Report

Teacher's pet is thriller drama targeted at a teen audience and set in the 21st century school. With themes of Good vs Evil, manipulation and the misuse of influence. Its about a 17 year old boy called Ben Miller who is facing trauma from an incident where he's manipulative primary school teacher made his class commit suicide, now his primary school teacher is back to do at his six form to do a similar thing meaning Ben miller has to stop him before he destroys his school. In my script I choose a scene that shows the characteristics and situation of the two main characters, Ben Miller and the teacher, the script shows how Ben miller is bullied, brave, clever and has a habit of talking to himself and is also shows the teacher's charm, superior intellect and manipulative skills. Then the film poster and the DVD cover will be the same image on the front cover dark, depressing and serious. The typography of the title will be bold. This will suit the genre of the film and also highlight the tone of the film.

In the production of Teachers pet I will consider the target audience and genre of the movie to make the movie as captivating as possible. Firstly due to it being a thriller to a teen audience the movie especially the cast and mise-en scene has to be as realistic and relatable as possible for a teen audience. So showing its set in a school with cast of teenagers of young adults would be relatable for a teen audience. Because of the teacher is the main antagonist is a teacher its also a antagonist an audience of teenagers can relate to.

For my research I choose these 3 movies: 'Gone girl', 'The guest', 'Mr brooks'. First of all I choose all these movies due to the fact that they are thrillers and could give me better insight into the conventions of a thriller, which are they are always about ordinary people in extra ordinary situation. Secondly I choose those three movies specifically because they all involved a smart, cold and calculating psychopath of an antagonist or antihero, which is very similar to the teacher in my story. These thrillers start of in a state of equilibrium but always descend into a dark and serious tone. Most thrillers often involve murder or some sort of crime. They always display ordinary characters usually in a normal settings (city, a suburban area or a household) involved extraordinary situations.

For my preproduction, I wrote a script which was 8 pages with 5 scenes from the Teacher's pet. I used a similar formats that I saw when I read scripts such as Gone girl and pulp fiction. Which said the location and time of day at the start of the scene.

I also did a poster of Teachers pet and used posters such as Shutter Island and Mr Brooks for ideas of the conventions of a thriller poster. I saw that most thriller posters for example these two have a central image and often use red technical codes to connote to danger. I had a hugh amount of trouble using photo shop to create this poster however I had got around that issue by getting a lot of assistance and expert help around my college.

I wanted to go for a combination of the style from my two exemplars for my poster. Just like the two posters I used as a template, I have a central image of my main protagonist, Ben miller. This will convey to the audience he's an important character in the story. The picture I used is of him in his room in squatted in the fetal position, which highlights the character's sadness, fear and state of trauma. In the back ground there is a picture of a noose on a child's neck which connotes to how the teacher manipulated the children into committing suicide. The use of dark colours on the poster adds an ominous feel and highlights that the tone is dark and sinister. The use of red was to stick to the conventions of thriller posters but in particular I used it for the phrase "The teacher's" was to show the teacher as being dangerous and highlight he's sinister and I used a formal font for the word due to teacher being formal profession; to add my own twist to my poster I used a font called snake skin/ snake jacket for the word "PETS" because the snake print connotes to pet, also the font colour is a colour that is similar to the colour of fur which is also connotation to pets. I  included star rating that suggests the quality of the film and made them bright red in so they can stand out and be visible, because that will attract audiences to watch the film. The tagline 'not just "another brick in the wall"' refers to the Pink Floyd song called another brick in the wall, about how teachers are ruining children and teachers should leave kids alone.

I used film 4 as a production company for this because I felt that they were an appropriate film producer since they produce a lot British and american movies that a thrillers
On my poster the strength of my poster is that I have kept to all the conventions of a thriller poster by including the age rating, production company logo, tag line, title, credit blocks, red and dark technical codes. The weakness could be that the poster is too dark so you can hardly make out the back ground with the noose on the child's neck.

For my DVD cover I used the same image from my poster on the front cover because it makes that picture more recognizable since the audience will be used to that picture from the poster. I kept my poster and my DVD cover similar using a lot dark colour codes. For my DVD cover I got inspiration from Mr Brooks and V for Vendetta. My biggest problem was getting the DVD cover to be the right dimension to fit the DVD case. After days and days of trying different things and asking for alot of help, I ended up having to flatten the layers on photo shop and making it bigger and smaller until I got the right size.

 
My front image of the DVD is similar to the image on the poster, difference being the added DVD logo, the 12 rating and the production company. Designing the back was the most tasking part of of the DVD. For the back ground I kept it dark because it suits the ominous tone of the DVD.  I added an old looking image of kids from the Ben millers primary school lining up. I added a picture of a scene from the movie with two characters from the movie Ben and Jake next to the bright yellow blurb so its readable and visible. The weaknesses to the DVD is that the back could look more professional by adding a longer blurb and better pictures.

Overall my final pieces were produced to similar quality as a professional thriller movie print based  text because I thought that the layout of the poster highlights the feel and tone of the movie. The weaknesses of the DVD is I could have filt

Weekly news

Watchdog bans Church of Scientology TV ad for misleading viewers

A TV ad aired by the Church of Scientology has been banned by the advertising watchdog for misleading viewers with a claim it gives aid to tens of millions of people.

The TV ad stated that the church works with “volunteers from many faiths” to help people, including “giving aid to 24 million in times of need”.

The commercial featured two Scientology volunteers carrying a person on a stretcher and another volunteer with a stethoscope holding a baby. TheAdvertising Standards Authority received a complaint about the TV ad challenging whether the claim about the number of people it helps was misleading and could be substantiated.

The church said that the 24 million figure was based on the total number of individuals helped by volunteer ministers between 1998, when records started being kept, and 2014.

It added that the priority at a disaster site was to provide direct aid, in forms such as medical assistance, rescuing victims and providing food, water and shelter. However, when the ASA asked for evidence of the aid given at various disaster sites it was only “anecdotal”.

The UK ad watchdog also raised concerns about how the data on the number of individuals who had been given aid had been calculated. It was also unclear as to what counted as “giving aid”.

“It was also unclear whether the church had included the total number of people in a community in cases where general community work had been carried out and, if that was the case, we had concerns about whether that was an accurate method of calculating the number of people given aid,” said the ASA. “Furthermore, we had concerns that there appeared to be no checks in place to ensure that individuals who were given aid were not counted more than once towards the overall figure.”

By Mark Sweney

Weekly news

Global sea levels rising faster due to global warming

Sea levels are rising several times faster than in the past 2,800 years and are accelerating because of man-made global warming, according to new studies.

An international team of scientists dug into two dozen locations across the globe to chart gently rising and falling seas over centuries and millennia. Until the 1880s and the world's industrialisation, the fastest rise in sea levels was about 3cm to 4cm a century, plus or minus a bit.

During that time the global sea level really did not get much higher or lower than 7.62cm above or below the 2,000-year average. But in the 20th century the world's seas rose 14cm.

Since 1993 the rate has soared to 30cm and two different studies, published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said that by 2100 the world's oceans would rise between 28 and 131cm, depending on how much heat-trapping gas Earth's industries and vehicles expel.

"There's no question that the 20th century is the fastest," said Bob Kopp, Rutgers earth and planetary sciences professor and the lead author of the study that looked back at sea levels over the past three millennia.

"It's because of the temperature increase in the 20th century, which has been driven by fossil fuel use."

If seas continue to rise as projected, another 45cm of sea-level rise will cause lots of problems and expense, especially with surge during storms, said study co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

The link to temperature is basic science, the study's authors say. Warm water expands. Cold water contracts. The scientists pointed to specific past eras when temperatures and sea rose and fell together.

Both studies project increases of about 57 to 131cm if greenhouse gas pollution continues at the current rate. If countries fulfill the treaty agreed last year in Paris and limit further warming to another two degrees Fahrenheit, the rise in sea levels would be in the 28cm to 56cm range.

23 Feb 2016 06:39 GMT

Coruse work report

In media we have been creating our very own media text in order to convey our understanding of the media word and how they construct a media text. We were instructed to create a thriller directed mainly at a young adult or teenage audience. Our work was set into sections preproduction and production.
In my preproduction I produced a script of a section of my film called Teacher's Pet. It is about a teacher that purposefully uses psychology and mind tricks to manipulate his student and drive to commit suicide. I felt this would appeal to the a teenage audience because the movie involves teenagers in school which is something teenagers can relate to. I watched several thrillers in order to get examples such as Gone Girl (2014) by David Fincher and Short term 12 (2013) by Destin Daniel Cretton.
Gone girl is a popular thriller which gave me ideas about what the conventions of thrillers are and what makes a thriller, a thriller which is it has to be about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Then I adopted that into my film because its about school kids with a really evil teacher. Thrillers often have a lot of dark undertones and murder, which my film has due to its themes of murder and manipulation. Short term 12 wasn't a thriller but it showed me how to appeal to a teenage young adult audience. Firstly the movie must be relatable so I made it about teenagers in school.  I scripted the several scenes from my film using the script format of a movie which I got from reading Gone Girls screen play.
For my production I worked individually to create a poster and DVD cover for my movie Teacher's Pet using photo shop. I heard this was the best way to do it however I had no skills using the program and struggled immensely to grasp the difficult to understands operation of separating things from the layers to make a new layer, in fact I knew nothing about photo shop however I tackled the issue by requesting assistance from a team of photo shop experts in my vicinity. They helped me comprehend and figure out how to use photo shop for myself with lessons on creating new layers and not locking them and how I can decipher a even the most heinous of problems  by clicking the step backward button and eventually with a lot of practice and patience I understood photo shop.

weekly news

Why does contemporary art look so simple? You asked Google – here’s the answer

by Jonathan Jones

Why do the lights keep going on and off? How is less more? What place does a balloon dog have in an art gallery? Or, as a lot of people have been asking Google: “Why does contemporary art look so simple?”

I am tempted to answer – because it’s idiotic. But first, we need to define what contemporary art means in this question.

Plenty of today’s art does not look simple at all. On the contrary it looks complex, and rewards the beholder accordingly. There is nothing simple about the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, saturated with troubling imagery and made with forbidding layers of ash, wood, straw and pigment. Nor is there anything simplistic about Tacita Dean’s eerie photographic panoramas of landscape and memory, or Cy Twombly’s sensual scrawled epics, tremulous with poetic erudition. Does it look “simple” to quote Cavafy and Catullus as much as Twombly’s paintings do?

Yet we all understand what kind of art the question is about. When artists such asDamien Hirst were taking the Turner prize by storm in the 1990s I used to hear old-timers moan about the triumph of the “one liner”. The essence of contemporary art has come to be seen as a smart, precise, quickly absorbed conceptual masterstroke. An empty room, with some sound art echoing in it.

Art reflects its times. We live in an age of constant visual and conceptual barrage by adverts, TV shows, and pictures that go viral on Twitter. Seriously, what kind of art do you expect the information age to produce? We want information we can quickly decode and respond to and share. As long ago as the 1960s artists were pioneering the reductive aesthetics appropriate to our time. Andy Warhol turned soup cans into portraits and news photographs of celebrities into portraits. The Minimalists created an almost religious cult of unaltered industrial materials. Conceptual art, invented in the late 1960s, denied that a work of art needed to take any unique physical form.

By the 1980s, on the eve of the internet, artists such as Jeff Koons and Barbara Kruger were insolently fusing these avant garde notions with the blunt rhetoric of advertising. Why shouldn’t art be as grabby as a good advert, Koons asks, in his early works, which directly “appropriate” adverts. Richard Prince borrowed the Marlboro Man with the same utter simplicity. Then a new generation led by Damien Hirst freed this bold, shameless style of conceptual wit from its advertising roots to make “big” statements about biology, time and death.

To complain about Warhol, Koons and Hirst is in many ways to shoot the messenger. They are simple in a way that addresses the speed and distraction of contemporary life. The apparent simplicity of contemporary art has become the secret of its success. You can grasp this art so quickly – from a spiralling slide in Tate Modern to an Antony Gormley statue, the instant impact of so much of today’s best known art means that busy people can enjoy it easily, not as boring old high culture but as entertainment. It takes hours to watch a ballet or a play and even more hours to read a book. It can take just minutes to appreciate the most acclaimed art of our time.

That may seem a condemnation. Yet it gives contemporary visual art (not that it’s always visual any more) an edge over all other elite art forms.

A novelist like Jonathan Franzen may spend hundreds of pages trying to describe the reality of our time, but a work of art can express that reality in its own nature, because the triumph of simple bold conceptual art is one of the phenomena that define our age.

So, one answer to the question “Why does contemporary art look so simple?” is that by being throwaway and ephemeral and as blunt as an advert it sums up the time we live in. Deal with it. That’s your reflection in the balloon dog. By embodying the crassness of this era of spectacle, what we think of as “contemporary art” has turned itself from a minority interest into popular culture.

Why does contemporary art look simple? Why did rock replace jazz?

Yet the question reflects an anxiety – and that anxiety has to gnaw at anyone who really cares about today’s art. The simplification of art that began in the 1960s, reached truly reductive levels in the 1980s and 90s and is part of the fabric of today, has made a lot of people rich – because the other great thing about simplicity is that it sells. Collectors seem to like stuff they don’t have to think about too much. It creates that unique Tate Modern vibe that always leaves me wanting to go next door and buy some tickets for Shakespeare’s Globe. It is a picture of the way we live now, but it is an ugly, depressing picture.

Does art really have to imitate the lowest attention span horrors of modern life to be contemporary? Of course not. I’ve already mentioned some artists who are complex and serious and not in the least bit simple. The truth is that artists themselves are sick of the simple art of the Hirst era. Galleries are full of art that wants to be complex. Unfortunately, a lot of it ends up being boring and impenetrable instead. There are Godard-like “masterpieces” of turgid video art galore, terrible epics of performance art and desperate attempts to make art more “serious” by turning it into gardening, say, or community architecture.

Indeed, contemporary art is in danger of losing the “simplicity” that made it popular – without regaining the depth that might make it truly matter. That is why we live in such a strange time for art and why its future seems to be stalling.Art stripped itself of so many enriching things and reduced itself to such a stark mirror of this age that now it struggles to find a more intellectually and emotionally rewarding vocabulary again. There are formidable exceptions. Great art is still being made. It will be made in the future. But yes, the answer to the question is that a lot of contemporary art looks simple because it is idiotically one-dimensional, poetically bankrupt and perceptually banal.

Weekly news

David Cameron needs to look beyond the veil 

 Remona Aly

For a man with an in-tray that never empties, David Cameron has strange priorities. This week, with the world economy shaking perilously and the EU campaign under way in earnest, his preoccupation was the claim that too few Muslim women speak English. Then he turned to the veil. If any public authorities put in place “proper and sensible” rules to ban women from wearing face veils, he would back them, he said. We must have done something to merit so much of his attention.

I wear a headscarf. I know women who wear face veils. Each time we are put in the spotlight in this way, the reaction is the same: here we go again. For we have seen veil or niqab debate thrown into the political ring on numerous occasions. Many have spoken out against a ban, saying it would be contrary to British values; others support one, citing the very same reason. These discussions never provide much by way of clarity. But they always mean trouble.

Each time the issue ignites a media furore, and Muslim women who wear the veil are exposed to more hostility in a climate where those in niqab and hijab are already under threat: 60% of the victims of anti-Muslim attacks are women.

When I started wearing a headscarf, I did so for personal and religious convictions. Now, whenever there is a media backlash driven by a political agenda, I feel frustrated that we can’t move beyond the broken record that is the veil debate. For the women who wear face veils, that frustration runs deeper; it’s a struggle not to feel like an outsider in your own country and it’s infuriating to be told to integrate at the same time.

Cameron would never go down the French route, he said. “I think in our country people should be free to wear what they like, within limits live how they like, and all the rest of it.” But that was not how his comments were received. I have some advice for him. Targeting a politically beleaguered minority of women who wear a face veil will not improve their fortunes or his own. The first thing he might do, for example, is try to base any future comments he might make on a reliably factual basis. Cameron referred to government reports that set the number of Muslim women who speak little or no English at 22%. The Muslim Council of Britain suggests the number of Muslims who struggle with English is just 6%.

Cameron is right that the acquisition of basic English skills should be encouraged. But the idea that the lack of them somehow fuels radicalisation and, down the line, terrorism is misplaced to say the least. It is, moreover, a reach to say that bad parenting leads to radicalisation – though an inability to speak English is not in itself a sign of bad parenting. As the clearly exasperated Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi pointed out, citing her own family, many Muslim mothers whose English might not pass the Cameron test have nevertheless raised children who have contributed significantly to British society at all levels.

Not speaking English doesn’t automatically mean a communication breakdown between mother and child, as parents, regardless of race and religion, don’t always know what their children are up to. And mothers without good English can still talk to their children.

I don’t want to be negative. Whatever his motives, Cameron’s spotlight on misogyny – a social ill throughout society – may have practical benefits, particularly if it challenges the entrenched patriarchy that undermines women’s rights and forms some of the so-called sharia councils - a fight that Muslim women have been leading for years. It is also laudable that Cameron wants to prevent female genital mutilation and forced marriage. But it’s a huge error to pin these unacceptable crimes on “segregation”. There is a texture that he needs to understand, complexities beyond the stereotypical notion of men controlling wives, sisters and daughters.

If he genuinely wants to help deprived sections of society, he should look at disenfranchisement and poverty at a broader level. Addressing educational disadvantage, tackling inequality, funding community projects, creating opportunities for the vulnerable from all backgrounds – these are some of the things that, combined with solid leadership, can really foster stronger, more confident communities. But by his own admission, the government cut £45m from budgets for teaching English.

Cameron says he wants “every young boy and girl growing up here to feel proud of our country and properly connected to it”. So do I. But the best way to nurture that would be to construct effective, alternative narratives that empower all women and strengthen society, rather than engaging in naive attempts to police a single group, in the unforgiving glare of the media. By speaking less and speaking more wisely, he could bring us closer to the Britain we all want.