2.1 – Review

Tuesday, 12th April– Today, we started the work leading up to our FMP (Final Major Project). We had to create collages from images/words in magazines, newspapers and the Internet that represented us as people; what our interests are, significant aspects of our lives etc. In mine, I included mainly things about music, films/filmmaking and where I grew up/where I live now. I thought these were definitely things that showed who I am as a person and gave information about my background.

Today we also started a second task- in groups, we were given the task to go out and interview each other talking about ourselves and the others in the group. I enjoyed this task, it was enjoyable and fun to do.

Wednesday, 13th April– Today my group went out to re-film some shots as the ones we got yesterday weren’t exactly what we wanted (also the audio wasn’t very good as there was a lot of wind noise in the background). We managed to get the filming done quickly as we knew we needed to get back to class and edit it.

 

Monday, 18th April

Task 1 – Research plan

Primary research

 

I created this small mind map which shows my main interests. By doing this, I can begin to finalise ideas for my Final Major Project by narrowing down ideas of what to base my video on. So far I have included my interests in media (films, TV, YouTube), animals, music (playing music, listening to music and going to gigs) and friends/family.

I would say that all my interests are global. My interests in music, animals and media are particularly global as I’m interested in all of these particular things from all around the world, especially animals as a lot of the most exciting and rare animals are from other countries. I enjoy listening to foreign music as well as I like to listen to a variety of different artists/bands from everywhere, and the same applies for my interests in the general media. As for family/friends matters, I’d have to say my interests are local as my family all live in roughly the same area as me.

Reflective writing

Today we began on our research planning for the FMP, which I think went well. I’m glad to have a slightly clearer idea on how to carry out my research now. I like the idea of carrying out focus groups as primary research to gather opinions from my peers, but I also like the idea of using the Internet for any secondary research I will need.

 

Tuesday, 19th April

Today we began our research on our topics of interest.

Music

I created a survey on a particular topic of interest from the previous session. The survey revolved around music, and these were the questions:

* 1. What is your favourite genre of music?

* 2. Do you prefer older music or newer music?

* 3. Do you prefer mainstream music or “indie” music?

* 4. Do you think the quality of music has declined over the past 20 years?

* 5. Who is your favourite artist or band?

 

I’ve heard many people state that they think older music from previous generations is a lot better than newer and more mainstream music, and that a lot of people my age and from my generation (and also older people) are beginning to dislike current and mainstream music. I wanted to prove this theory by including these questions in my survey.

Here is the link for my finished survey – https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/DVB6WWJ

Film

I created another survey on film, another one of my interests. This was just about genre in general, nothing incredibly specific, also it was shorter than my previous one. Here are the questions:

*1. What is your favourite genre of film? Why?

* 2. How often do you watch films?

* 3. Is there any particular genre of film you dislike? If so, why?

* 4. Who is your favourite director and why?

Here is the link for this survey- https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/DG7BM5W

 

Animals

My third interest is animals, so for my primary research, I carried out a small focus group on animals with four other classmates and asked a variety of questions such as if they like animals, what their favourite animals are and why, if they own any pets, if they have fears of any particular animals and if they have ever done anything to help the prevention of animal cruelty (becoming vegan, joining campaigns etc.) All their answers were very similar in the way of them all liking animals, most of them had pets, half were vegetarian etc. My reasoning behind asking these questions was I wanted to know whether people were interested in animals enough to want to watch a video made about them.

 

Family

Finally, I put my fourth interest down as “friends and family”. I decided to just research the “family” element of this in the end. I spoke to several members of my class (five people) about their families in general, and asked a range of questions. I asked questions such as:

• Which family members do you live with?
• Is family important to you?
• Do you have siblings?
• Do you have a family member you’re closest to?

The answers were all fairly similar- everyone I spoke to had siblings, agreed that family was very important to them and many people answered either their mum or dad when asked if they had a family member that was particularly close to them. I also had someone say that family wasn’t as important to them as friends were, because they saw their friends as their family- which I found interesting.

Secondary research

Firstly, I researched people’s opinions on music “then vs. now” and found some interesting evidence. I visited a site called http://www.patch.com and came across an article about how music has changed in the last forty years. I found an interesting and helpful quote that said, “The difference between pop music produced today versus pop music produced in the ‘60s through the ‘90s is true sound, poetic lyrics, and a real passion for the music, not the money.” (by Haley Weigman, journalist from patch.com) A couple of sentences later, the paragraph ended with “today’s most famous musicians are auto-tuned, bubble-gummy, and emotionless.” This was exactly the kind of quote that I was looking for in order to back up my previous statement about a lot of people nowadays disliking current music.

Further on in this article, the author, Haley Weigman, goes on to say, “It seems the year of 1997 was the turning point. In 1996 the top selling album of the year was Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill,” and in 1997 it was the Spice Girls’ album “Spice” (apparently creativity in album titling was going down the drain too). It devolved into the empty lyrics of Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj.”

I went on to find another site that talked about why people may be more fond of older music than music today, and a big factor of this was the actual lyrics of the songs. Research has shown that meaningful values of lyrics have gone downhill rapidly over the years.

The following charts, created by Nickolay Lamm, show an incredibly interesting analysis. The squares in the graphs represent how often a certain word is mentioned in a song, red being very frequently and no squares or light coloured squares indicate that the word is mentioned no times or not as frequently.

Firstly, Weed.

As you can see, nowadays many artists are creating music that talks about meaningless content such as smoking weed, something that only became a popular song topic around the 2000’s and became more popular towards the current time.

Although music has always included elements of the topic love, less and less musicians have been singing or making music about love and have been creating more music about non meaningful content- which is why more and more people are slating today’s music.

Information from this website: http://www.ibtimes.com/lyrics-now-then-history-music-charts-1556137

Mahapatra, L., Varandani, S. and Halleck, T. (2014) Lyrics, now and then: The history of music in charts. Available at: http://www.ibtimes.com/lyrics-now-then-history-music-charts-1556137 (Accessed: 21 June 2016).

Film

I went on then to research my second interest which is film. I wanted to specifically research genre and what each genre contains and is about. After researching on Wikipedia, I found out that there are actually more genres than I had previously thought. The list read:

• Absurdist / surreal / whimsical
• Action
• Adventure
• Animated
• Comedy
• Crime
• Drama
• Fantasy
• Historical
• Horror
• Magical Realism
• Mystery
• Paranoid
• Philosophical
• Political
• Romance
• Saga
• Satire
• Sci-fi
• Slice of Life
• Speculative
• Thriller
• Urban
• Western

Information from this website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genres

Unknown. (2016). List of genres. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genres. Last accessed 5th May 2016.

Out of all these genres, I was not aware that Absurdist, Paranoid or Magical Realism were actually genres of film.

I also researched what certain genres determine and found that the main characteristics looked at within genres are location (where the film is set and locations used within the story), characterisation (personality of characters, backstories etc.), plot and structure (storyline and how the film is set out), themes (e.g. romantic films including themes of sexual, moral and emotional values), narrative address (playing on the expectations of the audience) and style (of the general image of the film, way the characters look, the way it’s shot, the certain music used etc.).

 

Animals

As my third interest is animals, I did some research on the most popular animals in general. I found an interesting website that listed the most popular animals typed into Google. The top five were dogs, cats, horses, chickens and fish- I thought that dogs and cats would be in the top five but chickens and fish were a bit of a surprise as I didn’t think they were as popular as they are.

Information from this website: http://list25.com/25-most-popular-animals-on-google-search/4/

Salamanca, A. (2015) 25 most popular animals on Google search. Available at: http://list25.com/25-most-popular-animals-on-google-search/4/ (Accessed: 5th May 2016).

I went on another site which was simply titled “Favourite and popular animals”. On this site, I was able to find other animals which have been known to have a lot of people be interested in them. Examples include the bear, whales, tigers and turtles (slightly more exotic animals). I wanted to see what types of animals other people are interested in so if I were to create a video on animals, I’d know which animals to include to attract people’s attention.

Information from this website: http://a-z-animals.com/animals/favourites/

Unknown. (2008). Favourite Animals. Available at: http://a-z-animals.com/animals/favourites/. (Accessed: 5th May 2016).

Family

For my secondary research on family, I looked into the general meaning of the word “family”. One particular definition stated that family is “a fundamental social group in society typically consisting of one or two parents and their children.” I learnt about the term “nuclear family” which is considered the typical family with two parents and their children (the type of family that everyone usually automatically thinks of when hearing the word “family” as it is always the type that is typically shown in film and television).

In my primary research on this topic I stated that someone I know claimed to consider their friends as their family as they are closer to their friends. I learnt that many others actually think this way as well and see friends as “the family you choose” which I found very interesting.

Information from this website: http://family.lovetoknow.com/about-family-values/meaning-family

Michelle Blessing. (2012). Meaning of Family. Available: Blessing, M. (2006) Meaning of family. Available at: http://family.lovetoknow.com/about-family-values/meaning-family (Accessed: 21 June 2016).

 

Reflective writing

I enjoyed doing this blog post as it has been very interesting and informative and I have learnt so much on the topics of music, family, film and animals. I especially enjoyed the research I did on music as it is my favourite topic and I managed to learn some new information about lyrics and music over the years. I also enjoyed carrying out surveys and focus groups with other people as I learnt a lot about different people also. I know now that I am a lot closer to knowing what I’m doing for my final major project which makes me very excited.

 

Bibliography

Mahapatra, L., Varandani, S. and Halleck, T. (2014) Lyrics, now and then: The history of music in charts. Available at: http://www.ibtimes.com/lyrics-now-then-history-music-charts-1556137 (Accessed: 21 June 2016).

Michelle Blessing. (2012). Meaning of Family. Available: Blessing, M. (2006) Meaning of family. Available at: http://family.lovetoknow.com/about-family-values/meaning-family (Accessed: 21 June 2016).

Salamanca, A. (2015) 25 most popular animals on Google search. Available at: http://list25.com/25-most-popular-animals-on-google-search/4/ (Accessed: 5th May 2016).

Unknown. (2008). Favourite Animals. Available at: http://a-z-animals.com/animals/favourites/. (Accessed: 5th May 2016).

Unknown. (2016). List of genres. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genres. Last accessed 5th May 2016.