NEA Task

Since beginning the NEA task on the 18th June, I have received performance, website and technical training, which have helped develop my skills in directing, teamwork and choreography.

I have so far been able to complete my own music video version of Sigala's 'Give Me Your Love,' using shots directed and performed in by me and other members of my NEA music video group. On the Studio day, I was direct some shots and perform in others, as well as take some promo shots for my artist, and help with the others' promo shots.

I will continue to use the current project in the future, but I will be changing various aspects of it in September. I will not shoot any shots in the summer, but instead I will scouting out areas for possible locations for narrative, and also focus on taking new and improved shots in September. I will use more variation across my shots, with CU, LS and wide shots being more prominent. I will also put a focus on shooting dance shots, as I feel there should be more dancing and well choreographed movement within my project. I will also aim to reshoot some of the lipsync shots that I am in, as I feel my lipsyncing skills must improve for the final project.

News Task

Explain your role/responsibility within the team and the task. What were you required to do?  
I was part of the team that took care of the website for our Daily Telegraph newspaper. I worked in a group of three, working together with Derek and Dara. Our task was to create a front page design and layout for our newspaper, using a template that was given to us. We had to find and resize different adverts for the page. The main task for this page was to create headlines for some select stories that we were given, ordering them on the page, and pairing them with the appropriate images, to capture the audience's attention. We also had to coordinate with the other groups, to make our different elements synegise, and make the newspaper feel realistic overall.


For one media form, describe the codes and conventions you chose to follow and explain their intended impact.
To make our webpage seem like it was produced by The Telegraph, we had to identify and apply the typical codes and conventions usually used by The Telegraph. For example, The Telegraph is a newspaper that writes its headlines in a non-bias way, only ever quoting the opinions of  those featured in their stories. Therefore, we only ever structured our headlines to grab our readers' attetention, and never to convey an opinion (eg 'Terror attack in Baghdad, 543 dead'- stat grabs audience attantion, whilst not conveying any stance in the issue) such as a paper like the Mirror would. We also included premium stories, as the Telegraph's website has a paywall, that restricts users from viewing certain stories without a digital subscription.

Explain how your choices reflect the real newspaper's values and target audience.
Our choices reflect the newspaper's values and their audience pretty well, in my opinion. For example, the Telegraph's readership enjoys stories about Brexit, as connoted from the prescence of several Brexit headlines and a Brexit tracker on the Telegraph website. So we used a Brexit story as our main story, as to well represent the Telegraph newspaper, and grab the audience's attention. We also noticed that demographics for the Telegraph readership saw most reader to be middle/upper middle class, so we included high class adverts, such as the Tiffany's jewellery ad at the top of the page.

Explain how your team adapted the news across the three different media forms and the reasons behind your decisions.
Our team used three different forms of media: print, digital and social media. We had to communicate between each other to keep things like headlines and featured stories consistant (the print couldn't have a different main story to the digital for example), whilst also changing things around (the images used for each story would be different across all three platforms, as not to be repetitive).

In hindsight, is there anything about your team's outcomes that you would adapt or improve?
I think that our team could have adapted the fonts to represent the Telegraph more, and I think collabiration between groups could have been better, as our team put in the wrong headlines at times. Overall though, I think the team did a good job adapting to represent the Telegraph, and that the end product would seem pretty realistic if it was ever produced.

Continuity task- Our story is about two boys playing football, with one clumsly falling over a bystander at the end. The main plot was simple, and there wasn't much going on, so it wsa easier to create a narrative flow. However, creating a narrative flow was still extremly hard (especially without editing), with the ball having to be thrown and kicked at several different angles and heights to make create continuity between shots.

Several shots were retaken, in an effort to acheive full continuity. However, the transition between shots 2 and 3 was not continuous, as the ball is kicked low off the ground in shot 2, whereas it appears high in the air in shot 3. This transition could be better. For example, the ball could have been kicked higher off the ground in shot 2, which would have improved the narrative flow between shots 2 and 3. Because of this, we did not acheive full continuity.

Improvements could be made to the video to improve the narrative flow, apart from the poor continuity between shots 2 and 3. For example, the shots could be cut quicker, like at the end of shot 2, where the shot could be cut immediatly after the ball was kicked, instead of showing character 2's legs for a few more seconds. Character 3 could also be more involved in the video, as he is randomly introduced, and it is not apparent to the audience what he is doing when character 1 trips over him.