FILM INDUSTRY

SHEPPERTON STUDIOS

Listen to Radio 4's programme Today Thursday 10 February on BBC Sounds.

Then read Mark Sweeney in The Guardian below

Mark Sweney

@marksweney

Wed 9 Feb 2022 07.36 GMT

First published on Wed 9 Feb 2022 07.00 GMT

Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service has struck a record-breaking deal to lease space at Shepperton Studios in the company’s first long-term commitment to making TV programmes and films in the UK.

The company’s multimillion-pound deal with Shepperton, home to productions ranging from Alien to Mary Poppins Returns, will see it join its rival Netflix in having an exclusive contract at the Surrey studio as the streaming wars continue to fuel a race for space to ensure that productions can be filmed without delays.

While details of the deal have not been disclosed, it is understood that Amazon’s lease is for well over 10 years – longer than similar deals struck by Netflix and Disney, which has secured space at Pinewood Studios, the parent of Shepperton – which makes it the biggest vote of confidence to date in the UK’s booming £6bn TV and film production industry.

“Shepperton has long been synonymous with top-tier television and movies and we’re proud that it will be home to many [Amazon] Prime Video productions in the years to come,” said Jennifer Salke, the head of Amazon Studios, which started filming productions in the UK in 2016 with The Grand Tour, from the ex-Top Gear hosts Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond.

Amazon said that the next two years were expected be its busiest yet for UK-made productions, with Shepperton due to come online in 2023 when an expansion of the site is complete.

The company would not say whether Shepperton would play a major role in the shooting of the eagerly anticipated Lord of the Rings adaptation, after the surprise decision to shift filming of the second series from New Zealand to the UK.

While Bray Film Studios and Bovingdon Airfield have been chosen as initial production facilities when filming begins this spring – between them, the locations have been used by productions including Fast & Furious 6, Justice League, Rocketman and Mamma Mia! – regions of the UK including Scotland are hoping to benefit from the big-budget series seeking to ape the New Zealand settings of the Peter Jackson trilogy.

For Pinewood, which has spent more than £1bn expanding its studio capacity since 2014, its bet on the streaming-fuelled demand for shooting facilities is paying off.

“It is superb for us,” said Paul Golding, chairman of Pinewood Group. “There are essentially five studios out there today with the guarantee, clear visibility and capacity of their production slate to enter into long-term contracts, and we now have deals with three of them.”

The other two – the Batman-maker Warner Bros and Universal, home to the Fast & Furious franchise – have their own facilities at Leavesden near Watford and the soon-to-open Sky Studios Elstree in north London.

Pinewood and Shepperton will have grown from 29 sound stages across 100 hectares (250 acres) to 63 across 202 hectares (500 acres) when the latest investment programme is complete.

“That is not the end of it,” said Golding, who said Pinewood had consent for a further 65 hectares (160 acres) to be developed. “It is a ringing endorsement of not just Pinewood, but also the UK film and TV industry.”

TV DRAMA: GRAY'S ANATOMY

Answer the question below, with detailed reference to specific examples from the extract only.

1   Discuss the ways in which the extract constructs representations using the following:

  • Camera shots, angles, movement and composition

  • Editing

  • Sound 

  • Mise-en-scene [50 marks]

Today we put into practice the exam board's advice to start the exam response with a clear outline of how we understand the representations as a whole.

• we make links across the whole extract
• we avoid description and aim for analysis
• we tackle all aspects of media language in each scene (not one by one for the whole extract)
• we may refer to theorists if relevant and helpful, such as Stuart Hall

Next lesson we cover aspects of other theorists:

• Stuart Hall - reception theory - how different audiences 'receive' or read texts differently
  
• Roland Barthes - denotation and connotation The Rhetoric of the Image
  
• Levi-Strauss - binary oppositions 
• Vladimir Propp - narrative structures
• Tzvetan Todorov -  equilibrium > disequilibrium > restored but different equilibrium
  

TV DRAMA: THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT

To do well:

• start your response with a short paragraph that is a solid basis, an overview of how you understand the place, people, issues
• use a cohesive, holistic approach - you could analyse both the scenes featuring the reception boys together
• write in an analytical not descriptive way

Answer the question below, with detailed reference to specific examples from the extract only.

1   Discuss the ways in which the extract constructs representations using the following:

  • Camera shots, angles, movement and composition

  • Editing

  • Sound 

  • Mise-en-scene [50 marks] 

Tackle your analysis in the order of the scenes 

The Queen's Gambit (Season 1, Episode 2 Exchanges Netflix 2020) Beth Harmon is adopted from an Orphanage by a middle-class childless couple. Suddenly plunged into a confusing new life in suburbia, teenage Beth studies her classmates and hatches a plan to enter a chess tournament.

inpoint 33.27 "You're home late"- Alma (mother) ..."I was out walking" - Beth

Outpoint :"Beltik's the state champion"  Townes. 

"Which is which?"  Beth. 

"Sh!" Townes.

CCR 1: COMPLETING 'HOW YOUR FILM OPENING REPRESENTS SOCIAL GROUPS & ISSUES'

In the autumn, during your research, you created Pinterest boards collating images of social groups and issues in your film opening. Your production is now nearly completed and you have a clear concept not only about who and what is in your film but also how you want them to come across to your audience.

In this presentation, you will use your knowledge of theoretical frameworks to present your characters in their social contexts and the issues / ideas that inform their world. 

In class, you watch two presentations that are core concepts in your entire course:

Video on representation  

Stereotypes can be distort representation because they reinforce specific ideas about people, often negatively.

For Stuart Hall, stereotypes are generated because of the limited stereotypes the hegemonic elite show us.

 

Video on reception theory  

For Stuart Hall, there is no one single fixed 'meaning' of any media representation or text; different audiences understand representations differently. A film maker may encode a character in a particular way, but different audiences decode the same character differently. Hall writes about these different understandings of any media text as the dominant (or preferred) meaning /reading, a negotiated meaning /reading and an oppositional meaning /reading.

 

In class, we look at how you have used visual and sound codes to construct your characters.

We discuss how your audiences may 'read' your characters. 

 

For instance, Vendetta includes a scene in which the murderer plays his guitar in front of what resembles a shrine to the girl who has betrayed him. Her picture, the flowers and the darkened room along with the music, suggest an element of ritual, of displaced self-righteousness, of warped justice. Is he made mad by love? Crimes of passion and jealousy are familiar themes in literature and a teenage / young adult audience may see in this central character similarities with the Duke of Ferrara from Robert Browning's dramatic monologue My Last Duchess in which the Duke justifies his murder of his young wife:  

Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

    Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

    Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together.