Narrative Theory

OCR will expect candidates to be able to utilise narrative theory with regards to case studies / production.

Narrative Sheet on Gateway

Narrative : Order of the story + Style that it is represented

Story : Description

Part of the human condition is that we don’t dream nor remember original events (real or not) in linear order.

The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things

Story is the irreducible substance of a story (A meets B, something happens, orders returns), while narrative is the way the story is related (once upon a time there was a princess…)

Media texts are better organised than everyday life.

“The time of the
thing told and the time of the telling”.

What he is basically saying is
that a text is like a tangled ball of threads which needs unravelling

One set experience will create one meaning of the media text while a different set brings another meaning. What this means is that due to my like experiences I will take one certain meaning from a movie where as Sally from down the road with her own life experiences make take a completely different meaning.

Audiences bring different psychology and sociological baggage to a media text which affect what meaning they receive. Plus the meaning can change depending on the context of the viewing, how the person is feeling where they are etc.

Explanation of Audience Research

My research has been laid out in 6 distinctive posts on my blog. Each post covers a specific part of my research whether it is the area of question or the evaluation of the entire piece. This enables you to view information about a specific area of my research in a quick and efficient manner. The 6 areas are:

• Explanation of Audience Research
• Consumption of Music
• Is Piracy really that bad?
• Production Questions
• Have you heard of a...?
• Evaluation of Audience Research

My research has been centred on a questionnaire designed to answer the questions above. I felt 2 to 3 questions on each area would provide me with a better understanding of the audience who would most likely enjoy my Media Productions such as my Digipak or Music Video. By conducting this research before creating my productions I would be able to gain an insight into what was necessary to attract them.

The other purpose was to gain research valuable to my Media Investigation into Piracy and its effects. I felt rather than sending out 2 separate questionnaires it would be more productive and efficient on my part to combine them into one.

I designed the questionnaire to be answered on the internet rather than by hand, this enabled me to quickly spread it across social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter while also saving me time on having to type up the results or enter the information into a Table to design a graph. I sent this questionnaire out to a random selection of individuals on my list of contacts and within a day or so had collected all the information I needed.

The demographic focus of my research was on the age group of around 16-25 because from my own taste in music and experience in attending Indie music gigs I know that this will be the age group most likely to enjoy the Blighters type of music. Furthermore I realise from working in a Computer Services & Training Company that the majority of people in that age group are far more savoury with the internet and technology meaning that they would give me more of a non-biased answer on Piracy. There would be no true result asking if someone would use Piracy as their active method to acquire their music if they can’t use a computer let alone an internet browser.

The demographic would be only slightly heavier on the male side than females but otherwise gender equal. The indie scene is made out of many individuals but can also attract Aspirers who are attracted by the musicians’ skills or even mainstreamers can be attracted depending how popular the Indie band becomes. What this means for my research is that it has been collected off a wide range of individuals which can’t be specifically locked down onto the groups personal aspirations but rather their age group.

Have you heard of...?

When looking into my media investigation on Piracy I came across 2 very good alternatives to iTunes and great sources of listening to music. I was wondering if other people had heard of them as well, or even used them, so I set out to find out if my target audience had.

Not surprisingly with Spotify now being supported on the Ipod Touch and Iphone as well as numerous mobile phones a large majority of people had heard of spotify. A few even used it.

Not surprisingly with Spotify now being supported on the IPod Touch and IPhone as well as numerous mobile phones a large majority of people had heard of Spotify. A few even used it.

On the other hand only 1 person questioned had heard of We7.com. Not surprising considering I hadn't heard of it until doing some research into alternatives to Spotify myself. Even though, in concept, it offers the same things as Spotify for PC / Mac users with it being a radio station very few people would have ever run into it.

What this shows us is that with the internet age being what is and the easy ability to stream music more and more people are hearing of these alternatives to buying music. Why pay for an album when you can simply listen to a small advert instead for free? Spotifys monthly payment concept to remove the adverts may take hold or it may not. Personally I don't see it doing so since I rarely spend more than £10 bi-monthly on music let alone £20.

Link back to Round up

Production questions

Quite a few other bands such Lostprophets or Paramore have used skateboarding in their videos however with both of the mentioned bands leaning more towards rock I was wondering what reaction people would have to a Indie-New wave band having skateboarding. I was also curious to see if anyone had even heard of Blighters before the questionnaire.

Our main production idea was to base the music video around Skateboarding, knowing that the demographic from this question would suit the Blighter band perfectly I was hoping to see a majority in favour. Thankfully I found that the majority of those who answered my questionnaire, 9 out of 12 (75%), were in favour. This put more confidence into creating our music video and cantering it around skateboarding and performance shots.

My second question was more out of interest, I myself had never heard of Blighters until we found them as an unsigned band and decided to use them for our production project. However 3 people had heard of them before the actual questionnaire, 1 of which had seen them live in Norwich!

The 2 above graphs show that my target audience, on the majority, are interested in the idea of a skateboarding music video regardless of the fact very few have heard of the band.

Link back to Round up

Is Piracy really that bad?

Is Piracy as wide spread as people think? Is it really the greatest threat of the internet generation? What do people use to do this illegal act, if they even know how? This section aims to answer these questions.

Interestingly only 8 of 12 (75%) knew how to download music illegally, from within the post Consumption of Music the graph of how people 'acquire' their music shows us that 5 of those 8 use illegal downloading as their main source. So even though downloading music illegally no longer requires such skill, especially due to programs such as Limewire making it exceedingly quick and easy, it is very surprising that not everyone knows how to download and use it let alone use it as their main source of acquiring music.

The graph above is a question more relating to my Media investigation than Audience Research. There are quite few methods to how you can go about downloading music illegally. The 4 above are the main 4 and any other method is generally derived from one of them or a cheap knock off such as Frostwire instead of Limewire.


I was surprised on how many within the group I asked use torrents because of the technical ability needed is far higher for them than either of the Limewire or Rapidshare users. Likewise those using Youtube would need to have a specific ‘Ripping’ program or an Audio recorder which most cost money.

I am a firm believer that Anti-Piracy laws will never be enough, or in reality work, so I was very surprised when just under half of those I asked felt that they were enough. I expected more comments along the lines of "piracy laws don’t stop anyone from downloading music" or "They still haven't managed to prevent it at all" where as I got comments as "There's enough advertising to put me off".

To conclude piracy may not be in the utmost thoughts of many of the public, but it should be for those in the media industry. With this many people knowing how to download music it clearly is too easy to do so. Even with my own opinion of the law never being able to fully stop it, the ones currently in place put very few people off, even the advertising campaign is more something we chuckle at that take seriously.

Link back to Round up

Her Morning Elegance - Oren Lavie

Her Morning Elegance is moderately unique music video by being filmed primarily in the form of stop motion. Stop motion is the method of taking numerous still shots and then quickly streaming them one after another, creating the appearance of moving inmate objects. While sounding simple it is far from the truth; Her Morning Elegance consisted of roughly 3225 still images. Taking these shots spanned a period of 4 weeks where the characters were represented by 3D dummies. Frame by frame it only took a shocking 2 days for the live actors to replace the dummies.

While the technique’s used to create this video via animation and stop motion is very impressive it extremely reduced the ability to use different angled shots or ranges of distance. This is due to the unfortunate reality of the editing procedure. To produce a smooth moving stop motion video the camera must remain stationary. Thus this meant we only see a minimal amount of shot types yet on the plus side we have a firm establishing shot at the beginning of the sequence displaying the master shot as well as a brief array of close ups of the protagonist introducing you to the character.

The music video itself is run through via an impressionist narrative with a seemingly unrelated array of different areas within the protagonists dream sequence. This uniqueness and slight childish feeling as well as the calm and almost eerie folk track draw the audience in. The simplicity of the video with the ability to easily distinguish between the different scenes, such as the dark blue bed sheet representing the sea and the white socks representing fish, also adds to the character of the video.

The technique’s and narrative employed in this video are both of quality that will attract a broad audience due to the humour, such as the socks as fish or shirts as birds, as well as the aesthetic appeal of the surroundings by having them as a simple bedroom. A feel-good factor is also employed by reminding us all that no matter the dream good or bad we always wake up after it in our comfy bed to the blazing sun.

Consumption of Music

How do audiences consume their music, is it through the Highstreet, the internet, CD Players or even the radio. How do they purchase or acquire this music they listen to? This section aims to address these questions and analyses the results.

The graph above shows you the answers I gained from the question on “How they ‘acquire’ their music normally” which aimed to find out if the highstreet is truly dying out like the Media Industry fears. From the graph it appears that the highstreet has lost popularity with just being tied first with 5 out of the 12 participants in the questionnaire. This shows us that ~58% now prefer other alternatives to going to highstreet and buying their music. This step can be explained however by the fact it is far more convenient to use the internet to get your music whether illegal or by using programs such as iTunes or Spotify.

However with the options Highstreet, Internet D/L (download) and Streaming all being legal it seems the majority still prefer paying and owning their own music over illegal downloading. Out of those options it seems that the majority still using legal methods prefer owning a physical Album over the music tracks floating around in the internet ether of iTunes or Spotify.

But with just under half of the votes illegal downloading clearly shows the change in perspectives. If anything this graph shows us that the majority of people no longer own huge album collections but rather store their music on their computers or laptops. This in itself makes sense because with my demographic being of the age range 16-25 I would be greatly surprised if even 1 out of the 12 do not own a mobile phone of IPod that they use to play their music

With the massive increase in options and alternatives on how to listen to music I decided to find out what technology people use to listen to their music collection. The question asked was ‘What technology do you use to listen to music?’ to do this the question was setup as a multiple answer. My expectations were that the majority would use iPod/MP3 because of convenience. The small size and long battery life provides superb portability. Likewise I'd expect most people to use a PC/Laptop to listen to music, especially because without one you would not be able to upload your music collection to your IPods, MP3s or phones!

Furthermore due to how technology has moved forward and how MP3 players are now easily affordable I would have been greatly surprised to have found out if anyone still carried around a bulky CD player. Likewise with many mobiles phones now having a functioning music player just as capable as an MP3 player it makes sense to see a few people using this option. On top of that many IPods & mobile phones also offer radio services, but still many of us wake up in the mornings to Radio 1 as our alarm.

To conclude it is quite clear that the music industry is moving on with technology with more and more people using iPods/MP3s over the old bulkier tech. However it seems out of the legitimate options of listening to music people are still going out to stores to buy albums, but with illegal downloading having an equal amount of support it is no surprise many artists like Lily Allen detest Piracy and see it as a large challenge for the industry to face. Then again this fear may not be about the legality of it but more based on the fact that the demographic I’ve used is very similar to the audience of hers.

Link back to Round up

Evaluation of Audience Research

The research carried out has been successful in shedding light on the audience I hope to attract to my Media Products whether being the Music Video, CD Case or Magazine advert. The demographic I have concentrated on should be more than likely to enjoy them.
The primary method I used to gather data was a questionnaire. While providing easily graphed quantitative data it does not provide as much qualitative data as an Interview would. However it does provide a few key lines of opinions which I have used within my research as well as to shape my own personal opinion. So the strength of the method used is the ability to create a visual demonstration of the results through the graphs, but a weakness is the inability to provide in-depth opinions of the audience.

Also another strength of the method is the ease of getting the data. Doing a questionnaire is normally no more than a 5-10 minutes task where as an interview, even with 10 questions, can take up to 30 minutes. What this means is that while 12 have done my questionnaire out of those 12 I may have asked to do an interview only 1 or 2 may have agreed due to having their own studies or work to attend to.

When evaluating the questions themselves I feel on the whole they are entirely successful but I do feel that I should have asked “What is your preferred method of listening to music” along with “What technology do you use to listen to music?” because it would have provided more specific results instead a general picture of the technology they own.

When it comes to evaluating whether the demographic I have mentioned throughout the Audience Research is accurate for my Productions and the Blighters band I can now confirm it does. By having a mixed gender group between the ages of 16-25 with social aspirers, mainstreamers and individuals who I know from attending gigs all can enjoy Indie type music I have now got relevant data for my Media Studies work.

Just by looking at those attending gigs for bands such as Arctic Monkeys, Death Cab For Cutie, Radiohead you can see similar qualities between the demographic mentioned. That is because all the bands fall under the indie / Alternative music banner.

However a large weakness of my Audience Research is the fact I have solely concentrated on single demographic. While this provides good information for my own projects it doesn’t provide me any data to compare tastes or differences in consumption of music. I can say that within age range of 16-25 everyone owns some form of music playing device however I can’t say that mainstreamers are more likely to own an Apple IPod where as Individual aspirers are more likely to own a Zune MP3.

In conclusion I would say my Audience Research is a success on the whole but if I did come to do it again I would more than likely design more questions to compare differences in music tastes and consumption.

Link back to Round up

Media Investigation - [OLD]

This is the draft presentation, it is currently 2 long. However you can gain a very good idea of what I am hoping to achieve and explain from the 3 videos.

Music Videos & Youtube?

Out of curiosity I decided to look at the Youtube music video listings and find out what sort of videos were at the top, and to see what sort of narratives or performance shots they used to achieve the finished product.

The first 2 music videos, excluding TV shows, were both performance & narrative based videos.

Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love
Coldplay - Viva La Vida

Bleeding love, while coming out over 2 years ago, has over 20million more views than the next most popular video tagged as music. This clearly demostrates that the populace like strong narrative based videos with performance shots of the artist. It is for this reason that we've decided to make our own video into a performacne and narrative based production.

Shots List

Added More shots outlining and finished all the sections.

Rough Timeline
00:00 - 00:31 = Stop Motion / Journey to Skatepark
00:31 - 01:01 = Narrative
01:01 - 01:31 = Performance
01:31 - 02:01 = Both
02:01 - 02:30 = Both

Shot List 00:00 - 00:31 [Narrative]
1 - 3 - Waking up in Bed [Stop Motion similar to practice video]
4 - 5 - Eating breakfast & Postits [Stop Motion - Side shot - Postits band title]
6 - 8- Fridge magnets [Stop Motion - Song title]
9- 10 - Going out the door [Stop Motion then speeding up to normal]
11- 13 - Skateboarding to Park [Normal / faster speed] / fade out

Shot List 00:31 - 01:01 [Performance]
14 - 17: Fade in at skatepark [Long tracking shot]
18 - 22: Numerous performance shots with clips of skateboarding [360 shot, panning quick high and low angle shots]

Shot List 01.01 - 1.31 [Skateboarding Narrative]
23 - 26: Skateboarding narrative part [Long shot, close ups]
27 - 30: skateboarding stunt (ollie over the drums) involving two shots slow motion and normal merging the two [tracking + panning]

Shot List 01.31 - 2.30 [Skateboarding/ Performance]
31 - 34: Performance shots - [high and low angle - 360 and panning shots]
35 - 39: Skating - [tracking]
40 - 45: Performance
46 - 47: Sheep shot [Fades out on sheep eating grass]

Musicians split when it comes ot Piracy...?

Recently the British Government have released plans on how they plan to deal with the piracy problem at large.

Persistent file-sharers could have their internet accounts suspended in an attempt to crack down on piracy

It is about time that the government stepped in to deal with the problem, but like the FAC (Featured Artists' Coalition), British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and the Music Producers Guild I think this is in fact an over reaction. Not a heavy sledgehammer as the 3 musical bodies put it, but rather an atomic bomb.

"It's going to start a war which they'll never win."-- Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien

I myself am a small time pirate. I've spent time downloading music before going out and buying it due to having a very select taste. I also know that the chances of the government, even if ISPs (Internet Service Providers e.g. BT) stepped in to help, that catching and recording illegal downloading will be nigh impossible. That's without taking into account the difficulty of telling the difference between legal file sharing and illegal.

This is all before the fact that by doing this many people will most likely be put off music altogether and go for alternative types of entertainment as mentioned by the Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien.

[ Information from the BBC ]

However, 11 days after this statement Lily Allen stepped forward to rally stars against piracy. Taio Cruz, James Blunt and Tim Rice-Oxley all put forward their support to Lily as well as congratulating her for stepping up.

"File-sharing has had a very, very negative effect on my career, as it has on many others" -- Taio Cruz

Taio Cruz is a prime example of how music piracy can be damaging, by having his debut album being leaked almost 3 months before the scheduled release date he and his music label were not sure whether to continue. The amount of money lost for both was most likely huge with many people hearing, downloading and listening to the song for months before it came out.

Also like in the article it states that due to the label losing out on money it will also mean that they will have less to spend on supporting new artists, which while I don't feel it is damaging them the artists themselves do.

[ Information from the BBC ]

My own opinion on this situation is that Piracy is a bad thing, however they need to sort it out by moving forward in technology and time. Sites such as Spotify and Me7 are the starting point, however for a student such as myself who wants to listen to music on the move the chances of me actually wanting to listen to hugely long adverts is small. Spotify premuim is also a rip off in my opinion, £9.99 a month equating to £119.88 a year is to much for those who only listen to the odd song from an odd album.

Itunes is my current favourite legal way to obtain music, due to being cheap and enabling me to buy a single song off an album and not all those fillers. It will be interesting over the next couple of years to see what other unique ideas and concepts appear.

Music Video Storyboards

Above you will find our current storyboards.

Shooting Schedule.

Location Scouting

The first video is a full 360 degree view of the Skatepark from on top of the central box.



The second video gives you an idea of the layout of the actual skatepark.

For a greater idea of our location planning please look to the Shooting Maps & Music Video Planning posts.

Cast & Costumes.

For the performance based part of the music video we plan to have 3 people imitating the actual band, they will be Owen, Ryan and Jake as explained below.

On the left we have Owen Taylor as the Lead Singer and Ryan Hayward on the right playing the Bass Guitar. We also have Jake on the bottom right playing the Drums. We've chosen this setup for 2 reasons, firstly Ryan and Jake are both in our media group enabling us to easily get together and secondly because Owen has the right authentic feel of being a singer, especially due to recently being scouted to be a model.

Furthermore they fit in with the genre of New Wave / Indie by having a ridiculous amount of hair and the colourful clothing.

The skaters we plan to base the performance shots around are currently Toby Roper on the left as well as Jake on the right. The main character performer shall be Toby because we do not wish to overlap the performance cast with the band itself to much. We also choose to involve Toby because he is good friends with Jake and an exceptional skater, as shown below, fitting in with our initial music video ideas.

We may also include some random sheep to add some humour into the music video.

Costumes

To keep with the same feel as the band, as displayed in the above image, we plan to have a smart/casual look during the performance segments of our music video. By doing this we will attract a more wide ranging audience by looking unique but not to unique to be put into a specific genre pile such as 'Goth' or 'Emo'.

We currently plan to have Owen in a shirt and blazer similarly dressed to the image on the left where as Jake and Ryan will be more leaning towards casually dressed such as on the right. This will create a contrast between the singer and other band members thereby connoting the importance of the lead singer. The reasoning for wanting to make Owen stand out more than the other band members is because he will be the voice as well as the face for the entire band. By making him better dressed we draw attention to him further which can also increase his overall appeal especially to 'aspirers' who are attracted to him via his looks and musical talent.

Our current costume for the skater is the stereotypical hoodie type outfit. The look of the skates connotes their way of life, not very flashy or high maintenance, this will also enable us to relate to the audience as well as the genre. New wave is a semi-laid back genre which has a wide range of clothing styles however the hoodie and casual look fits into it perfectly. By dressing like the audience.

Blighters - Boys in Motion MP3

The above is the MP3 of our chosen unsigned bands music track.

Bligthers - Boys in Motion.

We are planning to cut this track down to around 2.30 due to not wanting an overly long music video. This will also make it far easier for us to fill the time limit with a more varying amount of shots and a cleaner narrative because we will not have to just create clips to fill space.

Death Metal Genre

The above video is a short presentation which I had to do at the start of the year about the Death Metal Music Genre. It will give you a small insight and a generalising picture of what's involved in the music from the type of sound to the general clothing worn.

Media Questionnaire

Please tick the boxes as appropriate

Age: 15-17 [ ] 18 – 20 [ ] 21 – 23 [ ] 24 – 26 [ ] 27+ [ ]

Gender: Male [ ] Female [ ]

Which genre of music do you listen to the most?
E.g. RnB, Rock, Alternative, Emo etc.

Have you heard of the band 'Blighters'?
Yes [ ] No [ ]

Would a music video involving Skateboarding interest you?
Yes [ ] No [ ]

How do you ‘acquire’ your music normally?
Highstreet Shop E.g. CD at HMV [ ]
Internet Downloads E.g. iTunes [ ]
Illegal Downloads E.g. Youtube [ ]
Streaming Music software E.g. Spotify [ ]

Have you heard of Spotify?
Yes [ ] No [ ]

Have you heard of We7.com?
Yes [ ] No [ ]

Do you know how to ‘acquire’ music illegally?
Yes [ ] No [ ]

If yes what is your preferred method?
Recording off Youtube or Spotify etc [ ]
Torrents E.g. thepiratebay.org [ ]
Limewire or equivalent E.g. Frostwire [ ]
Downloading sites such as megaupload or rapidshare [ ]

Other please specify...

What technology do you use to listen to music?
MP3 / MP4 / iPod [ ]
CD Player [ ]
Radio [ ]
Computer / laptop [ ]
Mobile [ ]

Do you feel the current Anti-piracy laws are enough?
Yes [ ] No [ ]

Why do you feel this way?

Above you shall find my media questionnaire of which I shall be using for my media investigation.

Shooting Maps

Our basic shooting map is above, showing the basic layout of the Hethersett skatepark. The below 5 shooting maps will show you a few of our scenes as well as ideas for location of lighting and the camera.The above image displays to you one of our lightening ideas. We plan to use 2 powerful gas lamps, this will highlight the band against the oncoming darkness of the time we're shooting the video.
The second image shows to you one of our ideas of getting a high angle shot of the band performing via standing on one of the ramps. This will also enable us to use a variety of angles while recording either the band or skater.

Similarly the image below shows you how we plan to use the gas lamps to get a large arc of light from 2 directions onto the central box. This will thereby further enforce that the central box is the stage.
Another idea we have is to have a 360 shot of the central box.
Plus we also plan to have more basic shots of just medium and close ups.

Topic :
To what extrent has the use of Piracy impacted on the music industry.

Context :
I have choosen to look into how piracy is impacting the music industry due to it being closely linked to my generation. The modern technology, increased internet speeds, ability to download any type of music for free and listen to it on your own MP3 / Ipod has created a problem which copyright and the power that be are trying to address.

It is generally interesting to me because it will affect how I consume music for some time, whether it be legally or illegally. Downloading from Spotify or thepiratebay.org. The relevance of this research at this point in time is that it will show a wide variety of the different comsumer options to listen to music as well as the greater affect of piracy on the industry as a whole from the basics of music to the problem of fraud.

It is also interesting in the fact that this is the tip of technology, the tip of the iceburg.

'Boys in motion' - Blighters lyrics & Annotation

'Boys in motion' - Blighters

The war has been won
The soldier must go on
in search of
New life, new work
You were my battle
And you have been won
Like the Soldier
I must move on

Oh boys in Motion
Fighting against me girl
This place like heaven

Oh boys in Motion
Fighting against me girl
This place like heaven

Girls smell so sweet
or so I remember
So why do you
Make it so hard to fall in love
I guess there's no one good for me
Better get used to being lonely
don't ever say
Fall in love

Oh boys in Motion
Fighting against me girl
This place like heaven

Oh boys in Motion
Fighting against me girl
This place like heaven

Practice Shots.

Ryan and Jake were able to do a few practices with stop motion on a time lapse camera.

They used a simple idea of bed covers sliding back by themselves, which was influenced by the style shown in the video Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie.

Jake also experimented with some 'postit' notes and getting letters to appear. I was very interested in this method in the way it would make the title of our musical video be quite unique. This all leads into the fact our song is called "Boys in Motion" and will enable us to relate the video quite easily to the lyrics of the song.

thepiratebay.org gone for good?

Thepiratebay has been one of the biggest and most used torrent tracking sites in the world for over 3 years, ever since it's little debuckle with the copyright laws back in 2006. With thousands of musical tracks and other major content such as OEM versions of Mircosoft windows and professional software from Adobe and other companies totalling in the cost of billions across the entire site it is no surprise that governments, companies and many people wished to see the site burned.

Finally, after the original attempt to shut it down in 2006 by the Swedish government it seems that thepiratebay is being crushed. After the legal proceedings where the 4 founders were sentenced in April to one year in jail, and fined $3.6 Million Dollars, the piratebays main backbone ISP (Black Internet)was threatened with legal action if they didn't shut down. It seems that anti-piracy law where non-existent still carries enough threat to dislodge thepiratebay from Swedish ISPs even though according to Swedish law there is no such thing as copyright when enforced by another country.

Currently thepiratebay is still down, but it is highly doubtful they will be done for good due to being brought out for over $7,000,000 by a company looking to make the site legalised.

Extra info
3 hours after the Swedish court ordered the upstream provider Black Internet to block traffic to the site Pirate Bay staff announced that the site had been relocated, but due to technical difficulties they were prevented from coming online immediately. Due to DNS issues, depending on your host it will be how far you realise a domain such as www.thepiratebay.org has been moved, the website was only accessible from some areas.

[Last updated 25/08/09]

Anti-Piracy getting serious

Below is a story from the 25th of August.

Four men have been jailed in China for creating and distributing piracy software for Microsoft Windows XP.

The "Tomato Garden Windows XP" blocked the operating system's authentication programmes and enabled users to access it for free.

The software was created by Hong Lei, who was handed a prison sentence of three-and-a-half years by a court in Suzhou, eastern China, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

Another man was given the same sentence, and two others were jailed for two years in what was termed the biggest software piracy case in the country.

Hong and his accomplices distributed the version through a portal called tomatolei.com which made money through internet advertisements.

Although the case was widely publicised by China as a sign of its efforts to control piracy, many say more needs to be done.

US Congressman Howard Berman of California, who is in Beijing to meet Chinese leaders, said in a statement: "China's efforts to stop intellectual property theft have been weak and ineffective - heavy on tough talk but light on implementation."

As you can see anti piracy has started getting serious. This is one of the first serious sentences against piracy and the largest case of it's kind in China. Similar to the "thepiratebay" case this is a lethal message to all those going against the huge corporations such as Microsoft and making something worth billions of $$$ free via some clever coding.

Media investigaiton - Proposal

Topic :
To what extrent has the use of Piracy impacted on the music industry.

Reason for topic :
Interest and background knowledge on priacy and copyright laws.

What do you expect to find out :
About creative comms license, spotify, piratebay, rapidshare, Virgin Media etc.

How it will help me to develope my understanding for the year 13 coursework?
Relations of piracy to music in the modern world.

How will you express your findings?
Presentations, blog as well as video.

Ideas for research topics :
The Piratebay court case
Spotify
Virgin media + music companies teaming up
Latest technology affect on piracy (internet speed)
Access to illegal content
Accepted or looked down upon

Music Video Ideas.

The ideas listed in the post Promotion Band - Blighters are Stop Motion and multiple characters, the later idea originated from one of my friends own youtube videos located below:

From what he explained to me this was done via having the camera in the same position throughout the shooting and overlapping the 2 different film clips. Audio on the other hand had to be recorded and overlapped to get the sync completely correct, even then there was some time difficulties.

Where the former idea was mentioned by Jake. I then remembered a former video I had come across through my friend at the top by Oren Lavie called Her Morning Elegance. A perfect example of Stop Motion and how well it can come across.

Both idea's are quite interesting, and easily possible to do with even the most basic software. Personally I'm leaning towards Stop motion due to suiting the name of our chosen song "Boys in Motion".

Promotion Band - Blighters

We've finally decided on the band our group is going to promote.



Blighters! The band was chosen mainly due to the song 'Boys in Motion' fitting to our first idea of a unique-ish video of using Stop Motion. Below you will find some ideas towards location, casts, etc.

Location : Skate Park (Stop Motion + Multiple single character on screen at once)
Cast : Jake (Multiple skater)
Ideas : Drums in tree, stop motion, skating, multiple single character doing more than 1 thing on screen at once.

The group attempting to promote this band is Myself, Jake and Ryan.

Technology, how much do you know?

When I talk to most people they have many misconceptions about modern day technology, and only a very basic understanding of how the the Internet works. There are 3 major factors to how we, the consumers, access the technologies bounty.

1. Our ISP (Internet Service Provider) and their Terms & Conditions (TaC)
2. Our average Download / Upload speeds
3. Your Computers overall 'power'

Don't forget that I am a heavy internet user and that I take advantage of everything possible, for this reason I will have more gripe with these problems than an average user. However it will provide an insight into the problems that those who use such sites as "thepiratebay" or "rapidshare" suffer.

ISP's are either the savour or destroyer of your enjoyment of the internet. They control your top speed, whether you can download at all during peek times, if you can access certain sites and more. 'Peek time' is the annoyance ISP's provide, with the phone peek times increase the cost of calls however for ISP's peek time means a massive capping of your internet connection to generally 200kb. This only affects those downloading with a 2mb+ connection, others don't notice, yet I remember numerous times I wanted to watch a program on Sky Player or BBC iPlayer and *WHAM* my connection is slapped down from 900kb/s to 200kb/s.

Downloading speeds is one of the major misconceptions. Many people feel the higher the better, however once you reach around 8mb regardless of how much faster you go you won't see an increase in surfing speed (Except on heavily flash'd sites) or a better ping when playing games against people around the world whether on the PC or Xbox 360. Going above 10mb to say 50mb on fibre option broadband you'd be paying for something quite worthless to the average user. However for the 'pirates' you'd be laughing manically.

Computer power relates to how fast you're pc can process programs, now days this more relates to whether you have Blu-ray players or a surround sound system than CPU speed. This is due to most computers now having enough power to easily surf the web and run numerous word processing programs.

However when you put all these things together it can either mean you have a very quick method to access illegal content or you don't. The way human nature is, the easier to do something the more likely we are to do it.

Welcome!

Hello!

Welcome to the new A2 media blog for my Media course at City of Norwich School.

All sorts of amazing posts shall be put up in the coming months.

Enjoy.