Exam: Merlin analysis

Today in media we looked a status in the running TV series of Merlin. We tried some new note making techniques to see if it would be faster and easier to get as many notes as we could down ready for our detailed analysis essay. We used the grid method i chose 4 different sections which were 'office with the woman', 'street market before the fight', 'fight with prince', 'old guy talking about magic'. Then i spoke about the camera, editing, sound and M.E.S this helped me to pick out the main technical features which i have been struggling on lately. However i found that i was quite restricted to how much i should write because the boxes were so small and i couldn't fit my writing in to it, so in all i did miss out on certain notes and some might of been important and essential for me to use.

However we picked out the different positioning of the camera, the way it travels such as a pan and the way it goes from one transition to the next. We also looked as prevalence of the character, new editing cuts such as intercutting and how that effects the pace of the rest of the section of sequence and what that may connote of symbolise for the rest of the extract. There was also a great amount of focus of the sound and the non-deirgetic sound and what that may do to the tone and effect the feeling to the whole piece i found this quite an easy thing to do as i am a musician. An example of this would be at the beginning when the music is very eerie and manly played in the minor scale to present it is a very sneaky uneasy tone. However out of all the technical features we looked at today on the Merlin extract i found it specifically hard to analyse the M.E.S because i normally analyse it and by accident describe instead of analysing in a detailed and technical way. But overall it was a bit overwhelming because we had never put all of the technical devices together as one and trying to include and describe them all with out babbling and describing i found was very hard.

I then went home and wrote all that i had found in the analysis in a essay form this i found especially difficult because there was so much to write that i kept on writing to much that had nothing to do with the question. This i need to learn to do and also to stop describing and start to use the correct terminology such as a wide close up or a long shot or a birds eye view. I then also need to use this and describe it in detail and also get the right place where it was shown. I also think that the way i sectioned the piece up wasn't as good as it could of been i could of been able to fit in at least one more section and split up the fight. I could of split it up in to two things post magic and then the use of magic this would of been easier to talk about and it could of also broken up my essay a lot more and of made it flow and of added a sense of continuity.