Friday 23 November 2012

Photography - Prince Ruperts Tower

My aunty in America asked me to take some photographs of the Everton tower for my uncles Birthday and of course I was only happy to do so. My dad is a big Evertonian and so he was happy to take me up there and I spent a while just taking photographs of the tower from various angles. Luckily the weather was nice and so the pictures turned out pretty good, except for the shadows from the building around the area. I hope my uncle likes them anyway!
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Wednesday 7 November 2012

Penguins!

They had real life penguins on the ice skating rink at Liverpool One today! So adorable I had to go and see them and take some pictures!


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Rolls Royce Photography

A new Harvey Nichols has opened in Liverpool today and I was lucky enough to be in town with my camera because they had a beautiful authentic Rolls Royce parked outside the store. Here are a few photographs that I took of it.
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Monday 5 November 2012

Bonfire Night

I love photographing fireworks because it takes some skill to get them fully exploding and to catch the light and the colours just right. This year I went to Sefton Park to watch the yearly display they have there with a few friends. I have to say, their display used to be a lot better than it is now; but we still had some fun!
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Friday 2 November 2012

Flat or Home?

So I have had a bit of a crisis this week. I needed to decide what I was doing with my living situation next year. Its crazy how early you have to do these things considering I wouldn't be moving anywhere until next July at the earliest!
So I am currently living in the flat in town which I love a lot, I am with 3 of my friends from university and they are great. But there are so many pro's and con's issues that I have came across and I am thinking about them a lot. SO. I decided to make a list of reasons who to live at home and why to live at the flat; this is the only way I could think to make the decision because it was just too hard!

Home:


  1. Would have less distractions
  2. More Money
  3. Albus (My dog!)
  4. Closer to work
  5. Only in university 2 days next year
  6. Don't have to clean as much
  7. Family
  8. Would get more work done
  9. 3rd year is more important that leisure
  10. Closer to Tom (My boyfriend!)
  11. Cleaner

Flat:
  1. Friends
  2. Don't have to pay for taxi's home
  3. Closer to university
  4. In the city center
  5. More socialising
  6. No parents
  7. Independence
  8. Closer for Student Union Work
As you can see, the home list was longer, so next year I have decided to live back at home with my parents. I just feel that this decision is the best; mainly because we will be in 3rd year and I will need to work very hard and I can't see myself doing so with all of these distractions I find myself with this year. I love living with my friends and it has been/will be an amazing experience for the rest of the year.

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TV Studio Production - Meeting 2

Today we had our second meeting about our TV pilot for Channel 4.  We had a fair few items to discuss and so we went right ahead because we only had 40 minutes.
Firstly we discussed the name for the show. I cam up with a few ideas so here they are:
  • Inspiring Liverpool
  • Being Liverpool
  • Local Liverpool Life (LLL)
  • Life in Liverpool
  • Life of a Scouser
  • Scouse Life
  • Scouse in the City
After telling our lecturer these ideas, she said that we shouldn't just focus on Liverpool because we need to be able to broadcast this show nationwide so that the whole country will want to tune in. So the new idea is to focus on something from a different city each show. This means that the show would either travel around each city, or have different people from all over the nation come to the set. Therefore, we need a title that will just round up what the show is about, in a short and snappy phrase. This is the next task we need to work on and so we will have this worked out for next week.

We next spoke about the fact that we were supposed to have a meeting last night with our guest 'House of Scouse'. Unfortunately, I got a text last week saying that they would have to rearrange the meeting because they had something on already and had forgotten. I didn't see this as something to worry about however because they seem like lovely people and so they rearranged the meeting for the 5th of November.

We then discussed what we might do for the title sequence. Prior to the conversation about the title, I was thinking about using the Liverpool skyline in some way as to establish where the show is set. However, because we need to make the show more national, this is what we need to rethink. We know that the titles need to be no longer than 20-30 seconds, this is usually what a title sequence length is. I am going to research Channel 4 title sequences to see what they like to use; this may aid us in impressing Ed Pugh from Channel 4 itself.

We then discussed the interview that we are going to do with our guest. We need to collect more information about them when we meet up so that we can think of some interesting questions to ask. The interview will be about 4 minutes long and so we need to take this in to consideration. I am going to email the questions that we come up with through to the guest before they come in so that they can have a gist of what they will be asked. I am hoping they can send responses that they would have for these questions so we can see where to go with the conversations.

We finally discussed what we are going to be doing with the demonstration. We are having a runway so that 3 models can come down and the boys can talk about their clothing range. We needed to discuss what we are going to do with the actual runway - we were asking if we could have it raised and this question still needs to be answered. Apparently there was a raised walk way used in the old TV studio, so the technicians are going to find out more for us for next week.

Today was very productive and I feel that we are finally on our way to having a great TV show at the end of the month! I can't wait to film the show and music item; this really is my favourite module on the course because I love both the practical and research side of television.

Speak Soon!

Thursday 1 November 2012

Applied Media Research - Choosing The Question

Today we were given the choice of what question we would like to do. We had to personally rate all of the questions 1,2 or 3. 3 being our least favourite, 2 being the middle favourite and 1 being our most favourite question.
Here is a recap of the questions with the ratings I gave them in order of my personal preference:

 1. Digital Fiction Factory (2)
The Internet, social media and other open systems have allowed for user generated content (UGC), crowd-sourcing and other forms of audience participation to prevail in digital media. But how do we translate these features into storytelling experiences, without treading on the toes of the author?

2. ONTECA (3)
What new models are there for selling media? When people download so much media freely, what are people willing to pay for and how? What are and what can we learn from the best monetisation mechanics for Freemium games on mobile?

3. Nine Lives Media (1)
Which are the three most successful ever examples of cross platform television programming, how did viewers participate and most importantly, what did they gain from the experience? (I would anticipate answers such as the London Olympics/Paralympics & Embarrassing Bodies) 

The reason that I chose the Nine Lives Media question is because I found it to be based around an interesting subject that I can relate to through my own personal use of the media. I also enjoy a lot of the work that Nine Lives Media have done in the industry such as their TV documentaries, e.g. The Human Mannequin that just aired recently on Channel 4.

After we all made our decisions, the papers were collected in and the lecturer tallied up the results. We were then put in to groups according to the choices we made. Not everyone will have got the question that they wanted to do, but fortunately I did!
I ended up in a group with two people that I am happy to work with as well so it has been an all round good day for this module!
We started work on the question by researching in to all different multi-platform shows. We can up with a list:
  • Hollyoaks
  • Big Brother
  • Doctor Who
  • Million Pound Drop
  • Becoming Human
  • The Walking Dead
  • Valemont
  • X Factor
  • Britain's Got Talent
We then decided to devise a questionnaire to give out to people so that we can start collecting data. Here is what the questionnaire looks like:
With this questionnaire we just wanted to find out some basic information about what people think of multi-platform media. After we do this questionnaire we can do a more detailed survey.

My Reflection
I think that filling in the sheet where we chose our questions could have been done online prior to the lecture; therefore we would have know what question we were having earlier instead of waiting around for the results. We then would have had longer to work in our groups to start our projects. Otherwise, this project will be fairly straight forward with the research methods being something I learned in secondary school so I am quite familiar with the techniques. I am happy with my group because we will work well together with no issues.

You Learn Something New Everyday
Sometimes you strike lucky!

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