Duration: 1 hour.

Objective: Practice. To explore the role of actually putting theory into practice in the education of film and our understanding of cinema as part of a larger constructed media landscape. The listener should leave this episode thinking more thoroughly about how media texts and their meanings are artificially constructed from real and staged everyday occurrences and the challenges that can be encountered in thoroughly constructing those media texts and their messages.

Focus: A group of participants will be brought together and will be set the challenge to go off and produce a microfilm on their smartphones in a single day. Each of their experiences will then be explored in addition to the challenges they encountered and what they have learned from the overall experience. While the other participants are off making their films, I will go and capture some vox pop asking various people what they think is involved in the construction of media texts and how much they create media texts themselves on their smartphones, social media and in other forms.

Format: This will depend on whether or not I can get the participants together on the same day in which case the episode will employ two sit-down discussions: one before the participants go off to make their films and one after they have made them. The vox pop will be interspersed with the two sit-down discussions. However, If I can not get a group of participants together on the same day, I will have to create this episode over various days and cut each before-and-after interview together (which is not my preferred approach for the episode).

Structure:

Pre-Intro segment – Still thinking about this, but it will probably use some material from Test Episode 3: Is it necessary for all film students to make their own films?

Podcast Intro – (45 seconds) – Cave of the 8-Bit Binary Organ theme music as combined with excerpts from other media texts to create a summative overview of what is the Breaking Cinema podcast.

Main body – This will be determined by the content of the interviews and whether or not I can get the participants together on the same day.

Conclusion – This will be determined by what the participants have gained from the experience of making their microfilms.

Podcast Outro – a: “Thank you for listening to Breaking Cinema, like the Facebook page, leave a review on iTunes, etc.” message will play over the outro music.

Next Time on Breaking Cinema – a short teaser of the next episode.

Additional Notes:

• The microfilms produced will be made available online and this will be indicated in the final episode.
• The inclusion of vox pop will mean that I will need some release forms for this episode.
• The participants will be of varying focuses, i.e. not just film-centrics.

Media content to be referenced and included

Not applicable for this episode.