"Breaking Bad" - technological convergence and exchange

This is not a film yet the cinematography, editing, mise-en-scenes and great acting sets this exceptional TV series apart from every other. You could do worse than analyse scenes from this series from YouTube for TV drama. British TV drama is light years away from the quality offered by Breaking Bad. The programme is also one of the darkest, funniest, strangest and most humane programmes ever to air.


Here, you can see an example of EXCHANGE in which YouTube's contributor, Politely Homicidal, has edited together extracts from the programme and scored it with a song which features in one of the episodes. Of course, anyone (with the necessary editing skills) could do this by using digital technology in a laptop with decent editing software, and then uploading the result through the Net in YouTube. This is one of the great upsides of technological convergence. Ironically, the song is very significant for Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a struggling high school chemistry teacher with many family issues because White turns to cooking crystal meths after he is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The song is by Mick Harvey and its called, "Out of Time Man".



Here's a good example from the series:


And another, although this one plays around with the part after the explosion:

The Women of Mad Men - an essay by Myles McNutt

http://memles.wordpress.com/2007/12/16/the-women-of-mad-men-an-essay/

Mad Men's G.I. Dick: Don Draper as Korean War Veteran by Allison Perlman

G.I. Dick: Don Draper as Korean War Veteran

by Allison Perlman — New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers University-Newark

A great piece followed by intelligent discussion on Don Draper's reinvention of his identity and his "conflicted masculinity".

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2009/04/20/gi-dick-don-draper-korean-war-veteran

The Oppressive Rectangularity of the Fluorescent Light in Mad Men by Jeremy Butler

The Oppressive Rectangularity of the Fluorescent Light

by Jeremy Butler — University of Alabama

An excellent analysis and discussion on fluorescent light and its historical representation in Mad Men and in US film and TV.

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2009/04/11/mad-men-style

There's another article on Madmen's cinematography and use of fluorescent lighting here.

http://www.ascmag.com/magazine_dynamic/March2008/Television/page1.php

Falling Man and Mad Men - an analysis of the opening credits

by Gary Edgerton — Old Dominion University

Gary's analysis of the programme's opening credit sequence with several posts discussing this sequence.

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2009/04/14/falling-man-and-mad-men-154

Mad Men: why women don't get ahead in advertising

Why women don't get ahead in advertising

Here's an interesting clip with a discussion on the representation two female characters from Mad Men. It's by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass — Manchester Metropolitan University.

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2009/04/15/why-women-don-t-get-ahead-advertising

A video essay on camera technique and alienation in Mad Men

This subtle and clever video essay by Jefferson Robbins focuses on the cinematographer's camera techniques and how they established the visual grammar of Mad Men. Robbins also makes a couple of intertextual references to Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 film Notorious as he establishes the director's influence over the second season's cinematographer, Christopher Manley.

RETRO: The Camera & 'Mad Men'
Uploaded by Jefferson_Robbins. - Full seasons and entire episodes online.

The source is Film Freak Central.

Representatation and Ideology - as a concept map

Click on the image to enlarge.

Media students should find this concept map useful when analysing all types of media texts for representation in AS and A2. Remember that meaning in film and media texts is created in a social context and not individual one.

Here's another music video to analyse by Madonna: "Like A Prayer".

This music video was criticised by various church groups in the late 1980s. Being risque comes with the territory for artists whose music videos challange the existing boundries of public taste when their videos were made. It would develop your skills to have a go at analysing it for Representation: ideology, class, age, sex, race and with Andrew Goodwin's theory.

An Ideology map: important for AS and A2

One of the key ways to understanding Representation is to consider ideology. Remember that Representation means how Gender, Race, Age and Class is represented in the media, including the films and programmes that you study.