Dissertation – Blog Entry Five

  Had to give our presentation in the lecture today and Jaks absence made it extremely hard to get across a lot of our idea since it was mostly his idea to begin with, Matt and I bumbled our way through it and it suffered badly as a result. Lecturers raised some interesting points and I made a decision with Matt that, if by next Friday, we’ve not been able to come up with a question for the cookery show project we’ll go our separate ways and will go to our fallback projects, I plan to spend most of the next week furthering my research on recipes, production values and also on developing my autism in the media idea as my fallback option, hopefully by the time I post here again things will be better and the outlook this project will be much brighter

Dissertation – Blog Entry Four

    An hour before the lecture I met with Jak and Matthew to work out what roles we would each take on and what we would each do in writing our proposal and actually doing the dissertation. Matthew took on the issue of feminism and gender in the target audiences of cooking shows, Jak handling looking at cooking shows in general and I would be handling the production values, looking at what shots, lighting, sound, camerawork, etc were frequently used in shows and what we could re-adapt for our own show. We also decided to do a series of shows, each one looking at a different recipe. I spent most of the previous week watching as many cooking shows as I could get my hands on, Ready Steady Cook, The Naked Chef, Come Dine With Me, River Cottage, Delia Smith and even Man VS Food, an American show aimed at a mostly male audience.

      I’m also planning to try and work out what recipes we should do and what we should use, finding as many as possible and trying them out myself at home, hopefully I can find recipes that’re simply, interesting, can be done within the time frame of the show and would make viewers want to copy them. So far this week I’ve tried sautéed chicken and a pasta sauce, sadly neither could be done in the half-hour time slot, my search for good recipes continues but I’m confident I can find good ones we can use as well as write my part of our 5,000 word proposal for our dissertation. The main problem I’ve been finding in my research is most cooking shows that at least try to make dishes the viewers can follow along with are an hour long, not 30 minutes and I’m having doubt as to whether we can do any good dishes that will take less than the 30 minutes we’ve given for each episode of the show, I’ll mention this to Jak and Matthew the next time we meet up

Dissertation – Blog Entry Three *Backdated*

In the week I met with Matthew and Jak and we worked on our initial idea some more. Jak and Matthew had the idea for making not just a cooking show, but a cook-a-long show similar to what is so popular in America. In British cooking shows the host generally works on the recipe at their own pace and either gives a link to access the recipe elsewhere such as on a website or it appears on the screen in the show at some point for a minute or so (before the advent of the internet). Generally speaking, the shows are to watch only and most people will not use the recipes themselves. One example of this formula is the show Come Dine With Me on Channel Four where the actual cooking takes up a small part of the show and there are only links to the shows website for anyone who actually wants to use the recipes featured on the show themselves. Even in cooking shows that focus on the cooking of a single dish, the cooking is done very quickly, at the pace of the chef themselves and would be nearly impossible to follow at home, such as on Britain’s Best Dish which is set out more like an entertainment show then a show you could cook along to.

  In contrast American cooking shows employ the cook-a-long method where the presenter takes their time and in some cases leaves gaps so the people watching at home can catch up and do the steps the presenter outlined. This format is extremely rare in British cooking shows which are set out more like standard entertainment and is a format me and my group feel is very underused and has a potentially big audience for. We agreed to watch some cooking shows and meet up the following week to finalise our dissertation proposal

Dissertation – Blog Entry Two *Backdated*

I looked over the notes from this week’s lecture and began to realize just how massive an undertaking the dissertation is. Though I’m not afraid of it, as many great people have said throughout history: Nothing in life that’s worth doing is ever easy

   Taking note of what Andy and Simon said during the lecture and after spending most of this week looking into each idea in turn, I’ve made the following decisions about my four topic ideas:

1.      Autism In The Media – Out of all my ideas this was the one I was hoping to use for my dissertation. I was able to find a wide variety of sources in different media from the manga With The Light to episodes of popular American dramas House, Scrubs, Cold Case and several American films such as Adam, The Boy Who Could Fly, Bless The Child and even a Thai martial arts film Chocolate. While I found plenty of sources I found they were all either in some way or another glamourizing the disorder, or having the autistic character act very out of character such as in the episode of House where the autistic character, a child, gives House his PSP, something extremely unusual, in the film The Cube the autistic character was a savant who was essential to the group escaping the Cube prison, of everything I looked at only the Scrubs episode and With The Light seemed to portray autism realistically and even then in Scrubs the autistic character was barely on screen. I decided that I couldn’t make the topic into a good dissertation and decided to abandon it, with the proviso of returning to it only if the other options were un-doable

2.      A critical comparison of Japanese and Western horror films – I spent the better part of two days researching this idea and tracking down films I wanted to compare. Chaw and Jaws for Creature Feature, Battle Royale and Friday The 13^th for slasher, Tomie and Saw for psychological horror and Freddy VS Jason and Ring (the original Japanese film that inspired the later Hollywood one) for big budget film. It started off well but after reading several books including The Oxford History Of World Cinema, I started to realize just how big this idea was and how much I would need to cover. I thought about abandoning the individual sub-genres and focusing one on film from Japan and Hollywood but even then, the amount of material available and potential areas for discussion were simply too big, I didn’t trust myself enough not to get drawn off on a tangent or use up all 10,000 words without actually answering my intended question: How do Japanese and Western horror films differ cinematically. If I ever decide to do a masters or a PHD thesis this would likely make for a brilliant topic but now, for my dissertation, it’s simply too big

3.      Anime as a creative medium – I looked at this idea first and then abandoned it early on after realising one major problem: I couldn’t come up with a good question to write my dissertation on, a very bad sign, so this idea was immediately abandoned

4.      The group work/cooking show – I kept this idea as my fall back option and after going over it with the other two group members, Jak Matthews and Matthew Kincarr, I felt this was an idea I could really work with and make something good out of and the Jak and Matthew were, form my own experience with working with them in the past, very reliable. I made the decision to do the group project with them but if for one reason or another, it fell apart I would return to my original autism idea and try to make something out of that.

With my dissertation idea chosen I’m looking forward to knuckling down and getting some serious work done, here’s to the future!

Dissertation – Blog Entry One *Backdated*

After going over my lecture notes in great detail I decided to go with my usual approach to these kinds of assignments/deadlines: Make 4 or 5 choices, explore each one and then decide which of them I think I’ll be able to do the best in, the ideas I chose were the following:

 1: Autism in the media – I go out and track down as many cases as possible where autism is featured in any media (ie. books about it that are meant to entertain, episodes of TV series where a character has it or is featured in an episode, etc).

  Why?

  Because I’m interested in the disorder, as well as having it (albeit very mildly myself) and already have some inkling of how it may be portrayed, mostly high functioning autism and in the Rain Man vein of representing the disorder, it should prove interesting to see whether my inital opinion will be proven right or not

2. A critical cinematic comparison of Japanese/Asian horror to Western/Hollywood horror – I will watch one film from Japan/Asia and one Western/Hollywood made horror film and do a critical cinematic comparison between the two, what cinematic techniques they both use and where they differ (ie. colour schemes, underlying themes to the films, how they go about scaring their audience, etc, etc, etc). I plan to select one film from each of the sub genres of horror films, Creature Feature, Slasher, Psychological Horror and one big budget film from each area (ie. Uzumaki from Japan and Freddy VS Jason from Hollywood) that the area is well known for producing, is ‘stereotypical’ of the area and its type of horror films

   Why?

    I’ve always enjoyed horror films and more recently, Asian horror (the original Grudge, Chaw, etc) and feel a cinematic comparison of the two geographical areas of film will have a wide variety of academic material to help me, and that I can create a relatively new/unusual hypothesis (that cinematically, both areas use a lot of similar techniques and aren’t as different as many people believe)

3. Manga/Anime as a creative medium – I go out and track down manga/anime that cover issues and topics that generally, they’re not assumed to cover (ie. cooking, sports, psychology, politics, economics)

  Why?

   Anime and manga have always been a great passion of mine and in the course of reading/collecting them I’ve found a great many that cover topics I didn’t expect to see covered ( Life – Covering teenage depression and suicide, Akumetsu – Focusing on the relationship between political corruption and the stagnation of the economy, With The Light – covering autism, etc) and firmly believe it is as much a useful creative medium as television, books and the like

4. A group project of a series of cooking shows – Two other students and I will create a cook-a-long show

  Why?

  Creating the cooking show is similar to what I’ve already done in other modules ie. Filming a documentary in year two and creating a short film this year and would let me work in a way I’m very used to already and lets me play to my strength, so to speak