriots.

The name for this theory "Hypodermic needle" is a metaphor made to represent the notion that information is injected into viewers through TV giving them appropriate messages designed to trigger a desired response. This desired response could be someone purchasing a product due to an appealing  advertisement or simply more viewers or popularity to a certain television show or channel.

There is also the "Bullet Theory" which is another metaphor used to describe the same concept as Hypodermic needle theory. This "Bullet Theory" is more or less the same only its more graphic with the way it explains the "Shooting of information". This theory strongly suggests that a powerful and direct flow of information is being shot from sender to receiver constantly on television.

This theory can also be related to The Matrix. In The Matrix, The active people who are free from the digital world can chose to learn anything new at any time just by going into the system. The way they go into the system is by injecting a needle looking plug into the back of their heads. That is just one cross references between the theory and film, here is another. When they are in the digital world they can have information on how to do certain things in seconds by simply making a call and asking for it. What happens is the "operators" will find the appropriate program and then install it or download it to the active persons digital self similar to an injection or shooting someone with information.      

The user gratification theory states that someone watches something something to develop their personalities or social relationships with people. Here is a little list for the different things people may want to use TV to develop on:

Personal Identity - Someone people watch something be cause it may add to their personality or character

Surveillance - Someone people watch shows about factual things in order to know more

Entertainment - Someone people watch TV for fun as a pass time or with people to be entertaining

Personal Relationships - Some people watch to be social and fit in with cultures and community

The Receptive Theory is about how different groups see things. People may be offended by things or may just not agree with what they are seeing or experiencing. This can sometimes also links to personal identity as some people personally might not be able to handle things whether its because they have an image or social reputation to hold or just cant handle things. A really good example for this are homophobic people. Homophobic people are people who have a phobia of homosexual people and cant stand to be around them.

The Effects debate argues that the impact of what a character or story may have on someone. In other words this theory says, that if people constantly see people shooting and people doing bad things in shows and films, they will re act this in real life and be influenced to do similar things.

Framing

In photography including cinematography, framing is a technique used to focus the viewer's attention upon the subject. Framing can make an image more aesthetically pleasing and keep the viewer's focus on the framed object

Light painting photography

These pictures were taken in the TV/Time variant mode so that I could have better control of the shutter speed and F stops. To achieve these  pictures, I change the shutter to 25" and then changed the ISO to 100. I then set the focus to manual and took shots in a dark room while flashing lights and bovine them in front of the camera. 

Red Nose Day Post Program Evaluation

On Friday the 15th of March my class hosted and organized a Red nose day telethon live show that was broadcasted live to some parts of the college. Also we had an audience that consisted of both students and teachers.

At the beginning of the project we were given a brief that told us what we had to do in order to plan and showcase our show.  First we all did some research on comic relief shows to get an idea of how things work and what would be expected of one in general. The next step was to pitched our individual ideas to each other and then put them together to come up with the final over all content idea. The idea had to consist of a 2 videos and a live section. 1 video was meant to be about a charity while the other was to be humorous.

Our idea and theme was originally to promote the awareness of homeless people and the problems that come with being homeless but things changed as we struggled to find a homeless charity that was associated with comic relief. Instead we changed our charity item from raising awareness on homeless people to raising awareness on young people with mental health problems.

Once we had our idea figured out, we only had a month to do our pre production. For pre production we had to make storyboards and prepare scripts. We also had to give roles to people for recording our pre recorded things and have meetings where we would record, in a diary, the things we were doing to make sure we were making progress.

My role was to record the comedy item and edit it. I also started the running order at early stages of the pre production process and worked as a camera operator on the live day. On the day of rehearsals I visualized and planed the shots to give my self a better idea of how and where I would be moving and the amount of space I would have.

The show started with an intimidating atmosphere as the first two presents had a bit of trouble reading off of the teleprompter but as the show continued people became relaxed and things began to flow nicely. The Red nose day show our media groups hosted lasted around 3 hours with breaks in between each group switch over. The audience we had definitely enjoyed the video content for our show and also some of the humorous live activity parts.

Although the show was going well towards the end, The audience lost interest and left just before the final group took over. Also some people had trouble reading from the teleprompter because the text on it moved very slowly which caused sudden pauses during presenting with some groups.

Over all the Red Nose day show we all hosted didn't turn out as bad as some of us thought may have but it does have some room for improvement. One of the most important thing we could have done better to improve the final show is focused more while we were going through pre production and also focusing more on the possible reactions from the audience to videos and live activities would have been another benefit for us.

Low lighting photography project

Today our assignment was to look at and experiment with low lighting photos and shadows. During the experimenting, we took portrait pictures of each other using different things to cast different shadow shapes. I set the iso so it was 200 to compensate for the low lighting and set the f stop to 5.0.

(High shutter speed) Strawberry pictures

Today's assignment was to look at and experimented with fast shutter speed. We went to the studio and set a bowl of water onto a table so that we could drop strawberry's into the bowl while taking high shutter speed photos. To get these pictures we use a very fast shutter (1/400) and set it to manual mode. Also the f stop was 4.0 and i used a 24mm lens.

Here are a few pictures:

My Surreal self portrait

What I did and how I did it
first I searched the web for surreal pictures on google and various other sites like deviant art, flicker etc. After a while of searching I ended up finding 2 pictures I liked the most so I then tried to figure out how to remake them. I then took a portrait picture of myself and then I edited two different versions of them once I was sure I could imitate them.

What inspired me

Before pictures

after picture