Thursday, 21 January 2010
Billboard research
Sam and i have developed our research into supporting pieces and created these annotated billboards to help us produce billboards for the documentary. From this research we have learned that bold and simple designs stand out and are more effective than detailed pictures. We have also noticed that the larger and simpler the font the more the writing stands out. As i driver myself i have had bright coloured billboards catch my eye and the big writing puts the point across to drivers passing by.
Editing continued...
The opening is not yet complete but we have moved onto edit little clips of the Darryn Lyons interview to add into the opening. We have selected the clips which relate to the documntarys main points about paparazzi. We have extracted the sound out of the clip and therefore have been able to use it as a voiceover aswell.
In one section of the interview Darryn describes the key characteristics of 'celebrities' that people are obssessed with, these include, drugs bash, celebrity cars and celebrity cellulite. I have found pictures related to these topics and used his footage as a voice over whilst photos are shown. We decided to use transitions amking it look as if from a film strip, this gives the slide show character and a light hearted theme on a serious issue.
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Darryn Lyons Interview
Aswell as editing the footage from the interview, i have been looking into the ideas for our supporting piece and decided on a write up of the interview.
This was tricky to complete as the sound of the interview is not as clear as we had hoped due to the camera quality. I have been able to go through playing and pausing the video on quicktime every other sentence to be able to type up the answers Darryn gave us. As i have now completed it, i am going through adding in the appropriate gramma to the word document and will upload it to blogger once completed.
The next stage is to plan out how to present this information as one of my supporting pieces.
Below is the interview write up with correct gramma. Now i have to think of how to present this information as a supporting piece.
Darryn Lyons Interview
How did you start your own company?
Well I saw a big niche in the market, in probably the early 90’s, where the Sunday newspapers do these kind of centre spreads once every two or three weeks on big celebrity stories and the old entrepreneurial clan kicked in and I saw a business opportunity. I was working full time as a free lance on the Daily Mail and worked every hour to do celebrity pictures, there was only one magazine called Hear magazine which was a German based publication. I saw the advent of today’s newspaper which was celebrity led and really I suppose the explosion of celebrities we see today. I suppose I was one of the starters of the whole paparazzi movement, which was celebrity’s being the inspirational culture that is today. God knows how many splashes of newspapers are on what celebrities do today.
Do you find celebrities come to you for help?
I have great relationships with many celebrities globally these days, we also have a P.R company, our own television production company and in London we have studios and obviously the core business which is Big Pictures. There is also an outlet in America, mrpaparazzi.com, which is now the biggest blog in Europe when it comes to breaking celebrity news, 3 million people a month log on to get their celebrity fix. So, yeh we are very celebrity orientated. There’s an explosion in the industry today and we are the biggest in Europe if not the biggest in the world when it comes to working with celebrities and actually doing a lot of celebrities P.R. We work with a lot of brands, fashion brands, in terms of getting across and being associated with the celebrity image today.
Do you find you have good and bad relationships with the celebrities?
Yeh I don’t think there’s any doubt, there’s a little bit of a miss conception when it comes to me personally. I think I am the global face of paparazzi but I have very close friendships at the likes of Kelly Brooks, Simon Cowell, Katie Price, all sorts of different celebrities, in the world around, in Hollywood mainly being based in Britain and Australia. I suppose I crossed from one side of the camera to the other these days, I suppose a lot of people regard me as a celebrity in my own right when it comes to the amount of television, my TV has now been seen in more than 80 countries globally and I am very recognisable and you can see with the old hair do! That’s very much me and my style, is my style. I think when celebrities get close to me and understand there’s a little bit more to the man than behind the hair and the intelligence most people would like to hide. I think at the end of the day business has to be fun, im certainly not a gambler in a casino but I have certainly been a massive gambler in business , but its all risk and the great thing about me is I always remember where I came from. I came from a small country town called Jalong at the bottom tip of Australia, at the end of the day if I have to go back there and live in a tent, it wouldn’t phase me.
Do you find you get involved in legal cases?
Certainly in the last few years, with the European court of human rights and its decision where Britain is very much part of the European law these days which I see is very sad on the free press. Certainly the press in this country has changed dramatically in the last three or four years. We’ve been involved in a few very high profile court cases one being J.K Rowling, which we won initially, but then we lost on appeal, well we didn’t actually lose we were given the right to go to trial but it was just unaffordable taking on a multi billionaire. To this day I still think we are all very much right in what we are doing and I think that celebrities no doubt have taken advantage of the media, the press and the legal system when it comes to privacy these days, in fact in a very wrong way. I think the law and the government are leading celebrities into a situation where they can use their own protection for their own self gain which I think is a very sad state of affairs in a country like Britain today. We are vastly seeing the erosion of press freedom and in fact I would almost put it down to a certain control and protection from the government point of view to protect people that certainly shouldn’t be protected because as far as im concerned celebrities are aspirational figures and they make their money out of being photographed. I look at myself as one of the greatest P.R men in the world, I give them their oxygen to survive and become famous. I don’t think you should be able to turn the tap on when you want to sell a CD, movie or a record and then turn it off when your having sex and cocaine, when your doing the wrong things with someone you shouldn’t be doing and having an extra marital affair. So the fact of the matter is yes I think Britain has become totally mislead by Europe when it comes to privacy in a basic, basic human right of a free press.
The public are know to have controversial views towards the paparazzi, how do you feel about this?
I’m not so sure the public do have controversial views to the paparazzi. I think paparazzi has become very coal cool and I think that we love to see the train crashes of today’s society. I think we love exploiting the pressures of today’s society, I think celebrities have been created by the people for the people so the fact of the matter is I don’t see how anyone can complain about it. It’s the old story of don’t shoot the messenger. The fact of the matter is if you’re buying the product, you’re watching it on television, you’re listening to it on the radio, the obsession with the younger generation about fame and aspiration today is all about the celebrity culture. I suppose I was one of the ones of the early pillars of that creation of the celebrity inspirational culture. I think its quite a good thing, I don’t think it’s a bad thing I think as long as the celebrities understand that they are aspirational figures and unfortunately they do have to tow the line in what kids are looking and watching at. Unfortunately not a lot of them can deal with that, they think they have the right to do what they want to do because the obscene amounts of money they get and the fame that they possess. I’m of the great opinion that celebrities think they are from another planet and their of a far superior race to us normal humanoids and some of them which I’ve seen, go off the rails as it goes to their head. As I’ve said the greatest thing you can ever aspire to is to never forget where you came from, whether your famous or not famous at all. I think that’s the secret to ones success, but they certainly do like their own P.R but only the way they want to see it and that’s not the way I photograph it or report it. All I’m doing is reporting and photographing what’s in front of me, I can’t orchestrate a photo. I mean the paparazzi are probably one of the greatest recorders of historic perspectives in terms of photography that we will have in a thousand years time. All I see is myself recording history of today’s modern culture and I think the last decade particularly celebrities are going to be remembered like the sex, drugs, rock and roll of the sixties. The millennium will be remembered as the aspirational culture that was the celebrity world at its time.
Why is there a high demand of pictures for celebrities?
I think there is a high demand of celebrity’s pictures because we want to look and live our lives through someone else’s eyes. I think the inspirational of wanting to be famous, of understanding what makes celebrities tick, I think most people, they don’t remember that all they really are is the same as a normal person and I think that the problem is with celebrities that they think they are not normal people, people will never change. There have been fame to situations going way before Christ, and even Christ himself is a famous person, so the fact of the matter is that things are far more conservative than thousands of years ago in today’s society. I don’t think anything has changed that much, celebrity has always been there but myself Darryn Lyons, Big Pictures and Mrpaparazzi has exploited the fact that celebrity is a big business today as media is. We love watching peoples misfortunes, unfortunately that’s a fact, whether its celebrity cellulite, celebrity stars in their cars, or celebrity drugs. The fact of the matter is the Britney spears and Amy Winehouse’s of this world will always be the hottest hits on the internet, when someone in fame has misfortune, that’s not my fault, im only reporting it, people do have a huge appetite to see people succeed then fail.
What is a typical day for one of your photographers?
Well they are briefed the night before; it’s very much run like a newspaper or magazine, more so a newspaper in this office. We have morning and evening conferences, we know who the x factors are, we know who the top ten celebrities of the given week are, they change like the stock exchange, they change daily, they change by the minute, who’s famous and who’s not famous. Its basically keeping our finger on the pulse of who’s famous and who is worth money globally around the world that particular day, who’s in town, who’s coming into town, who’s worth watching. If you have a choice of watching Cheryl Cole, who is big bucks at the moment, or Katie price or Elle Macpherson, you probably wouldn’t want to watch Elle Macpherson but ten years ago you probably would have. So celebrity culture changes very quickly on whose hot and who’s not and it’s all about keeping your finger on the pulse of who is the most famous and who is worth the most money.
Do you think your business has been affected by the recession?
Without any question the whole world has been affected by the recession, the last few months have been the hardest in our business lives, without question. We have had to lay off a tremendous amount, 30% of our staff, I can see there are certain green shoots of this coming out of it, I think the media has been bashed in all sorts of ways, its been bashed legally and by the recession, its been bashed by less people reading newspaper, all of a sudden the demand is changing. We are also going through a massive technological revolution that people in the media don’t really realise. You know people are transferring their thoughts online to mobile, where we as a company are very much at the fore front as I have pushed for the last few years, seeing the success we have had online, its not always the monetary success. Sitting in a position on content ownership, with big pictures and the big group of companies that are very globally high esteemed as we own our content, well most of that content and the rest of it is licensed where as a lot of media organisations don’t own their content. We can use that content in revenue earning ways to source television through new media in terms of the internet online and mobile so that’s an exciting time for this company and we are seeing massive change and certainly the recession without any question has hit the media hard for most companies.
Where are the hotspots?
Well the general hotspots are the usual suspects they are restaurants, clubs and events. We certainly have huge amount of informers that are coming from around the world, we also have celebrities that tip us off about where they are and what they do on a regular basis, a lot of big celebrity clients who are under a non disclosure so we cannot release who they are so that’s for obvious reasons. A lot of the paparazzi you see today is set up by the celebrities to make them more famous in the global commercial world of today, working with celebrities is far more important to me than working against them in this day and age. The world of celebrity dictates the glamour of fashion, it dictates whether we should be wearing Chole or Christian Louboutin. Fashion celebrities and fashion culture, dictates what women want and where they direct their husbands, where they are going on holiday, buying a new car, buying a handbag or a man- bag. The fact of the matter celebrity culture today is the ultra dominant brain washing technique of the generation of our time and I think most people underestimate how powerful the celebrity genre is today and im at the for front of making that happen and commercialising it.
This was tricky to complete as the sound of the interview is not as clear as we had hoped due to the camera quality. I have been able to go through playing and pausing the video on quicktime every other sentence to be able to type up the answers Darryn gave us. As i have now completed it, i am going through adding in the appropriate gramma to the word document and will upload it to blogger once completed.
The next stage is to plan out how to present this information as one of my supporting pieces.
Below is the interview write up with correct gramma. Now i have to think of how to present this information as a supporting piece.
Darryn Lyons Interview
How did you start your own company?
Well I saw a big niche in the market, in probably the early 90’s, where the Sunday newspapers do these kind of centre spreads once every two or three weeks on big celebrity stories and the old entrepreneurial clan kicked in and I saw a business opportunity. I was working full time as a free lance on the Daily Mail and worked every hour to do celebrity pictures, there was only one magazine called Hear magazine which was a German based publication. I saw the advent of today’s newspaper which was celebrity led and really I suppose the explosion of celebrities we see today. I suppose I was one of the starters of the whole paparazzi movement, which was celebrity’s being the inspirational culture that is today. God knows how many splashes of newspapers are on what celebrities do today.
Do you find celebrities come to you for help?
I have great relationships with many celebrities globally these days, we also have a P.R company, our own television production company and in London we have studios and obviously the core business which is Big Pictures. There is also an outlet in America, mrpaparazzi.com, which is now the biggest blog in Europe when it comes to breaking celebrity news, 3 million people a month log on to get their celebrity fix. So, yeh we are very celebrity orientated. There’s an explosion in the industry today and we are the biggest in Europe if not the biggest in the world when it comes to working with celebrities and actually doing a lot of celebrities P.R. We work with a lot of brands, fashion brands, in terms of getting across and being associated with the celebrity image today.
Do you find you have good and bad relationships with the celebrities?
Yeh I don’t think there’s any doubt, there’s a little bit of a miss conception when it comes to me personally. I think I am the global face of paparazzi but I have very close friendships at the likes of Kelly Brooks, Simon Cowell, Katie Price, all sorts of different celebrities, in the world around, in Hollywood mainly being based in Britain and Australia. I suppose I crossed from one side of the camera to the other these days, I suppose a lot of people regard me as a celebrity in my own right when it comes to the amount of television, my TV has now been seen in more than 80 countries globally and I am very recognisable and you can see with the old hair do! That’s very much me and my style, is my style. I think when celebrities get close to me and understand there’s a little bit more to the man than behind the hair and the intelligence most people would like to hide. I think at the end of the day business has to be fun, im certainly not a gambler in a casino but I have certainly been a massive gambler in business , but its all risk and the great thing about me is I always remember where I came from. I came from a small country town called Jalong at the bottom tip of Australia, at the end of the day if I have to go back there and live in a tent, it wouldn’t phase me.
Do you find you get involved in legal cases?
Certainly in the last few years, with the European court of human rights and its decision where Britain is very much part of the European law these days which I see is very sad on the free press. Certainly the press in this country has changed dramatically in the last three or four years. We’ve been involved in a few very high profile court cases one being J.K Rowling, which we won initially, but then we lost on appeal, well we didn’t actually lose we were given the right to go to trial but it was just unaffordable taking on a multi billionaire. To this day I still think we are all very much right in what we are doing and I think that celebrities no doubt have taken advantage of the media, the press and the legal system when it comes to privacy these days, in fact in a very wrong way. I think the law and the government are leading celebrities into a situation where they can use their own protection for their own self gain which I think is a very sad state of affairs in a country like Britain today. We are vastly seeing the erosion of press freedom and in fact I would almost put it down to a certain control and protection from the government point of view to protect people that certainly shouldn’t be protected because as far as im concerned celebrities are aspirational figures and they make their money out of being photographed. I look at myself as one of the greatest P.R men in the world, I give them their oxygen to survive and become famous. I don’t think you should be able to turn the tap on when you want to sell a CD, movie or a record and then turn it off when your having sex and cocaine, when your doing the wrong things with someone you shouldn’t be doing and having an extra marital affair. So the fact of the matter is yes I think Britain has become totally mislead by Europe when it comes to privacy in a basic, basic human right of a free press.
The public are know to have controversial views towards the paparazzi, how do you feel about this?
I’m not so sure the public do have controversial views to the paparazzi. I think paparazzi has become very coal cool and I think that we love to see the train crashes of today’s society. I think we love exploiting the pressures of today’s society, I think celebrities have been created by the people for the people so the fact of the matter is I don’t see how anyone can complain about it. It’s the old story of don’t shoot the messenger. The fact of the matter is if you’re buying the product, you’re watching it on television, you’re listening to it on the radio, the obsession with the younger generation about fame and aspiration today is all about the celebrity culture. I suppose I was one of the ones of the early pillars of that creation of the celebrity inspirational culture. I think its quite a good thing, I don’t think it’s a bad thing I think as long as the celebrities understand that they are aspirational figures and unfortunately they do have to tow the line in what kids are looking and watching at. Unfortunately not a lot of them can deal with that, they think they have the right to do what they want to do because the obscene amounts of money they get and the fame that they possess. I’m of the great opinion that celebrities think they are from another planet and their of a far superior race to us normal humanoids and some of them which I’ve seen, go off the rails as it goes to their head. As I’ve said the greatest thing you can ever aspire to is to never forget where you came from, whether your famous or not famous at all. I think that’s the secret to ones success, but they certainly do like their own P.R but only the way they want to see it and that’s not the way I photograph it or report it. All I’m doing is reporting and photographing what’s in front of me, I can’t orchestrate a photo. I mean the paparazzi are probably one of the greatest recorders of historic perspectives in terms of photography that we will have in a thousand years time. All I see is myself recording history of today’s modern culture and I think the last decade particularly celebrities are going to be remembered like the sex, drugs, rock and roll of the sixties. The millennium will be remembered as the aspirational culture that was the celebrity world at its time.
Why is there a high demand of pictures for celebrities?
I think there is a high demand of celebrity’s pictures because we want to look and live our lives through someone else’s eyes. I think the inspirational of wanting to be famous, of understanding what makes celebrities tick, I think most people, they don’t remember that all they really are is the same as a normal person and I think that the problem is with celebrities that they think they are not normal people, people will never change. There have been fame to situations going way before Christ, and even Christ himself is a famous person, so the fact of the matter is that things are far more conservative than thousands of years ago in today’s society. I don’t think anything has changed that much, celebrity has always been there but myself Darryn Lyons, Big Pictures and Mrpaparazzi has exploited the fact that celebrity is a big business today as media is. We love watching peoples misfortunes, unfortunately that’s a fact, whether its celebrity cellulite, celebrity stars in their cars, or celebrity drugs. The fact of the matter is the Britney spears and Amy Winehouse’s of this world will always be the hottest hits on the internet, when someone in fame has misfortune, that’s not my fault, im only reporting it, people do have a huge appetite to see people succeed then fail.
What is a typical day for one of your photographers?
Well they are briefed the night before; it’s very much run like a newspaper or magazine, more so a newspaper in this office. We have morning and evening conferences, we know who the x factors are, we know who the top ten celebrities of the given week are, they change like the stock exchange, they change daily, they change by the minute, who’s famous and who’s not famous. Its basically keeping our finger on the pulse of who’s famous and who is worth money globally around the world that particular day, who’s in town, who’s coming into town, who’s worth watching. If you have a choice of watching Cheryl Cole, who is big bucks at the moment, or Katie price or Elle Macpherson, you probably wouldn’t want to watch Elle Macpherson but ten years ago you probably would have. So celebrity culture changes very quickly on whose hot and who’s not and it’s all about keeping your finger on the pulse of who is the most famous and who is worth the most money.
Do you think your business has been affected by the recession?
Without any question the whole world has been affected by the recession, the last few months have been the hardest in our business lives, without question. We have had to lay off a tremendous amount, 30% of our staff, I can see there are certain green shoots of this coming out of it, I think the media has been bashed in all sorts of ways, its been bashed legally and by the recession, its been bashed by less people reading newspaper, all of a sudden the demand is changing. We are also going through a massive technological revolution that people in the media don’t really realise. You know people are transferring their thoughts online to mobile, where we as a company are very much at the fore front as I have pushed for the last few years, seeing the success we have had online, its not always the monetary success. Sitting in a position on content ownership, with big pictures and the big group of companies that are very globally high esteemed as we own our content, well most of that content and the rest of it is licensed where as a lot of media organisations don’t own their content. We can use that content in revenue earning ways to source television through new media in terms of the internet online and mobile so that’s an exciting time for this company and we are seeing massive change and certainly the recession without any question has hit the media hard for most companies.
Where are the hotspots?
Well the general hotspots are the usual suspects they are restaurants, clubs and events. We certainly have huge amount of informers that are coming from around the world, we also have celebrities that tip us off about where they are and what they do on a regular basis, a lot of big celebrity clients who are under a non disclosure so we cannot release who they are so that’s for obvious reasons. A lot of the paparazzi you see today is set up by the celebrities to make them more famous in the global commercial world of today, working with celebrities is far more important to me than working against them in this day and age. The world of celebrity dictates the glamour of fashion, it dictates whether we should be wearing Chole or Christian Louboutin. Fashion celebrities and fashion culture, dictates what women want and where they direct their husbands, where they are going on holiday, buying a new car, buying a handbag or a man- bag. The fact of the matter celebrity culture today is the ultra dominant brain washing technique of the generation of our time and I think most people underestimate how powerful the celebrity genre is today and im at the for front of making that happen and commercialising it.
Monday, 11 January 2010
Youtube and opening footage
Whilst we have been lucky enough to capture footage of the paparazzi to an extent, with pamela anderson and at the premiere, the opening of the documentary I had planned to be a quick pace collage of paparazzi footage. Therefore we have used certain clips from youtube which fit into the codes and conventions of the documentary. Editing these clips into our own clips was very easy on iMovie and have been able to produce a quick moving selection of clips.
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