Tuesday, 7 September 2021

Heaven by Emeli Sande

 Narrative: 

The music video follows around various people going about their daily lives, for example, there was a woman in a red dress going down some stairs, a man in a blue jacket sat in a doorway, an old man with a white beard and a girl in a taxi.

Shot type: long
Shot type: wide

 Shot type: medium

Stranger Things

Stranger Things is a Netflix original series based in Hawkins, Indiana, in 1983. 

Season 1 episode 1 starts with a laboratory in the middle of the woods and a man in a lab coat running down a hallway. He is pushing the buttons to get the lift to come to him and as it arrives something growls and we never see him again.

After that, we are introduced to some of the main characters: Michael, Will, Lucas and Dustin. They are sat in Michael's basement, playing a fantasy RPG and Michael's mother comes to tell them that they need to go home. Will and Dustin go biking home, deciding to race. Will pulls away and finds himself in the woods near the lab. He hears something and runs home, but is soon taken the mysterious thing.

A young girl with shaved hair, wearing a hospital gown, is introduced after she wanders into a diner. She has a tattoo of the number 11 on her arm which she claims is her name. She stops a fan from spinning using her mind and appears to be a lab experiment. The scene changes to the boys deciding to search for Will since the police were unsuccessful in finding him. They then stumble upon Eleven in the woods, who says she can hear Will breathing. The scene changes again to Will's mother Joyce on the phone to a static line with growling. The phone surges with electricity and Joyce is burnt and the episode finishes. 

Stranger Things was originally called Montauk as it was based there, however, the writers decided it would be too hard to film in winter. The Montauk Projects inspired the writers to write Stranger Things. Before being picked up by Netflix it was rejected 15 times by different networks. 906 boys and 307 girls auditioned and Stephen King was the one who found Millie Bobby Brown.

Netflix is currently the streaming service with the largest subscriber count, however 41% don't pay for their account due to account sharing. It was founded in 1997 and launched in 1998 and was the first streaming service to be available as an app on multiple devices. As of April 2020 Netflix is worth $162 million.

Setting: the boys in the basement of Michael's house
Costume: various dark coloured clothing
Shot type: wide
Setting: a house or a hotel
Costume: blue work jacket, yellow phone on the wall
Shot type: medium close-up
Setting: kitchen of a diner
Costume: hospital gown 
Shot type: wide

Monday, 6 September 2021

First Photography Shoot

 


 Closeup on the thistles.

Wide shot of a castle near Beeston Castle.
Extreme wide shot of the countryside surrounding Beeston Castle.
Medium close-up of a rhinoceros. 
Medium close-up of a bovine animal.
Full shot of a chimpanzee.
Focused on flowers in front of lion.
Close-up on lioness.
Full shot on Sheffield Steelers player Ben O'Connor.
Full shot of Sheffield Steelers player Anthony DeLuca.
Deep focus on Sheffield Steelers player Alex Graham.

Friday, 3 September 2021

The Guardian

 

Launched in 1821 by John Edward Taylor, The Guardian (then The Manchester Guardian) is known for being one of the oldest running Sunday papers and its emotionally loaded headlines. The paper caters towards an educated, left-leaning, middle class 18+ audience, with 72% of readers identifying as liberal, in contrast to the 20% mixed and 9% conservative readers. They have always stated that they are left-wing and that they favour the left, but are generally factual. The Guardian was created during a time of worker movements and anti-corn campaigns. It has two sister papers, The Observer and The Guardian Weekly. The Guardian reinvests into journalism instead of distributing profits to owners and shareholders. 

Founder John Edward Taylor (11th September 1791 - 6th January 1844) was an editor, publisher and business tycoon. He was an apprentice under a cotton manufacturer and soon became a successful merchant. The Manchester Guardian was found using profit from trading slave grown plantation cotton. Upon Taylor's death, his nephew Charles Prestwich Scott (who was the first editor of the paper) fought to buy the paper, eventually succeeding in 1907. He was a liberal member of parliament and continued editing until 1929. 


The Manchester Guardian was a strong opposer of slavery and supported free trade. In 1860, The Observer quoted a report that the recently elected Abraham Lincoln was opposed to the abolition of slavery; however, shortly after the start of the American Civil War, they argued that the North imposed a burdensome trade monopoly on the South, claiming that if the South was freed to have trade with Europe, slavery would eventually cease. The American Civil War brought division between political parties in England. The Manchester Guardian were also split, as they had supported other independence movements, yet felt like they should support the rights of the Confederacy to self-determination. 

They criticised President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation for not freeing all American slaves and on October 10th 1862, they wrote "It is impossible to cast any reflections upon a man so evidently sincere and well-intentioned as Mr Lincoln but it is also impossible to not feel that it was an evil day for both America and the world, when he was chosen President of the United States". The newspaper reported the assassination of Lincoln in 1865. 

During the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, the paper earned a national reputation and respect of the left. George Orwell wrote in the 1938 Homage to Catalonia "Of our larger newspapers, the Manchester Guardian is the only one that leaves me with an increased respect for its honesty". Alongside the pro-liberal News Chronicles, labour supporting Daily Herald, communist party's Daily Worker and many other Sunday and weekly papers, it supported the Republican Government against General Francisco Franco's insurgent nationalists. On August 24th, 1959, the Manchester Guardian changed its name to The Guardian, reflecting the national and international issues published in the paper. It began publication in London in September 1961. 

One of the main scoops published by the newspaper was the 2011 international phone-hacking scandal, in particular the hacking of murdered teen Milly Dowler's phone. Another was the 2016 investigation into the Panama Papers, exposing then Prime Minister David Cameron's links to off-shore banking. They have won newspaper of the year four times, the last being in 2014, for reporting on government surveillance.

References:

The Daily Mail


The Daily Mail was established in 1896 by Harold and Alfred Harmsworth and Kennedy Jones. It is a middle-market newspaper in the form of a tabloid, and in 2020 it became the United Kingdom's highest-circulating daily newspaper, overtaking The Sun. Alfred Harmsworth died in 1922.

In 1910, Harold Harmsworth was made Baron Rothermere of Hemsted in the County of Kent. He served as President of the Air Council during World War One, and was made Viscount Rothermere of Hemsted in the County of Kent in 1919. In 1921 he founded the Anti-Waste League to combat excessive government spending (his own views). Harmsworth (known henceforth as Rothermere) used his newspapers to try and influence British politics during the 1930s, reflecting his support of the appeasement of Nazi Germany. He is considered "perhaps the most influential single propagandist for fascism between the wars" by historian Martin Pugh. Rothermere visited and spoke to Hitler on multiple occasions - including after the 1930 elections. Rothermere was granted an exclusive interview by Hitler, as thanks for foreign support. Rothermere hoped that "Adolf the Great" would become popular in Britain.



Many secret MI5 papers relating to the war were declassified and released in 2005. These show that Rothermere wrote to Adolf Hitler in 1939, the year before his death, about the annexation of Czechoslovakia and encouraging him to invade Romania. He also described Hitler's work as "great and superhuman".



The Daily Mail are known supporters of the Conservative Party and are a pro-Brexit tabloid. They have been criticised by the founder of Wikipedia for publishing fake news. They're also known for click-bait and are actually banned by Wikipedia as an "unreliable" source. Most of their stories favour the right, but they will report either side if the story is astonishing enough. In 2019, it was reported that the Daily Mail were the most unreliable paper for a third year. 94% of 799 users on Trustpilot rated the Daily Mail as bad, while only 3% rated it as excellent.

References: 

Final Issue 2 (front cover and contents)