Pioneers! O Pioneers!

The Levis' Go Forth ad campaign by Wieden+Kennedy is one of the most powerful campaigns I have ever seen. The most powerful individual ad from the campaign is called "Pioneers! O Pioneers" from the Walt Whitman poem of the same name. The reason this ad is so powerful is the combination of the retroesqe footage combined with the original recording of Walt Whitman reading his poem.
The appeal of this ad is autonomy. The campaign is called 'Go Forth' it encourages freedom and being independent.
This advertisement plays on autonomy appeal through the words in Whitman's poem as well as the visual images. The ad refers to the viewer as the Pioneer, the original, the one with the freedom to do what they want. The visual aspects in the ad also play a role in the autonomy appeal. The actors are all running, escaping their lives, being carefree and independent. One noticeable part in the ad comes at the 27 and 49 second marks. The first features a man running alone with a flag in a field, the latter shows a huge group of people following. He is pulling more people to freedom, who are all wearing Levis.
This is one of my favorite ads. Enjoy:

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG8tqEUTlvs&feature=related

3 Act Structure in Dazed and Confused

Richard Linklater's breakthrough film, Dazed and Confused is about a group of high schoolers on the last day of class in 1976. A nostalgic film that makes me glad to not be a freshman in that era. Richard Linklater follows the classic three act structure in his film that takes place in Austin, Texas.
The first act is set during the day time. It introduces the ensemble cast. Everyone has their problems which are introduced slowly throughout the first act. Mitch Kramer is an incoming freshman and is afraid of getting paddled. The first act ends in a mini-climax with Mitch and his friends getting in a car chase with the seniors who want to paddle him and as his friend's mom pulling a shotgun on one of the seniors.
The second act is when the party night begins. The main party gets busted so the kids go to the pool hall until new plans can be drawn up. This is where we hear Matthew Mcconaughey's famous line, "that's what I love about these high school girls man; I get older, they stay the same age." The second act ends with Mitch Kramer and his freshman friends getting payback on one of the seniors who paddled them by pouring paint on him.
After a party in the woods, Mitch meets up with the girl who he had been flirting with for most of the movies and they watch the sunrise on a hill. The movie concludes with Mitch coming home and getting yelled at by his mom.

Episodic

One of the most common aspects of sitcoms is the episodic aspect. It's the return to normality no matter how an episode of a television show ends, the new episode will start as everything is normal and previous episodes will not be referenced to that often.

South Park is one of the most well known obscene sitcoms. It's been around for about 14 seasons and is still going strong. The key to being so successful? Being episodic. No matter how an episode ends, the next one starts new and fresh. One main episodic aspect of the show is Kenny, the friend in the orange hoodie who died almost every episode for about 10 seasons straight.

No matter what, Kenny returns every episode. Why? Because it's funny.
Also, being an animated sitcom can do the impossible and redraw everything is normal in the next episode. Mecha Streisand is a great example. Barbara Streisand turns in Mecha Streisand, and destroys the town. But in the next episode, every building is back to normal.

Shot Progression in the Intro to Borat

Borat, a film by Sacha Baron Cohen, is a mockumentary that follows Borat, a fictional news reporter from Kazakhstan in his journey across America. Borat hails from a very poor, underdeveloped village. Director Larry Charles shows the village using the standard shot progression formula.

The first shot we see is the long shot. The unpaved road, the overcast skies, the worn down wooden shacks make the village look very downtrodden.

The second shot we see is the medium shot.  We get a deeper look into actually how poor the village is. The clothes hanging on the line indicates a lack of washers and dryers, which indicates a lack of technology. We can now see how worn down the buildings are and the overturned car in the bottom left corner. The village gets more poor each shot.

The third shot we see is the close shot. It is the close up of one of the poor people in the village. His old clothes, dirty hat and scraggly beard are only half of it. It's his face that has seen it all. The worn look on his face shows that he is not living the life of luxury.

Larry Charles used shot progression to show the poorness of the village. He reverses the formula for a comedic effect later in the movie.

We see Borat washing his underwear in a pond seemingly alone. As the shot zooms out all the we see he is actually in a huge lake surrounded by people.

The Movies

The movie industry has changed so much in such little time. The studios used to have a 'studio system' which was vertical integration, meaning they had control over every part of the movie making process. A company like Paramount would produce the movie, but they would also only show it in their theaters. Also, actors were contracted out to specific production companies, so if an actor could only do a certain genre, the company could only produce films within that genre. For example, John Wayne was always in Westerns. He was cast specifically for cowboy rolls, so the company that 'owned' him, specifically produced Westerns because that is what their actors could do. MGM used its actors to make Musicals like "The Wizard of Oz" All the studios made a small amount of 'A' films due to the limited funds and stars, but 'B' films were coming out every week.

The only reason the 'B' Films were successful is because if an independent movie theater wanted to show a company's 'A' movie, the production company demanded that their 'B' movies get shown as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BigTrail.jpg

Those were the days...

Looking back, All in the Family could easily be considered an edgy show that wouldn't air in this day and age on a network like NBC or ABC. But what made it like that and why aren't there any shows like it on network TV now? It was brutally honest, but still managed to be funny.
Al in the Family had the situational comedy we love. The same plots and the rough, but not broken home. (Husband and wife fight, but love each other, like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Married with Children.)
All in the Family is different because the producers didn't mind offending groups like homosexuals if they got laughs from all their target demographics. Today's sitcoms adhere to a strict policy of not offending any groups. Seinfeld coined a useful term, for use when talking about homosexuals. When accused of being gay, Jerry states, "we're not gay, not that there's anything wrong with that." This is an example of network television not wanting to offend anyone.
It's not network TV that wanted this change, it was the viewers. It was the protests and the boycotts from the offended groups that forced the change. Offensive shows were pulled from network stations like Fox and moved to stations like Comedy Central.
All in the Family was an honest show. It didn't avoid controversial subjects like sexual orientation or race, instead it faced them head-on. They didn't care if they offended people, it was still funny.
The Seinfeld way to not offend homosexuals

source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ild8w0rHQU

Radio

Do you remember when the iPod first hit the market? The national craze over the newest technological innovation? This isn't the first time a new technology has taken over the world. It happened with CD's players, Walkmans, and boom boxes. But the thing that started it all was radio. The technological change is one of the main reasons that the radio became one of the main communication technologies that is still around today.
While the basic radio was constructed by Marconi, the patent owner of the radio as we know it today is Nikola Tesla. "http://inventors.about.com/od/rstartinventions/a/radio.htm" The first regular radio programming began on November 20th, 1920 and quickly progressed on from there. "http://inventors.about.com/od/rstartinventions/a/radio_2.htm"
What did this all mean? This new technology would lead to the quicker spread of entertainment, from music to program. But the invention of the radio also lead to nationwide propaganda most importantly about war. The radio was a key factor of the development of our country as a whole and indirectly lead to the creation of new inventions, like A tracks and cassettes.

The history of radio.
source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVMGJlj0KY4