POP GOES THE NOW

Aycan Mehmet w1543773 Group D

[popgoesthenowam]

07/04/17-Final Production

Prior to presenting, we reviewed the rough cut that Arjun had made and saw what we could tweak. Some of the audio levels of the music were too high and we could not hear ourselves speaking. We also thought to add a title card before the Advert in the 60s to make it more clear it was an infomercial. We added more adverts to the 90s to highlight the mass consumerism ethos of the time and made the skit look more like a reality TV show by adding titles to the interview scenes. 

Rough Cut:

Final Cut:

Friday was presentation day and we got to display our film and see the ideas that other groups had created. It was interesting to see how everyone had interpreted the brief differently showing the vastness of creativity within people. As a group, we decided to use Prezi (mobile devices) as it was successful in presenting our initial ideas to the class before. We decided not to make the Prezi too long as we felt the film itself was clear in explaining how it was a palimpsest so our presentation mainly consisted of the process of how we came to choose the theme for each skit. Our film was well received by our class which was a nice surprise, as we were worried our humour would not translate well. The good feedback stated that we were creative and different from the other groups and how the piece reflected our relationship as a team. One person stated our chemistry seeped through our presentation. The only critical comment we received was whether the companies we featured like McDonalds and Domino’s will exist in the future, but we assumed they would.

The entire module has made me get back in touch with my creative side which I have enjoyed as it has allowed me to not be constrained within my comfort zone. As I have expressed in many of my blogs, my team from day one have been able to bounce off each other and create something, whether it is in a short time limit of the seminar or over a period of time. Having a variety of mindsets and creative skill sets allowed us to make the best possible piece we could. Taking this module has sparked my interest in doing an elective next year as well as I can integrate with people from other disciplines.

Word Count: 393

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31/03/17-Creative Production: Week 3

This week we filmed 2117, which was the final scene of our short film. During the week, we discussed some concepts we could use to show this. I suggested a React video like what the Fine Brothers do on YouTube currently, looking at all the historical artifacts of the 21st century, but we thought that react videos might not exist in the future. As a team, we decided to look at news in 100 years’ time. As our 2092 video illustrates a time with no political governance, 2117 is the opposite of that where the news presenters are under the order to promote robots on TV, whereas the truth is that they are taking over, demonstrated by the hijack later in the video. Our social aspect comes from everyone owning a robot and the cultural aspect is that robots are now artists. The commercial aspect is the pop-up advertisement of Coca-Cola, where the anchors can be seen looking at it. Before we filmed we made a table of the pros and cons of robots to use as prompts for our dialogue. This scene was quite simple to film as we just set up the camera in a certain position and ad-libbed our dialogue. Our plan for next week is to put the final film together and come up with a creative way to present it. I have started to make a Presentation for Friday and will refer to the marking criteria when producing it.

Word Count: 244

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24/03/17-Creative Production: Week 2

This week was the most enjoyable so far. We dedicated 2 days to filming most of our skits, from 2017-2092, whilst considering what will conclude our video in 2117, completing our full circle. We incorporated palimpsests by using pop culture references in our skits, 2017 was filmed in the style of a make-up tutorial expressed by YouTubers today. 2042 parodies both vlogs and MTV Cribs with the tour of the bunker. Our pop-up advert for Biometric Drugs in 2067 mocks infomercials from today and the skit for 2092 uses a Reality TV Show/Sitcom style where we also break the fourth wall, showing comparisons to a popular 1990s film Wayne’s World. I was comfortable in setting up the equipment as I have had experience shooting films for Media Studies, so it was rejuvenating to be able to revisit this. Above are some screenshots from our shoot. The first day of shooting allowed us to see how we could progress onto the second day with regards to planning the shoot effectively so we had enough time to film everything. I also referred back to the storyboards we had made to made sure we were covering each concept of social, political, cultural and commercial in every scene. The plan for next week is to finalise the 2117 scene and to edit the film with its effects.

Word Count: 223

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17/03/17-Creative Production: Week 1

This week we storyboarded our film. We chose to reflect the Youth in each era as they are usually the group in society who are shaped by cultural changes in beliefs, trends and how society runs. This week allowed us to concise our film down to key moments that will reflect the zeitgeist of each era and what would be practical for us to film. We also reflected on our feedback from last week and added more layers into each section. We initially wrote down what we wanted to do for each year, and how we could cover each of the 4 concepts in our skits. We chose to do a make-up tutorial video for the first year (2017) as this is quite popular. We are covering themes of cultural appropriation, the political climate and fake news in this skit. We then progress 25 years into the future, into 2042, where we incorporate our full circle idea. This year will mirror the 20th century where a war will be happening and have a tour of an air-raid bunker, adhering to MTV Cribs, but it will be full of luxury items which highlights consumerist culture. The war will be between North Korea and America using Nuclear technology. Kanye West will be the president. Kim Kardashian will have a pop-up advert, promoting a new fragrance called the Fountain of Youth. 2067 will be the Rise of the Hippies who refute the media-saturated culture we live in and Cannabis will now be legalised. Our characters will discuss the aftermath of the war and what is going on. Biometric payments will be introduced and new drugs will take advantage of this system, which is the basis of the pop-up advertisement we have on this skit. The last 2 years of 2092 and 2117 will be reflecting a dystopian society, 2092 having an anarchist political climate and 2117 will be under surveillance like an Orwellian Big Brother society. Having a clear idea of how each skit will play out allows us to be more efficient when we film next week.

Word Count: 345

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10/03/17-Intital Project Presentation

It was interesting to see other people’s interpretation of the project brief this week as it helped give insight to how my group could improve on our short film idea called '2117: A Good Lives Guide.(click here if on a mobile device)' Seeing the other presentations reassured us of our good group dynamic and that our work was of a good standard. We generally had positive feedback on our ideas, stating that we had adhered to the idea of envisioning the future and that we looked organised as a team and our presentation was engaging. We recieved some constructive criticism about how we will represent 4 layers in our film and whether our ideas about the future were over ambitious. I feel that having many possible outcomes for our vision of the future allows us to cancel down concepts and simplify but also elaborate on them further. We have tweaked our idea slightly by using pop-up advertisements during the film. I will research on how advertising has evolved throughout the course of history and see how we can form predictions on the future of advertising based on this research. I will continue to watch existing media examples that illustrate alternative realities and time travel like Rick and Morty, Futurama and Timeless to see how they utilize time as a plot device and how they visualise the future. The plan for next week is to meet up and start making a concrete outline of our film and see how practical our ideas are. We also reflected on our group dynamic as a team during this session and we will make more effort to communicate better and allow for more egalitarian roles in the team.

Word Count: 277

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03/03/17-Initial Project Ideas

We were all briefed about the final project last week and my team had been discussing potential ideas about the idea of palimpsests of the future. We had the idea to create a Monopoly game, based on religion, where players would act as a religion and buy different religious landmarks and places. After our initial feedback, we found that this would not be possible to do due to the fact it was not from present day and didn't cover the four layers required for the task. We came back to the drawing board and the second picture depicts the rest of our ideas, such as Fast’r Food, a new take on fast food where it is cooked automatically at the ease of your home and a real-life money tree that grows money, but we found that this would be impractical to design. Our final idea revolves around the idea that culture is taking a full circle, where we are influenced by sounds and patterns from decades ago. In order to visually represent this, we decided to do a short film about a character who is transported into the future and is given a survival guide of the year 2117, covering the social, cultural, political and commercial aspects of life. This process was the most challenging yet as I feel the brief was very vague and open to interpretation. We were quite good with coming up with concepts but struggled to find how we would create something to represent it. To help develop our final idea, I will study the concept and research around it using existing media examples and see how this can influence my creative thinking for the project.

Word Count: 280

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24/02/17-Palimpsests of Carnaby Street

The trip to Carnaby Street was insightful as I, along with my team, were able to uncover the street’s layers of contemporary culture and heritage. We found it was like a theme park where you can experience modern commercialism in a vintage way. Baudrillard’s (1994) theory of hyper-reality can be applied to the street as you lose yourself in the simulated cultural references tricking you into believing that this is the authentic experience.  Many palimpsests were found on our journey, like the Harry Potter style roads to the hypnotising money narrative. I found it was powerful to have the Union Jack on the glitzy sign as the street is populated with Multi National Co-operation shops and restaurants from different cuisines. It seems that we have a neo-British culture of Multi-Culturalism where we incorporate other cultures and hybridise it as our own which is a new take on colonialism. My favourite find of the trip was the True Religion mosaic (see below). In the mosaic, shaped like a stained-glass window, adhering to church artefacts, you can see markets from the early street to the theatre history of the area. Directly below is a store called True Religion, which complemented the mosaic well as it shows the street has always been a place to spend money, the ‘true religion’ being capitalism. I enjoyed doing the task as a team as we were able to bond and I could see how different people interpreted the street’s iconography.

Word Count:249

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press.

More Pictures

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18/02/17-Pop Culture

As my group were away this week, I collaborated with @popgoesthenowws from Group G. We were inspired by the Dior T-Shirt ‘We Can All Be Feminists’ (Catwalking, 2017) and decided to embark on looking how liberal slogans have been commodified in the realm of fashion. Because of the recent changes in political values, leaning towards the left and extreme-left, it has become fashionable to be liberal which is a far stretch from conservative 1950s. I was inspired by the lyrics of ‘Peace Sells, But Who’s Buying’ by Megadeth where they sing ‘Can you put a price on peace?’ which these t-shirts say you can and indeed peace has become profitable through fashion. In the wake of Trump’s election, people in the Western world are more motivated than ever to become activists for civil rights, and can use fashion as a means of expression for their values. But this is buying into the capitalist façade of freedom, and liberalism. We focused on a company (AllRiot) who promote anti-establishment and not using sweatshops but still advertise like a designer brand. Guerrilla techniques would be better to adhere to an anti-establishment ethos. Our piece draws comparisons to picket signs which makes it carry a strong impactful message.

Word Count: 204

References:

Catwalking, (2017). Dior's version of feminism? Charging customers more that 500 euros for this Slogan t-shirt. [image] Available at: http://www.smh.com.au/photogallery/lifestyle/fashion/paris-fashion-weeks-best-moments-20161006-grwa63.html [Accessed 21 Feb. 2017].

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10/02/17-Analysing Pop Culture

Rediscovering cultural theory and philosophy was refreshing as I had enjoyed learning about these concepts during my A Levels and in the first year of my Psychology degree. I was able to explore the links between the views of early philosophers and how my discipline of Psychology has formed, and also apply my knowledge of feminism to our case study of the Kardashian family (mobile devices) for our task. It was intriguing to analyse this show, as on the surface, it is fundamentally just another reality show but as we began to decode various issues, like how they adhere to and defy gender conventions, it was eye-opening to find how much influence they have on female representation in the 21st century. Our group’s chemistry followed through to this week and enabled us to give a structured presentation as we were familiar with our topic and gave our own perspectives on it. Having our audience feedback to us with some contradicting comments on the areas we discussed, such as Caitlyn Jenner being transgender, allowed us as a team to flourish our points and argue effectively. I felt better adjusted to our group dynamic this week and hope this develops throughout the module.

Word Count:199

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03/02/17-Disruptive Model  

For our first group task we were told to create a disruptive model based on one of three areas, popular culture, business or art. My team, @popgoesthenowak​,@popgoesthenowjj23 and @popgoesthenowomf​ came up with a disruptive model titled ‘Political Transparency’ (click here for slideshow if on a mobile device)  which focuses on popular culture. During our brainstorming session, it became evident that we all had strong beliefs on the temperamental political climate and to display our argument we used real life examples, such as North Korea and The US Elections, and discussed how Transparency of information in these situations would have been beneficial. Also we discussed how a more balanced portrayal of all political parties would disrupt society. I felt there was good chemistry in our team as there was contributions were equally shared by everyone. Working in a team of people from diverse backgrounds for this task allowed me to see the way other people think and formulate ideas and to also bounce off ideas that came into fruition during the process. Within the time constraints given, it was a challenge to come up with the model and despite some technical difficulties, I believe we done a good job in getting our points across during our presentation.

Word Count:198

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27/01/17-Contemporary Pop Art Task

It was a pleasant surprise to be given this task as I have not applied my creative skills for a long time and found it a refreshing challenge. I began to formulate ideas after the visit to the Tate Modern and finally reached the conclusion of using symbols and icons from social media as I feel this reflects the zeitgeist of today as we have become a media-saturated society in the postmodern world. By looking at existing artists’ work, like Warhol and Rauschenberg, I felt inspired to combine my favourite elements from each artist such as the panelling method and saturated colours in Warhol’s work and the 3D aspects in Rauschenberg’s work. My image has a contrasting replication which displays the positive and negative side of the social media platform. I used Microsoft PowerPoint and Fotor.com to create and edit my images digitally in which I felt comfortable in doing as I had used the software/website before.  Overall, this task has been an enjoyable experience as it has helped rejuvenate my creative spark and motivated me for what is to come up in this module.

Word Count:185