Warp
Warp, also known as Warp Records, is an ongoing independent English record label which was founded in Sheffield in 1989, renowned for discovering some of the most enduring artists in electronic music.
Warp records was founded by Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell (deceased) from their experiences working at the FON record store, alongside producer Robert Gordon, the label soon became home to artists who would be highly influential in electronic music.
The first release (WAP1) was by Forgemasters (produced by Robert Gordon), whose limited 500 copy pressing of "Track With No Name" was financed by an Enterprise Allowance grant and distributed in a borrowed car. The first album released was Sweet Exorcist's C.C.E.P. in 1991. In the same year Robert Gordon left Warp.
Warp went on to release a series of singles and albums from 1992 under the Artificial Intelligence heading, a series of experimental electronic music releases by artists such as Aphex Twin. Initially all the album releases were gatefold sleeves and coloured vinyl, often with striking covers by The Designers Republic or Phil Wolstenholme.
In 1999 the label released Warp 10: Influences, Classics, Remixes, a compilation spanning six discs, featuring early acid house and techno music that influenced the label and its artists, as well as classic tracks from Warp's back catalog, and new remixes of Warp material. The collection celebrated the label's tenth anniversary.
In 2000 the label moved its operation to London along with its physical music and merchandise store Warpmart.
Co-founder Rob Mitchell died of cancer in late 2001.
In January 2004 Warp launched an online digital music store, Bleep, notable for being among the few stores to completely avoid all digital rights management features in the downloadable tracks, unlike other music stores such as iTunes.
On 27 September 2004 Warp released its second music video compilation, named WarpVision, featuring most of the videos produced from 1989 to 2004.
The label recently began to expand outside of electronica by signing indie rock bands such as, Battles, Born Ruffians, Maxïmo Park, Gravenhurst and Grizzly Bear.
For the label's 20th Anniversary in 2009, several Warp20 concerts took place in Paris, New York City, Sheffield, Tokyo, Berlin and London.
Wednesday 12 May 2010
Wednesday 14 April 2010
Evaluation
Useful websites to help you can be found in the link bar on the right hand side.
For the final 20 marks of the project, you must complete seven tasks on your blog, posting them in this order, with the question heading at the top of each task. You may do them as a pair/group, but must post individual copies on each blog. Make sure you answer each question as well as producing the visual elements. Try not to write more that 1500 words in total.
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups ?
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 1
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)
Remember when we looked at 9 frames from Art of the title sequence? Well now it's your turn to do the same with nine of your frames.
You should go through the final version of the project and select nine distinct frames which you screengrab and drop into a photoshop in the same style as the website. You will be using these to write about how typical or not of opening sequences your particular design is, so choose them carefully.
Once you have the nine frames neatly in Photoshop, screengrab the whole thing and post to your blog, then write an analysis of how you have used such conventions.
The aspects we would like you to consider across your nine frames are:
The title of the film
Setting/location
Costumes and props
Camerawork and editing
Title font and style
Story and how the opening sets it up
Genre and how the opening suggests it
How characters are introduced
Special effects
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 2
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Pick a key character from your opening. Take a screengrab of a reasonable sized image of them. Think of one or more characters from other films with some similarity to them (but maybe some differences too!), find an image on the web of that/those characters and grab it as well. Drop the two into photoshop, as a split screen. Export this splitscreen image as a jpeg then drop onto your blog and write about the similarities and differences in terms of appearance, costume, role in film etc.
So for example if you have a lone cop type character, look for other lone cops to compare him with...
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 3
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
For this question, you are going to do a 'director's commentary' style voiceover explaining some of the key features of your opening
You will need to script the voiceover which deals with institutional issues to include:
discussion of your production company name and logo and the role of such companies
What does a production company do? start here
the idea of a distributor and who that might be and why. start here
where the money might have come from for a film such as yours here
why the various people are named in the titles
which jobs appear in titles and in what order and how have you reflected this?
what your film is similar to 'institutionally' (name some films which would be released in a similar way)
You need to refer to actual company names and processes so you will need to go back to the early posts on film companies and maybe do a bit more research
When you have scripted, record the voiceover using Final Cut on a new audio timeline, then export to quicktime and embed on blog.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 4
Who would be the audience for your media product?
You should have a drawing of your target audience member and an explanation of what kinds of taste they might have- where they would shop, what music they would listen to, what their favourite Tv programme would be, etc.
make sure you have taken a phot of it, post it on the blog and write a few notes on why they would watch your film.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 5
How did you attract/address your audience?
You will use YOUTUBE's annotation tools to add NOTES, SPEECHBUBBLES, and LINKS to your video:
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=92710
These annotations will highlight the ways in which your Film Opening links to other similiar films in order to attract the particular Audience you have previously identified.
Your annotations will refer to genre conventions, use of music, similiarities with other movies and what you have identified as the Unique Selling Point of your imaginary film.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 6
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
In pairs, take a picture of each other holding the kit you have used. This might just be the camera and tripod, and your Macbook but there may be other things you want in the shot.
Drop the image onto your blog and annotate it, adding all the programs and other technology you have used as screengrabs and what you learnt about it/from using it. Your written text need only be minimal. You could include reference to all the online and computer programs you have used such as youtube, flickr, blogger, final cut,photoshop,vimeo garageband, etc.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 7
Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
Concentrate on editing and camerawork.
Grab some frames from both tasks and put them on the blog and show what you know about shot types, edit terms and techniques.
Make sure you mention the 180 degree rule, match on action and shot/reverse shot
For the final 20 marks of the project, you must complete seven tasks on your blog, posting them in this order, with the question heading at the top of each task. You may do them as a pair/group, but must post individual copies on each blog. Make sure you answer each question as well as producing the visual elements. Try not to write more that 1500 words in total.
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups ?
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 1
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)
Remember when we looked at 9 frames from Art of the title sequence? Well now it's your turn to do the same with nine of your frames.
You should go through the final version of the project and select nine distinct frames which you screengrab and drop into a photoshop in the same style as the website. You will be using these to write about how typical or not of opening sequences your particular design is, so choose them carefully.
Once you have the nine frames neatly in Photoshop, screengrab the whole thing and post to your blog, then write an analysis of how you have used such conventions.
The aspects we would like you to consider across your nine frames are:
The title of the film
Setting/location
Costumes and props
Camerawork and editing
Title font and style
Story and how the opening sets it up
Genre and how the opening suggests it
How characters are introduced
Special effects
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 2
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Pick a key character from your opening. Take a screengrab of a reasonable sized image of them. Think of one or more characters from other films with some similarity to them (but maybe some differences too!), find an image on the web of that/those characters and grab it as well. Drop the two into photoshop, as a split screen. Export this splitscreen image as a jpeg then drop onto your blog and write about the similarities and differences in terms of appearance, costume, role in film etc.
So for example if you have a lone cop type character, look for other lone cops to compare him with...
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 3
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
For this question, you are going to do a 'director's commentary' style voiceover explaining some of the key features of your opening
You will need to script the voiceover which deals with institutional issues to include:
discussion of your production company name and logo and the role of such companies
What does a production company do? start here
the idea of a distributor and who that might be and why. start here
where the money might have come from for a film such as yours here
why the various people are named in the titles
which jobs appear in titles and in what order and how have you reflected this?
what your film is similar to 'institutionally' (name some films which would be released in a similar way)
You need to refer to actual company names and processes so you will need to go back to the early posts on film companies and maybe do a bit more research
When you have scripted, record the voiceover using Final Cut on a new audio timeline, then export to quicktime and embed on blog.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 4
Who would be the audience for your media product?
You should have a drawing of your target audience member and an explanation of what kinds of taste they might have- where they would shop, what music they would listen to, what their favourite Tv programme would be, etc.
make sure you have taken a phot of it, post it on the blog and write a few notes on why they would watch your film.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 5
How did you attract/address your audience?
You will use YOUTUBE's annotation tools to add NOTES, SPEECHBUBBLES, and LINKS to your video:
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=92710
These annotations will highlight the ways in which your Film Opening links to other similiar films in order to attract the particular Audience you have previously identified.
Your annotations will refer to genre conventions, use of music, similiarities with other movies and what you have identified as the Unique Selling Point of your imaginary film.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 6
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
In pairs, take a picture of each other holding the kit you have used. This might just be the camera and tripod, and your Macbook but there may be other things you want in the shot.
Drop the image onto your blog and annotate it, adding all the programs and other technology you have used as screengrabs and what you learnt about it/from using it. Your written text need only be minimal. You could include reference to all the online and computer programs you have used such as youtube, flickr, blogger, final cut,photoshop,vimeo garageband, etc.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 7
Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
Concentrate on editing and camerawork.
Grab some frames from both tasks and put them on the blog and show what you know about shot types, edit terms and techniques.
Make sure you mention the 180 degree rule, match on action and shot/reverse shot
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