TV Show-Down: Top Gear vs Loose Women

Round One: The Presenters

Top Gear: The Top Gear presenter entourage consisted of Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond. All members of the presentation team are male and it is clear that the show is mostly aimed towards a male audience. The three have a strong friend like relationship which translates across well on screen and relates to its target audience in a jokey colloquial manner. This manner helps create lasting memories in their audience often finding people referring to specific lines used by the presenters. Although they do a good job at avoiding revealing the fact, it is apparent that a lot of their discussion are scripted beforehand.
Score: 9/10

Loose Women: The Loose Women show currently consists of four predominant anchors; Kaye Adams, Ruth Langsford and Andrea McLean and an additional rotating panellist from show to show. The ladies all have a similar colloquial mannerism to one another but don’t engage in the ‘boyish’ banter that the Top Gear team do. They instead aim to appeal to ladies as the title suggests by occasionally engaging one another in gossip and jokes. There discussions feel much less scripted and free however their discussions don’t create lasting impressions on its audience. The rotating cast also means that a particular cast member a viewer enjoys could not feature in the next show and potentially loose fan base, but also new presenters to the show could have an opposite effect.
Score: 7/10

Round Two: The Look

Top Gear: The set design of the Top Gear show is situated in an open warehouse type environment and filled with cars and various car paraphernalia, from old run down cars to car seats and an engine coffee table. The whole show is very centrally themed on cars and establishes exactly what this show is about from the get go. Its opening graphics of the spinning axel and the title Top Gear also reinforces the car theme. The shows theme tune is snazzy and upbeat with a quick pace to it, again matching the theme of racing cars. The set is quite minimalist however and there is little colour thrown in, perhaps as a method of appealing to a male audience.
Score: 7/10

Loose Women: The set design for the Loose Women, like its presenter entourage, changes from season to season so i’ll be looking at its most recent incarnation. Their set is also quite minimalist but makes use of vivid popping colours to draw in its viewers. This I feel draws in the female audience it is intended for and creates a ‘modern woman’ feel, as does the dress code of its presenters and guests. The theme of the show is more broad and generally aims at what a female audience might find appealing and as such doesn’t have niche items like Top Gear does.
Score: 8/10

Round Three: The Content

Top Gear: The content of Top Gear is spelled out from the very start of the credits: Cars. And yet, it manages to appeal to a much wider audience than simply car enthusiasts through various funny challenges and special star guests. I personally find Top Gear more interesting of a show then the Loose Women and I am not a car enthusiast at all, yet as a male I think it appeals to me for many of the reasons mentioned before. One piece of content that I feel Top Gear could have benefited from would be more interaction with its audience perhaps in the form of voting or tweet suggestions for challenges.
Score: 9/10

Loose Women: The Loose Women show covers a much broader and topical approach to its show than Top Gear does, creating an interesting variations of stories each week compared to Top Gears singular approach. I personally find the stories discussed on Loose Women to be of little interest to me with a major focus on celebrity gossip and weekly relevant news stories. This is not surprising as the show simply isn’t aimed at me. I feel like the show could benefit from a more permanent presenter group with a different star guest to mix it up from week to week.
Score: 7/10

Bringing It All Together

The paradigms of media have altered drastically since the invention of the internet that has connected all of these variations of media into one new form. Our generation grew up in a time before the invention of social media whilst younger generations will have grown using social media in ways that we never could at that age. This is just one effect of the invention of the internet and how it has impacted on every day life. The art of social media has presented us with a way of presenting ourselves in an international manner. It seems like websites such as Facebook and Twitter have been a part of our lives for as long as we can remember, websites that allow us to archive our lives in small banks of data that continue to be accessible even after expiration. Here is a video that Facebook produced to introduce there timeline feature:

Professor Marshall McLuhan has the insistence that the audience wants something to do and his famous assertion of 1964 that the medium is the message, essentially prophesied the rise of the internet and interactivity of TV shows and the audiences involvement in the creation of media. Media has adapted throughout the years:

• The 19th Century – Text, Newspapers, Journals, Panoramas, Photography
• The 20’s, 30’s and 40’s – Film, the Silver Screen, Epic, Self-Indulgent Fantasies
• 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and 70’s were characterised by TV
• 80’s were about Video/Playback and Computer Games
• The New Millennium saw the birth of the Internet, Convergence and the participation of the audience in a more personal level.

In this ever expanding world of media on the web , how do we create an impact? Often studying the things that got viral is an interesting way of understanding the patterns that occur. Often shocking images or elicit imagery is something that makes a global impact. We live in an interesting world where by videos of a girl eating a bloody tampon disturbs audiences where as a video of a black man being shot eight times doesn’t, the internet has also created a sense of desensitisation for violence and gore but not so much for things society deem weird.

“Natural talent does NOT exist. Not even child prodigies and savants have natural talent. Everything they achieve comes through practice. 10,000 hours – minimum is what the number crunchers say. That’s 3 and a half years, eight hours a day, seven days a week. Thats what it takes to be shit hot at something”

Production Roles and Storyboards

It is imperative to any well organised documentary production team to have clear and defined production roles these can include; Director, Editor, Camera Person, Audio Technician and Interviewer. After a discussion in todays meeting we arrived at defined production roles for one another and we briefed one another on exactly what that role meant to them and the team as a whole and what was ultimately their responsibility. Our production roles currently stand as follows:

Michael Moser – Director
Karen Jensen-Clark – Audio Technician
Chris Caswell – Interviewer
Grant Snaith – Camera Person

My role as Camera Person is to operate the camera on the day of shoot, in order to do this there are a number of factors I must master beforehand. I will have looked into the storyboards in depth and prepared a visual for each shot in my mind so that when commanded to do so by the director I can assume the necessary shot without having to double check the storyboard again. I must also learn to utilise the camera and it settings and the other various equipment associated with it (Shoulder mount, Tripod etc). This is imperative as time cannot be wasted in messing around with settings, the settings should already have been pre-determined before shoot to reach the optimal appearance for our choice of visual style and then only need slight tweaking to adjust to light levels on scene. In addition to this I should take the time to hone my camera movement skills as this is an area I have previously highlighted as a trouble zone for myself. I will be doing so by booking at a camera and shoulder mount/tripod every other day and practicing tracking, zooming, panning and other styles of movements.

1) What are we trying to say about our character?
Maurice is a fascinating person to talk to who simply has so many stories to tell that we could have honestly chosen from a hundred different subjects related to him, however the most interesting aspect is his history as a war evacuee. Our documentaries ultimate goal is to tell our audience just what it was like for Maurice at this tender age to be taken away from his parents to a strangers home who’s only motivation for doing so was money from the government. It should also be made apparent just how mentally strong Maurice was during this time in his life and how he has overcome such trying times to live a happy life thereafter. In some respects we think this is relatable to modern day society and the debate about people having children to receive funding from the government without adequate means of looking after them.
2) How will you gather and order your research information?
We are currently in the stages of research into our subject Maurice and his past as an evacuee during the Second World War. We decided that the first and best place to start was a group meeting with him without cameras and just a simple mic to capture the conversation. This took place on Monday and went really well. Not only did this help to put Maurice at ease and familiarise him with the group but we also all got a better sense of our story and we each got a better visual for the story at hand. Advancing on that we have decided to further research into other stories and the historical facts behind the Second World War evacuees and will be posting our research onto our blogs. We think this is imperative to our success as a better understanding of the subject at hand can only help us to better tailor our questions to manipulate our interviewee into an emotionally provocative answer. Our final piece of research will be to take a day trip out to Coalville and the countryside that Maurice was evacuated to during the war. We intend to take Maurice back here during our filming and so this would be essentially location scouting better allowing us to storyboard this section of the documentary.
3) What is the editorial hook or angel on your subject?
The emotion of this story is a key factor that we have decided to really focus on during our documentary. During our meeting with Maurice off camera there were several moments picked up on by our group and on audio recording where it was apparent that the memories were close to bringing him to tears. It was these little moments that we realised we must capitalise upon to evoke an emotional connection from the audience. We would like our audience to have watched the film and ask themselves ‘What would it have been like if this had happened to me?”. In order to do this we really want to emphasis the separation from his parents at an early age and the need to learn street smarts in order to survive.
4) Decide on a visual style for your film?
When we went to visit Maurice we all took note of how the natural light from the large windows created a warm and yet soft lighting to the visuals and we all agreed that this would be an ideal visual style for our piece. We feel that the warm colouring creates a more personal feel to the story and since Maurice is quite elderly a cold colour could create a more lonely and isolated feel.
5) What is the heart of the story that can be told in three minutes?
The nucleus of our story is the separation of child and family as Maurice was taken out to Coalville, Leicestershire during the Second World War to avoid the bombing runs. We would begin our story from the moment of evacuation to his first place of residence and the difficulties he encountered here with poor heating and little food and then follow him to his second accommodation and conclude with his return to his parents. Each act of the story will take roughly a minute of the three minute long documentary.
6) How are you organised as a production team?
See Above
7) Why would this appeal to our intended audience?
Our story is a timeless tale of the hardships of youth in the trying times of the Second World War. It is an area that many British people are aware of but rarely stop to consider the effects of and as such our documentary is centred around the principal of revealing this. We would class our intended audience in the stereotype of Middle Class parents and grandparents of an age range from 50 to 90. We theorise that younger parents would tend to be disinterested in subjects such as the World War where as 50 to 90 would encompass those who were alive during the war and had similar experiences who might wish to reminisce about the past. 

Presenting our early storyboards: %5bUntitled%5d (1) %5bUntitled%5d

Who Would Want to Work With People?

Once again I find myself in a position of conflict within the groups structure, but this time perhaps more so as half of the group seems to have decided to take up arms against the final product that myself and another basically produced alone. So as you know if you’ve been keeping up to date with my posts regarding raw 105MC documentary our myself and a lad named Oliver stayed up till the early hours of dawn to finish off the video to the best of our abilities and meet the deadline of 10am hand in. I went to sleep that night feeling naively happy with what I felt was the best outcome from the limited filming we had gathered.

Oh was I so wrong, the editing process had basically been between myself and Oliver despite us opening it up to everyone to come along and have their say and input, they just didn’t seem interested. Yet this morning I wake up to a text from Oliver saying “Don’t think the rest of the group liked the video”. Immediately my eyes rolled in my head and my heart sank, I was reminded of Project 160MC and the troubles my group then had encountered during the editing process (something about the editing process just brings the devil out in people). I went onto our Facebook group page and was reading comments like “This isn’t uni standard” “They can tell its not organised” and all of this from the two people who had the least input into the project itself. They had all been given clear dates and times for filming, for editing meetings and for reviews of the footage before uploading yet they seemed unable to steer away from the lures of student life.

I am by this point furious if you couldn’t tell that for the second time (and likely third by the time I get round to reviewing my most recent 160MC project) that I have felt like we have dragged someone along in the group only for them to turn around and say its shit when it is simply too late to do anything about. I don’t know if I’m just choosing the wrong people to work with or if every group is encountering these problems but frankly all its going to take is for one of ‘these people’ to say the wrong thing to me and I will simply find myself speaking my mind.

The Magic of Music

Im a big fan of film and television soundtracks, I feel a good soundtrack can sometimes save an otherwise terrible film, they add pace and narrative to a scene and create all manner of feelings from sadness to tension. For example the film Amazing Spiderman 2, despite being a slightly less then average film, had an amazing soundtrack to it that perhaps without it would have left the film to fail. Its use of techno and dub step during scenes with main antagonist Electro are really inspired and allow you to feel his pains of being lonely and an outcast. The fact that these particular genres of music are combined and put into use here is a clever link to his name, ‘Electro’ and his ability to shoot bolts of lightning at his enemies, in much the way people associate with that genre of music, particularly dub step music videos. Below is the Electro music and then another video depicting a take on dub step combined with ‘flashy’ lighting effects.

Some films use music against what is being shown in their films to create a sense of unease, for example using happy music during a particularly horrific and gory scene will make the audience feel at edge because the two do not join up. Alternatively, the music could be employed to reveal the emotions of the killer or aggressor as being happy, this would create a rather psychotic feel to the character in question. An example of this can be seen in the film Reservoir Dogs by one of my all time favourites Quentin Tarantino during a torture sequence that most will probably recognise. During this scene the music is used to create a sense of almost enjoyment of the torturer, whilst also making sense within the context of the scene.

Another way that music is often used, and was used rather effectively in a trailer I posted not too long ago, is when they take a piece of music that is typically associated with fairy tales or happy children’s songs and remake it into some form of dark and sinister tune whilst maintaining its lyrics or a similar melody to it. This has been used time and time again and to great effect as it strikes a cord at our very childhoods, to a time of naive safety and turns it on its head. Heres an example of this where the nursery rhyme ‘twinkle, twinkle little star’ used within the popular horror survival video game Dead Space 2. I hope that this has helped to open your eyes as to the importance of sound within film.