Creativity: Theories

• "A process needed for problem solving... not a special gift enjoyed by a few but a common ability possessed by most people" (Jones 1993)

• "The making of the new and the rearranging of the old" (Bentley 1997)

• "Creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that comtains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognise and validate the innovation" (Csikszentmihalyi 1996)

• "There is no absolute judgement. All judgements are comparisons of one thing with another" (Donald Larning)

• "Technology has taken all the creativity out of media production"

• "A project that is too well planned lack opportunities for spontaneity and creativity"

• "Media producers can learn nothing from studying conventions of old texts"

• "Ththis particular understanding of creativity involves the physical making of something, leading to some form of communication, expression or revelation" (David Gauntlett)

• "If creativity is not inherent in human mental powers and is, in fact, social and situational, then technological developments may well be linked to advances in the creativity of indidivudal user" (Banaji, Burn and Buckingham, 2006)

Now and Then: Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in the West

ARTICLE
http://blogs.amctv.com/movie-blog/2009/08/now-or-then---i-2.php

Inglorious Basterds

This list from filmspotting.net forum lists and debates the reference's in QT's Inglorious Basterds:

1) The shot out of the doorway in Chapter One is taken from The Searchers. 

2) The rope burn on Aldo Raines neck is a reference to the ending of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. 

3) Operation Kino references the Russian and German word for cinema.

4) Aldo Raine is named for Aldo Ray who was a character is several WWII films. 

5) The film Nation's Pride is an obvious homage to German propaganda films. 

6) The character Hugo Stiglitz is named for the 70's exploitation star.

7) The Harvey Keitel cameo is a reference to "The Wolf" in Pulp Fiction.

8 ) The whole movie is an homage to The Dirty Dozen.

9) The three fingers part is taken from The Big Red One.

10) Antonio Margheriti (the name the Roth character takes) is the name of a 70's exploitation director

11) Cpt. Wilhelm Wicki (played by German actor Gedeon Burkhard) may refer to German director Bernhard Wicki, who directed the anti-war film “Die Brücke” (1959), which was nominated for an Oscar in the “best foreign language” category.

12) Chapter one is a reference to Once Upon a Time in the West. The first scene in both are very similar. They both start with the lady at the blowing sheets and contain a massacre that results in the death of a whole family except one girl.

13) The title references the original movie spelled Inglorious Bastards. 

14) Mike Myers’ smallish role as a British general named Ed Fenech, which is a nice little riff on the name of ’70s Italian movie starlet/sex symbol Edwige Fenech, who starred in some of the best giallo thrillers of the era.

15) Le Corbeau: Director Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 film about gossip, misinformation and paranoia in a small French village that turns friends against each other in a storm of suspicion and persecution. The Nazis, smartly sensing it was about them, banned it in Occupied France, so of course it’s featured on a Paris cinema’s marquee in “Basterds.” Improbable in real life, yes, but not in the QT universe.

16) G.W. Pabst: Famous German Expressionist director, mostly known for “Pandora’s Box,” starring Louise Brooks. Another filmmaker referenced in “Basterds” by its cast of movie-mad characters who talk and talk and talk about films when they’re not plotting each other’s demise, the Nazis weren’t fans of his Weimar era “decadence.”

17) Dark of the Sun: A 1968 “men on a mission” movie about mercenaries fighting in the Congo. Stars Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux. Taylor plays Winston Churchill in “Basterds.” Meanwhile, a female character has the last name Mimieux.

18) Jean-Luc Godard: As responsible as anyone for Tarantino’s love of running interference between the people doing the viewing and the thing being viewed, pointing out at every turn that this is “CINEMA.” Godard dedicated his French New Wave classic “Breathless” to American genre film studio Monogram Pictures and spent that entire movie framing Jean-Paul Belmondo as Humphrey Bogart. So when Tarantino throws text up onto the screen, like when he identifies “Basterds” characters with big bold blaxploitation-style fonts — anachronisms be damned, he does what he wants — he’s tipping his hat to the master.

19) Brad Pitt has a line of dialogue about fighting in basements a la Fight Club.

20) Fredrick Zoller is at one point referred to as the German Sergeant York, which is a nod to both real life character and the Howard Hawks film.

21) Sgt. Donny Donowitz is  supposed to be the father of Lee Donowitz from True Romance. Lee dies in a Mexican Standoff which is frequently used by QT and at least talked about in IB as well.

22) The pipe Landa smokes is a reference to the Sherlock Holmes films. 

23) Big face may be referencing 1984 (see image). It could aslo be a Metropolis reference  (One of Hitler and Goebbels favorite films).



24) There's a shot in Nation's Pride taken directly from Battleship Potemkin where a guy is shot and covers his bloody eye.

25) The lobby is exactly like the one in Action in Arabia (directed by Leonide Moguy in 1944 with George Sanders). Specifically the two stairs, the ceiling fans, and the timing of Colonel Landa’s and Sanders’ Action in Arabia character’s descent on the stairs.

26) Private Affairs of Bel Ami (directed by Albert Lewin in 1947, and also starring George Sanders) served as the inspiration for the big circle window in Shosanna’s living quarters, overlooking the cinema.

27) The David Bowie 'Cat People' music cue played while Shosanna Dreyfus puts on her 'war paint' is a double reference to Paul Shrader's Cat People and Jacques Tourneur's original, which co-opted German Expressionism for the film's style.

28) Maybe its just because its a popular German dish, but both IG and The Judgment at Nuremberg involve Stroodle.  In Nuremberg the American judge's German servants at the house he is staying at (a former high ranking Nazi), continue to push Stroodle on him.

29) The part in chapter one where the daughter shuts the window may be an homage to citizen kane, when kane is young, still living with his parents and outside sledding.

30) King Kong is mentioned in the bar game.

31) The shoe sequence is taken from Cinderella.

32) The final setting is reminiscent of Miller's Crossing. 

33) The Basterds shooting from the balcony is similar to Scarface. 

Some images from the thread:

Last House on the Left

How creative have you been in your AS and A2 productions?

How creative have you been in your AS and A2 productions?
Use the marking criteria for G325 to help you:

• Explain what you did and analyse the extent of your creativity.
• Give examples from the texts you created to support your points.
• Use terminology e.g. media terms, creativity terms.

Over the period of the course I have been creative in all elements of my AS and A2 production pieces. For my AS work I used the brief of creating a music magazine and tailored it to my creative ability. This was most evident in the genre as it allowed me to choose or develop a unique genre that is unconventional and not seen on the market before. I challenged the conventions of the genre and developed a mixed genre of past and present music combined into one product. This enabled my creativity thrive through a mixture of intertextuality and combining new ideas specific to my genre. Most evidently seen through my own magazine logo I used two different fonts, a modern hand-drawn aesthetic typography to represent the present element of my magazine genre with a classic Art Deco typography to represent the past. This was an effective use of my creativity as this allowed my magazine to be completely original and would not be reduplicated elsewhere. By adhering to a young adult audience aged 16-24, which is a common convention of the music magazine market, this allowed me to use elements that were more experimental that would be appreciated by that age group. For example, it was effective for me to use bright colour palettes such as the sharp red, deep blue and white that would attract my audience. This allowed me to create my own house style specific to my magazine, and which I could then reduplicate across the front cover page, contents page and double page spread. Although I was constrained to the dimensions of international A4 size and double A4 for my double page spread, it allowed me to use the space and layout effectively as possible. Otherwise I could over clutter my ideas rather than systematically position each element to attract the audience.

The AS product also allowed me to use new mediums to my own preference. This was mainly evident through the use of photography as I used my own artist and props (such as the American flag) to compliment the graphic design my magazine. I was able to choose my own white background and mise-en-scene such as heavy make-up and retro styled hair to appeal to the genre. This allowed my creativity to thrive as the photography was then completely unique to my product and was able to create an effective star image. This photography was a central feature of all pages and I was able to be creative within the post-editing stages of Photoshop and touch-up my artist and cut her out from the background so that my artist would appear seamlessly on the product. For the double page spread I also produced my own text, including the magazine article along with the contents page, sub-headings and cover lines to promote my artist and enhance the information I could provide. This allowed me to represent my artist in an entirely unique way and produce and completely original information. However, I was limited to the spacing of the documents, such as the double page spread where only several column spaces were available; therefore I had to decide carefully which features would be the most important to include.

Photoshop CS5 allowed me to extend my creativity as it provided a wide variety of editing tools to manipulate my graphic designs. For my A2 product I was able to scan a hand drawn image into the software which I manipulated to appear as if it had been drawn with a drawing tablet. I edited features such as the brightness, contrast and relevant levels and then overlayed them onto the background to remove the initial paper background from the scan. Here, the advantage of technology helped develop my drawing creativity to a final end design through the use of Photoshop's tools. My creativity here was more advanced than my previous AS product as all the features I had created by hand and further onto the computer, rather than relying on secondary mediums such as photography to turn out correct on the day of shooting. 

For A2 I followed a similar process for features such as typography and took inspiration from the 1950s era of style and trends. This enabled me to retrieve a specialist 1950s typography which I could then enhance in my own preferred way onto Photoshop by adding effects such as a drop shadow and outer glow. I could further specify features such as thickness and opacity to really emphasise my brand image for my logo. This influence of a different era allowed me to explore unconventional past features that would not have been as common in the present day market and helped me focus on creating a recognisable image. 

However, constraints that were compulsory with  my A2 brief in some way limited my creativity. For example, the digipak required certain regulatory requirements that meet industry standards and can be produced on a mass scale by external specialist companies. This meant that I could not experiment with new forms or irregular forms which could have appealed to my market. For example, I could have made a digipak in the shape of a foldable heart that would have been more aesthetically pleasing to my target market audience of 16-24 year old females. Although, I think working with the constraints of the digipak and the A4 album advert ensured that I did not over clutter spaces.

Randomly Generated CD Cover

The name of the band 'Oisly' was a random name from a Wikipedia page, and is a place located in France. 'It's the Exact Opposite' was the last four words of a randomly generated quote. The picture was a random picture from Flickr.

The dry terrain of the image reminded me of a country western themed album, so I also adopted a elongated san serif font to represent this genre of music.

AS:

• Genre

- Challenged the conventions of music genre - developed a mixed genre of past and present music
- Adhered to a young adult audience which is a common convention on the market
- The magazine adhered to original size convention of A4 to make the magazine appear conventional among others on the shelf

• Medium(s)

- Created my magazine using the digital medium of Photoshop to be applied onto an A4 sized paper
- Used photography which is a typical medium used within magazines

• Brief

-Designed a cover page, contents page and double page spread - could not produce additonal features and worked to the constraint of this

• Original

- Created my own magazine title and logo
- Produced my own photography which were completely unique to my magazine, as well as person and props - adhered to this convention that magazine work independtly to produce their own work
- Produced my own article and text alongside the magazine which was completely original to my magazine and no one else's

• Intentional or Unintentional

- Followed a house style (colour palette and typography features etc) as an intentional feature to make all three pages look consistantly uniform

A2:

• Genre

- Adhered to a young female audience that would idolise the female artist
- Enhanced the sexuality of my female artist to make both products appeal to both genders and fit into the mass market
- Music video was generic as it featured a track over video images
- Digipak had to fit into the certain template to fit in the market
- Album Advert has contraint of A4 and could not create an unusual shape to appeal to my audience

• Medium(s)

- I used pen and paper to create the illustrations for the Digipak and Album Advert
- Used paint as a feature on the background of my Album Advert which mixed digital technology with a physical medium
- Used video technology as the central medium for my music video - central convention of any music video

• Brief

- To create a music video that features your artist to promote a new single
- Create two ancillary texts, a digipak and album advert, that would support your artist

• Original

- Created the star image of a unique artist to feature in all my texts
- Sourced out unique locations for the filming of my music video which would not have been available to anyone else
- Created an original design for both my digipak and album advert that has not been produced the same anywhere else
- Created original illustrations for both my digipak and album advert that were specific to my artist

• Intentional or Unintentional

- The illustrations were an unintentional feature of my digipak, I had original wanted to use photography but I thought my draft illustrations created a unique way of representing my artist
- Intentional use of props and angles throughout my music video to present my artist in a specific way, especially supporting the theory of the Male gaze in order to appeal to a mass market
- My house style (colour palette and use of typography etc) was consistent for both my ancillary texts which was an intentional feature to make them appear uniform together
- I intentionally used the same illustration on the cover of my digipak and the same illustration on my album advert so that my audience would be able to easily recognise my artist against others and form a connection to the marketing campaign
- More intentionally aware of the function to sell my artist on my digipak and album advert

An Introduction to Creativity

This is what Pete Fraser, the chief examiner for OCR Media Studies, has to say about creativity:

"One of the possible areas you could be asked about in the exam is creativity. The projects you have undertaken will hopefully have felt like an opportunity to display your creativity, but you will need the chance to discuss what you understand by creativity and what it might mean to be creative.

The assignment options at AS and A2 all offer constraints for your work, whether it be making pages for a music magazine, the opening of a film or the packaging for an album; one of the reasons why you aren't offered total free choice is because people often find that working within constraints gives them something to exercise their creativity, whereas total freedom can sometimes make it really difficult to know where to start. It's why genre can be interesting- how has something been created which fits with certain structures and rules but plays around with them to give us something a little bit different?

The word 'creative' has many meanings- the most democratic meaning would really suggest that any act of making something (even making an idea) might be seen as a creative act. In more elitist versions of the term, it is reserved for those who are seen as highly skilled or original (famous artists, musicians, film-makers etc). An interesting third alternative is to think about how creativity can be an unconscious, random or collaborative act that becomes more than the sum of its parts."

Five Summarised Statements

1. Creativity can be excercised the most effectively when set to a brief, rather than total freedom
2. Creativity can be suited to fit certain genres, challenging, developing or adhering to rules
3. Creativity may result in an end product of any medium
4. Original and skilled acts of creativity are the most popular
5. Creativity can also come from an intentional or unintentional product

Five Key Words

• Genre
• Medium(s)
• Brief
• Original
• Intentional or Unintentional

Section A: AS versus A2

20 Songs on Shuffle

1. Taylor Swift ft. The Civil Wars - Safe & Sounds
2. Coldplay ft. Rihanna - Princess of China
3. Britney Spears - Drop Dead Beautiful
4. Lady Gaga - Changing Skies
5. Lady Gaga - So Happy I Could Die
6. The Wanted - Lightning
7. Lady Gaga - Blueberry Kisses
8. Britney Spears - Trip To Your Heart
9. John Travolta & Michelle Pfeiffer - Big, Blonde and Beautiful
10. Nikki Blonsky - Good Morning Baltimore
11. Katy Perry - Circle The Drain
12. Oh My! - Kicking & Screaming
13. Katie Melua - Call off the Search
14. Birdy - Skinny Love
15. Lady Gaga - Brown Eyes
16. Coldplay - Hurts Like Heaven
17. Christopher Plummer - Something Good
18. Coldplay - Clocks
19. Coldplay - Major Minus
20. Marina and the Diamonds - Primadonna

Hypperreality

hy-per-re-al
n. pl.

• Exaggerated in comparison to reality
• Used in semiotics and postmodern philosophy to describe a hypothetical inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technological advanced postmodern cultures.
• Means to characterise the way consciousness define what is actually "real"
• Reality by proxy

Postmodernism

post-mod-ern-ism
n.

• a late 20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism, which represents a departure from modernism and is characterized by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, a mixing of different artistic styles and media, and a general distrust of theories.
• A late 20th-century style in the arts, architecture, and criticism that represents a departure from modernism.

Paradox

par-a-dox
n.

• a statement of proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth
• a self-contradictory or fale proposition
• any person, thing, or situation exhibiting an apparently contradictory nature
• an opinion or statement cotnrary to popular opinion

Examples of Paradox

• "Only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed." - John F. Kennedy



I am a Paradox.



Intertextuality

in-ter-tex-tu-al-i-ty
n.

• the interrelationship between texts, especially works of literature; the way that similar or related texts influence, reflect or differ from each other.

Examples of intertextuality:



Marilyn Monroe the film 'Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend'







Madonna's music video 'Material Girl' has cinematic reference to
Marilyn Monroe's film





Bricolage

bri-co-lage
n.

• Something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available
• (in art or literature) construction or creation from a diverse range of available things
• something constructed or created from a diverse range of things.

Examples of bricolage:



Katsushika Hokusai - The Great Wave of Kanagawa



A bricolage from Hokusai's original print, with the addition
of new information including images and text



The Sex Pistols - God Save The Queen

My own design of a bricolage:

Queen Catherine Elizabeth

Section A: Task

Write down a brief description of your AS and A2 productions pieces of work.
You should include:
What you were asked to produce
The target audience
How you evaluated your product

AS
For my AS work I was asked to produce a new music magazine aimed at a particular audience and that appealed to a certain genre of music. The specification was to produce a cover page for the magazine along with a contents page and double page spread that included a relevant article for the music genre. My magazine focused on mainstream pop combined with retro pop inspiration (present and past) called 'Pop Heart'. My primary audience was females aged 16-25 years, with a secondary audience of lesser majority of 16-25 years male. Both these audiences share the commonality of enjoying mainstream pop music as well as retro music.

I evaluated my final product by constructing seven evaluations questions to assess to the extent how my product was successful. This included looking at to what extent my product adhered to conventions of real media products, whilst also looking at which conventions I didn't adhere to or conventions I had developed to make them innovative. I also evaluated how my product represented a particular social group, focusing on my target audience of young female adults, and how this was portrayed in the design of my product. Also, I evaluated whether my product would be suitable for the present day market, and which media conglomerate would invest in the niche magazine. My product was also evaluated in terms of how I deliberately attempted to attract my audience on all pages, and how I used particular design and lexical techniques to grab my audience's attention. Most importantly, I compared my final product with my preliminary design to assess how my skills have improved over time to create a professional appearance.

A2
For A2 I was required to create three products: a music video with two ancillary texts of a digipak and album advert that would be combined to create promote my new artist. This time my primary audience focused on both male and female aged 16-24 years. This was important as it suited the mainstream music market. I evaluated my product by self assessment through four vital evaluation questions. Again I looked at the conventions my media product used and whether I developed, challenged or adhered to these conventions. I also evaluated how the continual process of audience feedback translated into progress through my product and how this improved my product from my draft to final product. This was a significant part of evaluating my product as it gave me a range of feedback to work upon. I also evaluated the technologies I used through the research, planning, cosntruction and evaluation stages. I looked at how effective the combination of my main product and ancillary texts were combined to create a successful product.

Section A: Skills Development 5 Key Areas

Digital Technology
Adobe Photoshop CS5
Adobe Premiere Elements 8.0
Windows Movie Maker
Lighting Techniques
Panosonic HD video camera
16GB SD Card
Portable Harddrive
Glogster
Scribd
Prezi
Microsoft Word 2007

Creativity
Appealing to a certain target market to enable me to create niche and unique product
Using Photoshop to enable me to express my ideas in a systematic digital way

Research and Planning
Research: Textual Analysis of other texts, colour palettes, looking at conventions in similar media products,
Planning: Creating a draft, storyboarding,

Post-Production
Adobe Photoshop CS5
Magazine: Cut out central image, manipulated appearance of typography by adding shadows, outer glows and fill colours, increasing the brightness/contrast and saturation to make artist look more appealing,
Digipak
Album Advert
Adobe Premiere Elements 8.0

Using conventions from real media texts
Mise-en-scene: clothes, locations, props, make-up, lighting
Filming: 180 degree rule, lighting, lip syncing
Typography
Magazine: Masthead, sub-heading, typography, central image, rule of thirds, page numbers and titles in the contents page,
Digipak: Image of a front cover, track list on the back, using logo of real media record company,
Album Advert:

Section A: Skills Evaluation of Production - Question 1(a)

Task

Put the requirements of this question into your own words:

• Describe and evaluate your skills development over the course of your production work.
• Describe and evaluate how your skills have developed over a period of time from your AS and A2 coursework.

Evaluating: weighing up how I have improved from AS to A2, to what degree have I improved and how the standards have increased. What I could do better even more to improve further. Compare my skills from AS to A2 and how my knowledge has advanced using media progammes that create each production work.

Production work
AS:
Preliminary Magazine: Cover, Contents Page
Final Magazine: Cover, Contents Page, Double Page spread

A2:
Preliminary Music Video, Mime
Preliminary Music Video, The Kills 'No Wow'

Draft: Final Music Video, Lexi and the Spectrum 'Living Dead'
Final Music Video, Lexi and the Spectrum 'Living Dead'

Draft: Digipak and Album Advert
Digipak and Album Advert