Critical Perspectives: Cultural Imperialism and Appropriation.

Exploring the impact of:
-Globalisation- the media is a global marketplace/www.
-Cultural Imperialism- 'exploration' of values through global media
-Cultural appropriation

Global dominance explored:
-Globalisation considers the extent to which certain political economies 'dominate' the world through the process by which global media organisations as 'cultural transmitters'.
-Thus major media organisations on the world stage 'drowned out' smaller regional outlets as they tend to follow this lead and effectively replicate their stance and mode of production.
-In terms of news, accusations that 'US style journalism' is 'homogenising' world news coverage, becoming 'missionaries of corporate capitalism.
-Equally it has the potential to establish a dominant GLOBAL CULTURE.

Globalisation:
-It can be regarded as a positive or a negative phenomena.
-Why has it happened?
-Global media brands and output transmitting and selling formats on a worldwide scale are at least part of the reason.
-An increasingly 'marketed' media landscape on a global scale, chase big revenues and operate as nay other product being sold- dependent on supply and demand. But what affect does that have?

The consequence of 'Cultural Imperialism':
-In general, what we are talking about is the potential for the media to allow one culture to dominate over another.
-What does this mean for storytelling and the coverage of world issues.

Consequence:
-CNN have been accused of stirring up 'compassion fatigue' through their reporting of global suffering.
-Rather than motivation and mobilising change amongst world powers and individuals, its suggests that it has desensitised the audience to major world crises.
-Furthermore, focusing on particular events of 'crises coverage', global tv news coverage ignores many more significant events and there for they are excluded from policy debate.

Globalisation: World News- Whose News?
-When related to news, globalisation is distinct from globalisation in general- which tends to focus upon socioeconomic lines such as the impact of international trading.

Changing News Formats:
-Change the style and presentation of news programming.

-EG British television inherited it’s news formatting model from the US in the mid 1950s, with both ITN and then the BBC taking on generic features such as :
-‘dramatic’ tone, but distinct in form from drama.
- Half an hour in duration of ‘comprehensive’ coverage.
- Generically formatted but still unique to their individual brands.

Truly Global?
-How likely is it that TV news can truly provide 24/7 global ‘breaking news’ -
-More often it can revert to the usual short cuts in storytelling and story seeking as it does on domestic stories? Ie elite voices and establishments dominate.
-Global TV news players emerged throughout the 1990s and beyond
-with the likes of BBC World and Murdoch’s News Corps news brands such as Fox, Sky and Star competing with one another on a world stage for audiences in new markets such as China and India -
-what ideological impact is this likely to have?

TV News & The Global Public Sphere

-Not everyone agrees that global ideological dominance is a consequence of modern TV news operations –
-[global TV news] has the capacity to contribute to democracy ..... Through it’s range of respresentations, genres and information. ...... [but it’s plurality is] compromised by .... Images of consumerism’ (Barker, C : 1997 “ 230)
-I.e. the media can enhance and convey cultural differences, as well as the sort of ‘bad’ news which might reinforce cultural prejudices e.g. conflict or famine in the Third World etc.
-Furthermore meanings are negotiated and filtered through culturally varied ways of understanding therefore less culturally “imperialist” than the ‘Global Dominance’ model suggests.
-‘Although US programmes might lead the world in their transportability across cultural boundaries .... They are rarely the most popular .... Where viewers have a reasonable menu of locally produced programmes to choose from’ (Sinclair et al, 1999 : 176)
-Is this the case?
-What is the affect of social media on re-dressing the balance?

It's a Small World After all
-Can global and social media make the world more ‘interconnected, inder-dependent” (Cottle, 2009, p351)?
-Thus is global television is not something which necessarily causes cultural imperialism, but rather allows us to see the ourselves and each other as facing the same challenges and issues.
-What impact does this have on the potential for both news and fiction adaptation storytelling?

Drama & Cultural Appropriation:
-Equally drama and dramatic adaptations move across cultural ‘boundaries’.
-Consider : implications of taking a Manga-inspired story such as “Ghost in the Shell” and translating that to a US blockbuster? Is it as some have claimed an example of “Hollywood Whitewashing Controversies”:
-The issues of Cultural Appropriation is at the fore in these cases.
-What implications or examples are worth considering in your choice of screen adaptation? They may be less overt but still important to consider.

Global market place Vs Global representation?
-So why is it that, given there is an inherently global marketplace for media (particularly online) and that therefore audiences are inherently diverse, that major film producers should consider it so difficult to be more representative of the original ethnicity of the text itself??
-What is it that motivates ”cultural appropriation” ?

Does any of this matter? Reception Theory:

-The implications for cultural appropriation are not necessarily that we in the audience are “Passive” to the meanings “encoded” in the material they watch.
-Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory (1980) argued that audiences “De-code” what is presented to them and impose their own ideologies onto what they see and hear.
-Dominant Reading (views as intended)
-Negotiated Reading (views with some interpretation) • Oppositional Reading (opposition of intended view)
-Thus it is not necessarily the case that views are always imposed as intended nor even that the intention is always overt in the producer of the piece. is it not true that the media can affect our views and behaviour towards one another?
-Consider the role of the media in making sense of the world and what “matters”...

Post Submission Update:

After a quite distressing response from my group over social, I felt that I had to make a few minor adjustments to some of my blog posts and the final evaluation. This is because my fellow group members reacted extremely negatively to what I had said regarding my experiences working with them.

Upon looking at the original posts, I realised that a lot of the content, while truthful, was written rather aggressively and specific wording made the group appear far worse than was the reality.

Because of this, I felt like I had to change the posts so that they would appear a little more friendly towards my group and my experiences working with them, cutting out a lot of the true concerns I'd had about them and the project. However, upon doing this, I realised that my blog and evaluation were no longer accurate. As our blogs are marked based on the content we write and our truthful opinions of our experiences, I thought it was only right for me to put what I had initially written back in, albeit in a much less aggressive manner, also adding in areas where I admitted that certain problems came down to me and my own short-comings. This made me realise that I couldn't just change the content of my blogs to fit the rest of the group's views until they were happy with it as it wouldn't be an honest representation of how I had personally experienced the project.

I had made a similar post to this one stating that I owed the rest of the group an apology for the aggressive nature of the blog posts and I have apologised to them. The reactions to this from my peers may no doubt have reflected badly upon me as I know that they had tweaked their own blogs in response to the first version of my evaluation. However, I have nothing against them personally and don't wish to paint them in a bad light but I wasn't going to allow my blog posts to be dictated by  their own opinions and points of view instead of mine.

Final Evaluation: News Project

I have finally been able to see the fine cut/ final cut and personally I think that the final project that is being handed in is mostly successful. The final edit is very cohesive as well as looking professional. The edits between the transitions are all mostly smooth (with perhaps a few minor issues with cutting between different locations) and the same can be said with the music.

I feel that both Cailan and I make good studio presenters and we both appear comfortable in our roles. However, I do feel that the generated background behind us does not particularly fit in too well when transitioning to and from both the package and the live segments.

All of the footage looks very professional and mostly blend well with each other with some very good B-Roll that we can cut to to break up the long shots where one specific person is speaking.

I also was finally given the chance to help with the sound editing. I managed to take control of the edit for a short period of time to edit in the music without interference. We then all watched the segments and agreed on my edits with some minor tweaks from Alex. If I had not done this, half of the soundtrack that I have made may not have been included, making this part of my contribution rather redundant. As it is, a lot of the music is very quiet and not very noticeable but this was overall a group choice. Also my Voice-Over is apparently missing for unclear reasons.

Here is the link to the final video uploaded on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWls47PhxPc&feature=youtu.be

The group themselves were mostly pleasant to work with in person, however there were instances where I would not get on so well with them and certain problems started to arise as some of my contributions appear not to be noted by them. However, I managed to work well with them most of the time despite some times where I'd had some trouble coping with some unfair comments I have received from them over social media.

Here is a full list of most of the contributions that I have made towards this project as they are missing in the final submission:

Pre-Production:
-Initial research
-Electric car research
-Branding research (websites and adverts)
-Filming location finding
-Finding contacts
-Finding a wide range of car dealerships that we can contact as well as getting their numbers.
-Finding some quiet back roads for filming Alex in his car
-Contacting the Kent Film Office for several locations
-Getting in touch with various contacts
-Getting in touch which various car dealerships
-Route planning
-Music research
-Script Editing
-Creating every Risk Assessment

Production:
-Secondary camera operator
-Location scouting
-Fig-Rig operator
-Sound operator on certain shoot days.
-Keeping contact with other crew members when in separate locations.
-Initial solo performance as News Anchor
-Re-filming and performing with another News Anchor

Post-Production
-Creation of the entire soundtrack
-Helping to re-film B-Roll
-Giving constructive Feedback to the various editing stages
-Recording of Voice Over
-Sound editing (eventually, when I was given the chance)

It should be noted that, out of the eight primary days of shooting and re-filming, I managed to make it to six of them, only missing two. This is better than some of the others in the group as they have missed more days. I had a clear role on all of these days, whether it be getting some secondary footage of the presenter from different angles, monitoring the sound levels, getting some B-Roll of the subjects being presented and helping to set up and pack away the equipment each day. On the two days where I could not make it, I started work on other aspects of the project such as the soundtrack.

My dedication to the course and this project, although questioned by my peers, has been high. I’ve had to cancel many appointments and family gatherings that had been pre-planned earlier this year to make sure I am available to make it to the shoots whenever I can. I have come in early (perhaps too early) everyday that I have been here for this project to make sure I am there when I am needed.

Overall Positives:
-I had a clear role on every shoot day.
-I was able to fill in the days I had missed with other work to help support the project.
-I presented my own ideas and concepts (even if a lot of them didn't end up being used).
-The footage we captured was all of high quality.
-I am overall quite proud of the soundtrack which I made for this project.
-The final cut looks professional.
-Alex made for a good piece-to-camera and live presenter.
-Cailan and I made for good Anchormen.

Overall Negatives/ Improvements:
-Choosing to film in 4K led to a much longer production and edit time as the footage takes much longer to render due to its quality.
-Sometimes communications could be a bit strained as not everybody was on social media at the same times. Sometimes this led to me not knowing exactly what it was I was supposed to be doing at times.
-I noticed a few times where my group failed to acknowledge some of my contributions, leaving me a little worried how they would react to me in their blogs.
-Towards the end, tensions started to rise and attitudes such as bad language started to appear with some conversations becoming needlessly aggressive and stressful to go through.
-I needed to be able to get in and edit the sound sooner, seeing as I was only given a strict five minute gap by the group before submission.

Overall I feel that the final project is, indeed a success. It has just been a difficult ride getting here. I look forward to the next project as I have chosen Fiction Adaptation. This will be good for me as I can prove myself through my own creativity and work on and develop the project by myself without having to worry about being in a large group.

Finished the Soundtrack

I have successfully finished the soundtrack after some trouble. Here is a list of most of the tracks that I have created as they appear on my 'iTunes'.

The twelfth track appears to be missing due to an error I made when exporting the music to mp3 files. There are only supposed to be thirteen tracks. Also, some of the tracks I had created beforehand had been saved over so most of the ones presented are in their later states.

The tracks which I am most proud of are:

-Track 10: Carology Titles with Strings.
This is the track that would play over the titles. After much feedback, I made several changes to this pice, including creating a beep (much like BBC News) as well as adding some strings and Sound effects.

-Tracks 5 & 6: Electric Car
For when the we show the cars in the showroom, this was the first track that the group actually liked and thus I continued to create and adapt the other tracks in this style. I especially like the bass which comes in after a while as it sounds very powerful against the soft strings and sets the mood nicely.

-Track 14: Final Driving Song
For when Alex is driving his car around, this probably has the best production towards it and was a trac that I had to try and perfect time and time again. It has some resemblance to the type of music that can be found in shows such as Top Gear.

Major Concerns

As I have said in one of my early blog posts towards the start of this project, I do not agree with the idea of looking at each other's blogs as they are our own individual development logs which are fed back to the tutor, though my peers have obviously ignored this repeatedly. However, I got a bit worried after a rather unnecessarily heated argument over social media took place and I decided that I would take a look. I ended up finding the comments on me a bit worrying and often misleading in regards to my contributions to the course through a series of what I can only think of as misunderstandings, if not plain ignorance.

Specifically, I found that my contributions to the course may seem nullified by what has been written by the others in their blogs. I also saw comments about when I wasn't able to make it to certain meetings on just two of the eight days of primary filming despite me letting them know why I couldn't make those days. I feel like I should list a few examples where my reasons for these were perhaps not so clear.

Here are a few times where I was not able to make some of the shoots and reasons why:

- 5th October, After feedback on the script from Helen.
I was unable to stay to consult with the rest of the group on a few matters regarding the feedback due to needing to get home to help with some problems involving the landlord. This had already been promised to the my family but I probably did not communicate this to the group properly.

- 10th October, Filming Day 2
I had to leave filming slightly earlier as I needed to get home as the landlord was visiting and I needed to be there. I had relayed this to by group earlier that day.

- 21st October, Brands Hatch Filming.
After we got feedback for the rough cut, we were told that we needed to get an entirely new live segment with meant that we had to film a load of new footage. It was decided that the live footage would be shot at Brands Hatch on the Saturday. Unfortunately I was unable to make this shoot as I work from 11pm on the Friday night and do not finish until between 7am and 7:30am on the Saturday morning, meaning that I would have been asleep for the majority of the Saturday. As it turned out, I wasn't feeling too well for the short time that I was awake during that day.

- 25th October, Final Editing
Plans had already been made quite a while ago by certain members of my family (who live halfway across England) that they would come down specifically to see me and we would go out for the day for dinner. Unfortunately, I was asked at the very last minute last night if I was able to come in today. I didn't feel that it would have been a good gesture for me to suddenly turn these family members away right at the last minute. However, I do agree and realise that this was not the best time seeing as it is the day before submission and I have apologised profusely for this bad timing. I should have used better foresight in this instance. Though Cailan also had to miss a day for similar reasons but there appeared to be no problems with him doing this.

Other complaints I have had from the group include how I have supposedly not had much input into the editing process. I spent quite a lot of time during the edit time creating the soundtrack, sending them to the rest of the group, getting feedback, adapting the music to this feedback, creating brand new tracks from scratch and rinsing and repeating. This is something that I have been doing non-stop.  There was then a time when the group were happy with the soundtrack as it was so I stopped, leaving it for some time. I then started again as soon as there was some dissatisfaction with some of the material. This has taken up much of the editing process time.

In terms of the edit itself, I have not yet had the chance to properly get in and edit the sound and the music track that I have created. This is partly because a certain group member appeared not to listen to much of the feedback we were giving them and wasn't letting anyone intervene into 'their' edit. My experience with the editing process thus far has mostly involved watching various stages of the edit and trying to give some constructive feedback to what has been accomplished.

There have been these kind of issues all the way through the development, production and post-production of this News project but have mostly kept this out of my blog for fear of having my fellow group members reading it and taking things the wrong way.

A big concern I have is that I may not be properly credited for the full amount of contribution I have given to this course in the final project due to these misunderstandings. If so, I shall make a full list of my contributions in my evaluation of the project.

I hope this blog doesn't sound like I am making a load of excuses and I am not trying to attack my group; they have been pleasant to work with most of the time. I also know that I don't nessecarily get marked based what they say in their own blogs. I have just outlined various problems I have had throughout the duration of this project and I am just worried that certain claims by the others might be misleading as to full contributions I had to this project.

Second Studio Filming

After we had to take the interview with Ajay out of the live segment, the footage of the presenter in the studio which was already recorded at this time had to be reshot. This is because the script itself no longer made sense now that the entire news piece had switched around and new segments had been brought in.

Now we had rewritten the script, it was time to re-film the studio segments. However, we decided to change the set-up a bit and use two anchormen to present in the studio standing side by side. This choice was thankfully a group choice instead of just being down to George and his own preferences The two presenters were myself and Cailan. This made me glad as an earlier post I wrote was partly dedicated to my disappointment of not being the anchorman as I felt that it dampened the overall physically viewable involvement I had for the final news piece. This change allowed this worry to be retracted.

The shoot itself went mostly well. Both me and Cailan had taken a large effort to try and learn the entire script and we were both confident in what we were saying. However, we unfortunately stumbled several times when put on the spotlight (literally) in front of the camera. Though we were confident in what we had to say, we often stumbled trying to remember the lines whilst also trying to concentrate on communicating appropriately towards the camera.

It also didn't help that a certain member of the group was giving some rather patronising comments whenever we messed up. However, when we asked the other two if they would leave the room to see if we would fair better without them in the room. We did. After a few tries, we were able to perfect the part that we were previously having trouble with and even recorded the next segment with ease. Unfortunately, when it came to recording the rest of the script, the others were back in the room and we continued Mohave some trouble. Despite this, we managed to get all of the filming finished, albeit taking a lot longer than it could have taken.

Some other problems included some issues with the lighting casting shadows but this was something that we managed to deal with and thankfully did not effect the green screen effect too much.

We were also given some advice from Ferg who said that we were stood too close to the green screen and the lights would emit a green glow on us. This is something that we will have to keep in mind in the future as we had already finished the filming for our studio segments by this time.

despite these issues, I feel that today was mostly a success and I am happy with the footage.

The Editing Process 3: Nearly Finished/ Justified Concerns

The good news is, everything has been filmed to adjust to the feedback that we got from Helen last week. We have just finished the final pieces with the two anchormen in the studio set and now we have started to work towards the fine cut.

Thankfully, the green screen has proved to be effective so far despite the problems with shadows that the lighting rigs caused. A lot of the existing footage is still prevalent within the edit as well as the additional new footage to allow for the new order of the piece and how it is now being constructed. The actual edits themselves appear to be smoother with better transitions between shots and a more cohesive piece is the ending result of this.

However, unfortunately I still haven't been given much time to look into getting in and editing the music into the piece which I find worrying as we are quite close to the deadline. There was still a feeling of not properly being able to work around the editor as they still appear to be quite controlling over the edit, sometimes getting quite defensive whenever constructive criticisms and feedback was given in regards to the edit. Also some dissatisfaction with certain tracks from the soundtrack I made was voiced. This is fine as I can go and create some new bits but I wish these concerns were fed back to me sooner. I also am a little unclear now as to the style of music and the overall 'vibe' that I need to create seeing as the group has given me mixed feedback whenever I do one type of style or the other. I think the best thing for me to do is to try and find a balance between the two.

I, along with Cailan, had to leave early today as we both live a bit further afield and unlike Alex and George we both have to rely on public transport . Meaning we would not get home until much later and we both wanted to get home for a reasonable time. However, I shall talk to the rest of the group on Facebook and discuss the feedback then.

Hopefully I will try and get my sound edits into the final edit by the time submission day comes around.