Legal, Ethical and contractual issues letter.

To whom it may concern,

The purpose of this letter is to point out the contractual, legal and ethical issues with the job advertisement.

First of all there are many things legally and ethically wrong with your application form for apprentice digital video production producer, to start with the name of the job role is very vague. Most of the details about the role are too vague, the salary on the advert isn't accurate at all so whom ever applies doesn't know what they're getting themselves into. The same goes for the hours, it way too big of a time frame for anyone to consider applying. This is a contractual issue because of these things not being clear. There are also some confidentiality issues with filming such a touchy subject, especially because the person applying wouldn't even be working for you at this point.

This contract infringes the equality act because it discriminates against ages and religion, the contract isn't giving everyone applying an equal opportunity. Everyone needs to be given the same opportunities despite age, race or religion. The video idea is a very sensitive topic, which could cause the applicant emotional harm, as well as possible physical harm, if one of the interviewees gets aggressive,  but because they're not employees they would not be protected with the health and safety guidelines. Trade unions could help if this person was an employee and was being treated incorrectly but, once again, they wouldn't be employed so the union could do anything.

Since the applicant won't be employed by you when they are making the short documentary, you are avoiding legal responsibility for that person, especially because it's a sensitive the applicant could get in a difficult legal situation and you wouldn't be responsible, although not illegal, it's highly unethical. Once again this is a very difficult thing to film, and the direction you've given makes it seem like there's a bias, you only want male offenders to be interview, although the vast majority of offenders are male there are still some female, so this wouldn't be fair representation, and would cause social concern. It would be extremely hard to do a respectful re-enactment of events which such a small budget, you clearly have no regard for what the documentary is about.

This also goes against protecting the 18s Ofcom code, because this is being marketed towards young people to could be given a high age rating or just not be allowed to exist. It would have to be done extremely carefully, this would be next to impossible with such a small budget. Because you're showing this video to high school children the target audience is obviously young teens, so you'd have to be very careful with obscenity. The video would probably be given maybe a 15 or and 18 due to the nature of the video, depends on how it is filmed. You have also said to use a popular song for the sound track, this would be completely impossible with the budget, it costs a lot of money to licence and popular song and £20 isn't going to cut it.

Yours sincerely,

Robbie

Ownership and Funding

Ownership Concepts

Public Service Broadcasting

The idea of PSB was created when the English started to broadcast radio and they didn't want commercial broadcasting because they thought it was exploiting the audiences by making very low effort content but  profiting massively due to the amount of adverts that were broadcast. The BBC is a good example of PSB, it has a license fee that television owners have to own in order to access its contents.

Commercial Broadcasting

Commercial broadcasting is the opposite to PSBs they use adverts to make money, ITV is one of the biggest examples of commercial broadcasting. BBC is the only publicly owned TV broadcasting company, ITV is privately owned.

Global companies are companies that operate in multiple countries, they are usually big companies that own many other companies. These are called conglomerates. Here are some examples of big companies that own sub companies.








Vertical integration is when a company try to own all the different sectors of the process of releasing a project, this is to maximise profits, if a company produces a film they're not going to want to pass it on to another company for them to make more money off it. Walt Disney is an example of a company that follows this integration.

Horizontal integration is when companies try to acquire competing companies to expand their business while also taking away the competition. These are several examples of horizontal integration.

Funding Types

The licence fee was introduced by the BBC because they didn't want to commercially broadcast. A licence fee is a fee some broadcasters charge to view their channels.

A subscription is similar to a licence fee, a big difference is that subscription fee are based on monthly or yearly payments. Things like Netflix and Amazon Prime video use subscriptions.

There are things like DVDs and blue-rays, that only require a one off payment, although this is very quickly becoming outdated.

Pay per views are usually for sports events, you pay for one single event, this is a very good way to make money if there is a massive sporting event happening. For example it's used a lot for boxing matches. Sky box office is a pay per view website.

Sponsorship is a big way to make money in movies and TV, people could get paid to wear things, or to promote a certain product. This can make a lot of money for the people promoting things based on how well known they are. Certain programs on commercial channels have sponsors, shown just before the program starts. 

Advertising has some overlap with sponsorship, sponsorship is a kind of advertising, the main kind most people will be familiar with would be adverts on TV, this is how commercial channels make their money.

Product placement is when a TV or film is paid by a company to show their product, for example if someone was drinking, coca-cola could pay the production company for that person to drinking coke.  

Private capital is when a production company is given money to make a product as a loan, or for a percentage of the revenue the project produces. Many of these are partnered with banks, for example Barclays have a private capital/equity firm.

Development funding is when a big company, for example the BFI, funds small projects that are unlikely to be commercially financed in the early stages of development, giving small film makers a chance to have a funded project.

Crowd-funding is a method of getting funded by asking the public for money, websites like Kickstarter or Gofundme, are very popular examples, this is could be a very good way of getting funded if you are a small film maker or you couldn't get funded any other way. There are downsides, for example this method has a very small success rate, because anyone can pitch anything, there tends to be a lot of none-serious projects. This makes it harder to get noticed.

Single camera screenplay, final

Technical Skills development

The task was to film a short film about somebody receiving bad news, and to include different types of shots in it. I played the lead in this short film, and I also did a lot of the editing. The end result turned out okay although it was a bit shorter than we had planned. I have learnt that it is very important to film masters shots.

The task was to record a small convosation from a script, one of the read throughs my role was to read one of the charactors lines, and the second read through I was in control of the boom mic. The end results were okay although the levels of audio weren't stable, sometimes they were really quiet and others thye were too loud. I leanrt a lot of this task, for example, i learnt how to properly hold a boom mic to record the best possible sound. Also the importance of recording somewhere that isn't too windy, in the audio we recorded the wind is very stong, which ruined some parts of the audio.

The task was to get different shots using different kinds of lighting. My main role on the task was being the subject of the pictures that were being taken. The end result was good, a lot of the pictures showcase different types of lighting really well, but a few of them are out of focus. I have learnt that there are a lot of ways to creatively light a set to make it look really unique. I also learnt about the impact of using jells on lights.

 

Guide to preparing material for editing

First off you must use a local login instead of a network login, this means you'll only be able to access the files you create on this computer on this computer. This is important to do when editing video because the files will be large and won't be able to transfer over the network smoothly.

You will find the SD card slot on the back of most macs, once the SD card is inserted it will appear on the desktop. highlight all the files you want and drag them over to where you want to place them. Before doing this you should make a folder for your project, under the movies folder would be sensible.

With in this folder you should make other folders, one for the video, one for audio and one for graphics that you might create, your actual Premiere file should also e saved in this folder. You should drag and drop all of your video files into the video folder and all the sound you recorded into the audio folder.

 Once this is done if you just right click on the SD card and click eject the card will be ejected safely.

It's important to make sure the project is set up correctly before you start this. Make sure you set the file to save in the correct place, this is very important for file organisation to make sure you keep all of your files together. It's also important to make sure all of the scratch disks are set to the right locations, this makes sure that everything save to the right folder.

If you right click on the bin section in the bottom right hand corner of the screen there will be a drop down menu, click import and select all of the files you need to import. It's important to make bins to put all of the footage into, and to make sure that the bins mirror the folders in the project folder. If they're not it could get confusing. I also have a folder for music, which is where I imported my music into, it is very important to make sure the music you use in royalty free, it would be illegal if not, or if the source isn't credited properly, a good website for music to use in projects is incompetech, this website has many free to use songs, as long as you credit the website.

Under the footage bin I separated into days of shooting just to make it a little bit easier to navigate and find files that I need, although this isn't necessary, it does make it easier to locate things.

To create a title click file go to new and scroll down and click legacy title. a box will pop up for you to create and edit a title.