Existing promo videos analysis

-Identify the brand first

Target Audience​
Mode of Address (Tone/ Narration/ Lexis/ Delivery)​
Technical Conventions (Image/ Music/ Editing/ Colour)​
Conveyance of Brand/ Identity​
Narrative ​
codes and conventions


1. Walt Disney World promo


With a brand value of US$32.6 billion, entertainment giant Disney remains the most valuable media brand this year, despite a 5% brand value decrease since 2017. As a well-loved entertainment brand, Disney has a unique ability to use nostalgia to harness childhood memories amongst its customer base. (1) The company attracts people of all ages, reaching a broad audience through various media and entertainment outlets. Disney's power lies in its brand. Even in a short promo video of Disney World, they rely on visual storytelling to sell off the emotional component of the brand which is what appeals to all ages. In the promo we also see there is no speech as everything is portrayed through the use of visual storytelling. Disney also knows their audience- they know their audience relies on nostalgia, to keep coming back for more, they want a reminder of childhood not a new Disney but the Disney that the grew up loving as a child. Using symbolic codes, we can see that from the start as the most iconic character representing the brand identity without  the need of speech (Micky Mouse) looks in the mirror, and then followed by a montage of the park initially getting ready for the day. The music is uplifting and almost dramatic through the use of technical codes used to portray different recognisable characters, getting ready. All the colours are bright and the lighting is high key natural throughout. We know all this by the 37second as again we see Mickey Mouse looking at his Disney watch on his glove, through the use of editing and fast cuts as the park opening is about to happen, to the fireworks and different families portrayed after the 0.40 second, relying on its family values and well established brand identity, as the clips go through fast pace (rollercoaster video), to slower pace (Belle hugging two little girls), to interact even better with each important moment.

2. GoPro HERO5 Launch promo


Even before watching the promo we know the GoPro is a brand for the explorers, for people who need to capture the moment of living on the edge, capturing the same moments in fast pace, while usually practising extreme sports that no other camera can while also being portable and smaller than half the size of a regular phone.  It manufactures action cameras and develops its own mobile apps and video-editing software. Founded as Woodman Labs, Inc, the company eventually focused on the connected sports genre, developing its line of action cameras and, later, video editing software. (2)
To appeal to its target audience the company would need to use the same elements in its advert- from the opening of the video with the sunrise, we see a broad range of locations and activities performed, from mountain climbing to kayaking and concerts. We also see the same camper van throughout which most travellers/explorers would identify with as a prefered method of travel for them and the very clever editing of it moving through different location while the camera stays on the same position, cutting to the beat of the soundtrack (at 1.27 min), to represent again the capability and range of the cameras/drones.




3. Always advert


The Always advert almost doesn't feel like an advert, as throughout its not focusing on a product as such but rather the idea/campaign behind it. Always as a brand is known for its activist campaign in aid, empowering and self-confidence, as stated on their website 'Always empowers women to live life without limits through trusted feminine hygiene products and education.', so knowing this, thats what we're likely to see in the advert- gender stereotypes have a big impact on girls during puberty, as this is the time when they learn what it means to be a girl, and young womanhood comes to be defined by a set of rules, like beauty and submissiveness.(3) In a studio setting, high key lighting, they ask young women and men, boys and girls, what does it mean to do something 'like a girl' and their answers show the different views of the older girls and man compared to the young girls and how much society affects their views when growing up on what being a girl means. The mode of address is informal and direct, as the participants are looking directly at the camera as almost speaking to the audience/ viewer on the other side of the screen, the editing being very minimal, to focus the attention on the participants and their answers, while the music is motivating and in the background 'quietly' tying the video all together. The advert is actually breaking the assigned codes and convention of what 'being like a girl' has become to society, also translating as 'being weaker'. The advert however was a huge success, targeting females all over the world of all ages and backgrounds- #LikeAGirl was watched more than 90m times and was the number two viral video globally. It also drove unprecedented earned-media coverage. There was also a rise in purchases as a result of the campaign. Many celebrities like Gloria Steinem and George Takei, joined Always in its mission to change the meaning of the expression ‘like a girl’, turning it into a symbol of female empowerment all over the world.
The "Like a Girl" campaign from Leo Burnett won the 2015 Emmy Award for outstanding commercial.(4)



(1) https://brandfinance.com/news/press-releases/disney-sparkles-as-most-valuable-media-brand-of-the-year/#:~:text=With%20a%20brand%20value%20of,brand%20value%20decrease%20since%202017.&text=As%20a%20well%2Dloved%20entertainment,memories%20amongst%20its%20customer%20base.
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoPro#:~:text=GoPro%2C%20Inc.%20(marketed%20as,apps%20and%20video%2Dediting%20software.
(3)https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/case-study-always-likeagirl/1366870

(4)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_(brand)

Bins and storing footage

Throughout the year i made sure to store all my files on my portable SSD, in separate folders organised by units so they’re easier to find and access.

That’s an example of how I would organises each unit, with separate folders for different footage for example found footage for an advert and camera footage which would be easier to import to Premier pro as a folder with footage ready to edit. I would also keep any editing prompts/ music in a separate folder ready to use as well as also having the final product for each unit- either a short film or an essay.

New Wave french films research

Jules et jim 

‘Jules and Jim" is really Catherine's film. This is Jeanne Moreau's first great performance, all the greater because of the art with which she presents Catherine's discontent. A lesser actress might have made Catherine mad or hysterical, but although madness and hysteria are uncoiling beneath the surface, Catherine depends mostly on unpredictability -- on a fundamental unwillingness to behave as expected. She shocks her friends as a way of testing them.’  

Truffaut: "I begin a film believing it will be amusing -- and along the way I notice that only sadness can save it." 

directed by François Truffaut based on Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship with writer Franz Hessel and his wife, Helen Grund. One of the seminal products of the French New Wave, Jules and Jim is an inventive encyclopedia of the language of cinema that incorporates newsreel footage, photographic stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, masking, dolly shots, and voiceover narration (by Michel Subor). Truffaut's cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator with Jean-Luc Godard, who employed the latest lightweight cameras to create an extremely fluid film style. For example, some of the postwar scenes were shot using cameras mounted on bicycles. 

A Bout de souffle 

A Bout de Souffle (1960) starring Jean Belmondo and Jean Seberg is Godard’s first feature film and considered to be the most influential/most defining film to come out of the Nouvelle Vague. Many of the French New Wave directors were inspired by Hollywood mainstream cinema directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles and this was something that Godard certainly adopted for A Bout de Souffle; his own take on the classic film noir. 

The opening of A Bout de Souffle is composed of an extreme close-up of a man reading a newspaper “wearing a baggy, crumpled suit with hat cocked and fag in mouth, Michel Poiccard seems almost American”. 

Le Mepris 

The movie is adapted from Alberto Moravia’s 1954 novel of the same name. Jack Palance plays Prokosch, an American producer who hires Paul (Michel Piccoli) to write a screen adaptation of The Odyssey. Paul is pressured to commercialise the project, taking away from the purely artistic values envisioned by the director (Fritz Lang, playing himself). This brings troubles to his relationship with his wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot). It’s a self-referential movie, a film whose deconstructive gaze is turned on itself, especially on the mechanics of sexual allure (Bardots speech).  Contempt was the film that Bardot used to return back to screen as she had previously taken a break from acting to escape the medias attention. As we can see in the film Goddard exploits her looks, finding multiple opportunities for her to bathe or lie ariund naked he also takes the advanatge and draws out a theme of sexual objectification in the process . The most obvious example being at the start of the film in Bardot’s first appearance. She lies, again, nude on the bed, while talking to her onscreen husband- she asks him about various parts of her of her body, verbalising the fetishistic, cataloguing of body parts that the camera performs as it glides, in an unbroken take, up then down her back.  The scene was added as Joseph e. levine insisted on a certain amount of Bardot nude scenes. Goddards response was a scene that resists easy eroticisation: instead of allowing the viewer unalloyed voyeuristic pleasure, Bardot’s commentary on her own attributes reminds us that she knows she’s being looked over, and that our inspecting gaze is not innocent, invisible or unnoticed. This sequence is a good example of Godard allowing form to speak over, or through the content: The colour filter on the shot begins red, changes to white, then turns blue. There is nothing in the scene to suggest that it needs a tricolour imposed upon it, and the lights are not changing in Paul and Camille’s bedroom; that’s the artistic stamp that Goddard lives.  

Bibliography  
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-jules-and-jim-1961 

http://www.newwavefilm.com/french-new-wave-encyclopedia/breathless.shtml 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/dec/31/le-mepris-contempt-review-jean-luc-godard 

Freud's theory (id ego and superego)+ apply

According to Freud's model of the psyche, the id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories, the super-ego operates as a moral conscience, and the ego is the realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.

According to Sigmund Freud, human personality is complex and has more than a single component. In his famous psychoanalytic theory of personality, personality is composed of three elements. These three elements of personality—known as the id, the ego, and the superego—work together to create complex human behaviors.

Each component not only adds its own unique contribution to personality, but all three elements interact in ways that have a powerful influence on each individual. Each of these three elements of personality emerges at different points in life.

A film that shows the concept of the id, the ego and the superego can be seen in the film The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, between the fish being the superego, the cat being the id and the children Conrad and Sally are the ego. this can be seen clearly in the scene where the fish talks for the first time and lectures the children on how they shouldnt listen to the cat and follow the rules instead “He should not be here, ” said the fish in the pot. “he should not be here when your mother is not.”

Bibliography
https://www.simplypsychology.org/psyche.html

https://www.verywellmind.com/the-id-ego-and-superego-2795951

video/essay notes - French New wave

stamp letters- NOUVELLE VAGUE

professing the life experiences and philosophies of the director 

'Photography is truth, and cinema is truth 24 times a second' -the small solder Goddard

capture French life during the 50s and 60s through cinema 

'I liked cinema as it was, but felt it lacked sincerity. I just wanted to improve it'

they 'added' to the rules of cinema /breaking uo with the past

jump cut is both spacial and temporal- shows the difference in both space and time between two shots  (match two shots/ mismatch two shots)

mismaching two shots were avoided prior to the new wave, editing purpose was to maintain continuity and keep things flowing -the editing shouldn't be noticed 

inspiring the new wave of the 60s and 70s

Contextual Studies New Wave cinema- Nouvelle Vague research

The new wave was all about representing the spirit of the era, creating a new style of filmmaking (had to make the audience aware they are watching a film)

The French New Wave of the late 1950s, one of the key movements of post-war European filmmaking, forever altered long-established notions of cinema style, themes, narrative and audience. The New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague) showed the vibrant realism of Paris’ streets and its inhabitants at a time when many Hollywood films were still formulaic and studiobound. A Hollywood film of the time would more than likely have included a linear narrative and uncomplicated shots and edits (such as a typical shot-reverse-shot); a film from the New Wave, however, would astonish you with extended shots, handheld footage, naturalistic performances, on-location shooting, whip-pans, socio-political commentary and ambiguous or unresolved endings. Today, its impact can still be felt in the work of many contemporary directors including Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci and Quentin Tarantino.


The French New Wave was born out of the dissatisfaction that many young filmmakers and critics felt towards the existing, outmoded, French cinema of the time. While cinema was the most popular entertainment option in France in the 1950s (it was, after all, not long after the war and television had yet to fully impact upon society there), serious art critics found the films on offer to be unchallenging, stolid and without vision. Critics of the existing order, including Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, believed an auteur cinema, in which the director’s vision was paramount and personal, should be developed. They wanted to make films in which social and political issues could be explored – films that felt ‘raw’ and new. Taking matters into their own hands (and a dash of inspiration from the Italian Neo-Realist movement), Truffaut, Godard and several others set about changing cinema forever. The New Wave was born.

Jump Cuts- show the difference of space and time between two shots (to match or to mismatch 2 shots)
Camera-stylo (personalising films)
"Golden rule of show dont tell"
capturing a 'fly on the wall' feel
breaking the forth wall
push the boundaris of story telling
ahead of their time
'look at what works in your medium and think how could it be done differently'
'all you need to make a great film is a vision'
heavy on stylistic experimentation

'reality was the world as it presented itself to consciousness, and the film-maker as perceiving consciousness was responsible for mastering the flow of this perceived reality and shaping it to make its truth visible.' Andre bazin's nomenology (the Cahiers group)


'The French New Wave was a group of trailblazing directors who exploded onto the film scene in the late 1950s; revolutionising cinematic conventions by marrying the rapid cuts of Hollywood with philosophical trends.'

look at- the umbrellas from cherbrough

Bibliography 

'In France the great commercial success of 28–year-old Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu . . . créa la femme(And God Created Woman, 1956)' p.214 Cinemas of the World'

French New Wave, The pocket essential

Making Waves New cinema of the 1960s

https://theculturetrip.com/europe/france/articles/the-french-new-wave-revolutionising-cinema/

http://www.newwavefilm.com/new-wave-cinema-guide/nouvelle-vague-where-to-start.shtml

http://www.filmeducation.org/pdf/resources/secondary/FrenchNouvelleVague.pdf

Bibliography

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R7R0JHvvgo (entry task)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatbed_editor (entry task)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moviola (entry task)

https://indiefilmhustle.com/french-new-wave/  (unit 1)

http://www.newwavefilm.com/new-wave-cinema-guide/nouvelle-vague-where-to-start.shtml (unit1)

Camera settings

Shutter Speed
simply refers to the amount of time that the camera's shutter is open. The longer the shutter is open, the more light that passes through to the camera's sensor. Conversely, the shorter the shutter is open, the less light that's able to pass through.

• measured in seconds 
• to freeze movement in an image you'll need faster speed/ to let the movement blur you'll need a slower Shutter Speed.

ISO

How sensitive a film is to light
A camera setting that will brighten or darken a photo. As you increase your ISO number, your photos will grow progressively brighter. For that reason, ISO can help you capture images in darker environments, or be more flexible about your aperture and shutter speed settings.

However, raising your ISO has consequences. A photo taken at too high of an ISO will show a lot of grain, also known as noise, and might not be usable. So, brightening a photo via ISO is always a trade-off. You should only raise your ISO when you are unable to brighten the photo via shutter speed or aperture instead (for example, if using a longer shutter speed would cause your subject to be blurry).

• the lower the number, the lower the sensitivity and the finer the grain in the shots/ higher numbers mean your sensor becomes more sensitive to light (use in dark)

Aperture
Can be defined as the opening in a lens through which light passes to enter the camera. It is expressed in f-numbers like f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8 and so on to express the size of the lens opening, which can be controlled through the lens or the camera

• the opening in the lens
• the larger the hole the more light gets in- the smaller the hole the less light
• measured in 'f-stops'

Frame rate

• the number of individual frames that comprise/make each second of video (how many frames per second)/ the simple act of measuring how many video frames the surveillance camera captures per second of video. 30 fps means the camera captured 30 frames in a single second of video; the higher the frames, the smoother the video will be. Frame rate also has an impact on the size of your video files. A higher frame rate of 60 fps results in more frames, so the video file will be larger and heavier for the device.

https://www.photographytalk.com/beginner-photography-tips/shutter-speed-explained

https://photographylife.com/what-is-iso-in-photography

https://www.videosurveillance.com/tech/frame-rate.asp