"Wake Up With the King" Analysis

SHOT 1: ESTABLISHING THE SCENE

This establishes the setting of the scene, an average man's (the main "character" of the commercial) average bedroom. It also shows the relaxed atmosphere of the scene as it is presumably late morning because he is wearing pajamas and is drinking coffee, yet there is the sound of a loud lawnmower in the background.

SHOT 2: MEDIUM SHOT OF THE BURGER KING

Point of view shot over the man's shoulder to a medium shot of a man dressed in the Burger King mask/costume, clearly the other character in this commercial. Hilarious. He opens the blinds to find him peeping in the windows which adds to the hilarity of the commercial. It evokes a casual, fun tone for the viewer, not to mention a memorable use of their name. Lawnmower still going.

SHOT 3: MEDIUM SHOT OF MAN INSIDE

Point of view shot of from the Burger King's perspective, showing the man's reaction, or in this case, lack thereof. Again, it adds to the awkwardness of the situation, making the commercial funny. Lawnmower still going.

SHOT 4: LONG SHOT OF BURGER KING

Long shot from behind the Burger King, showing that he clearly is standing in the man's lawn, alone. He reaches behind his back to pull out a breakfast sandwich. Lawnmower still going.

SHOT 5: MEDIUM SHOT OF BURGER KING

Back inside the room from man's point of view, the Burger King presents the sandwich and light piano music starts playing. This establishes the friendly disposition of the King and apparently the restaurant chain in general.

SHOT 6: LONG SHOT OF MAN FROM BEHIND

Long shot of man's room and body, he opens the window and accepts the sandwich.

SHOT 7: CLOSE UP OF SANDWICH

This shot showcases the actual product being sold, in this case the omelette sandwich. It is made to look incredibly large, carefully made, and appetizing, and is literally being served on a silver platter.

SHOT 8: MEDIUM SHOT OF MAN FROM OUTSIDE

Shows the man taking a bite of the sandwich and clearly enjoying it. This is hopefully how the audience will react when they buy this sandwich. Also, a narrator begins to showcase the "enormous omelette sandwich." He has a sort of relaxed, sarcastic tone, that adds to the sarcastic, yet funny, yet effective marketing techniques of this commercial.

SHOT 9: EXTREME CLOSE UP OF SANDWICH

This is probably the most important part of the commercial, yet the most overlooked. It is the closeup of each part of the sandwich itself, the egg, bacon, and cheese, while the narrator simultaneously describes the sandwich as Eggnormous. Meatnormous. Cheesenormous." Again, playing on the sarcastic, funny, yet in my opinion effective mood of the commercial.

SHOT 10: CLOSE UP OF MAN

Shows the Man inside his bedroom with a half-eaten sandwich laughing and having a great time with "The King." Not only does this breakfast sandwich evoke good times for the man, but the narrator also says, "thaaaat's right" as he does, indicating they are clearly manipulating his reaction.

SHOT 11: MEDIUM SHOT OF KING/CLOSING SHOT

Shows through-the-window camera shot of the King standing outside with arms outstretched, now with birds and squirrels perched on his head/body, and deer and raccoons crawling all over the front lawn. This is an obvious correlation between the Burger King sandwich and happy, peaceful, joyful, "Snow White"-esque times. It ends with more animals joining, the narrator reminding the audience to "Wake up with the King." 

Overall, this commercial is trying to make the point quite explicitly, that Burger King = good times. While probably not effective in the long-term sense because it may tend to get a bit hackneyed and overused. Further, the blatant connection between the sandwich and the supposed "good times" isn't nearly as obvious so much as just sort of creepy.

Scene Analysis, "Stand By Me"

Stand By Me (1986), one of my personal favs.

Scene #1.....

As the number would suggest, I chose the opening scene of the movie.  The movie begins with an establishing or extreme long shot of a field, mountains in the background, an old jeep parked on the side of a dirt road.  The only sound playing is that of birds chirping.  It is presumably autumn (the gold field), and sunset.  Already, the movie has established a sort of melancholy, sad tone which will carry through the rest of the movie.

Soon after, the movie's title song, "Stand By Me" (Ben E. King) begins playing, a slower instrumental version.  This immediately reminds the movie of the connection to the lyrics of the song.  It also reinforces the heavy-hearted tone of the movie.

The movie then moves into a closer long shot of the jeep, and then inside the car to a medium shot of a man (Richard Dreyfus) sitting in the driver's seat of the car.  It is clear he is thinking hard about something, as he is looking down and breathing deep sighs.  Again, this reinforces the sad mood of the rest of the movie.

Next it flashes to the man's passenger seat, a close-up shot of a stack of newspapers.  The camera zooms in on the headline "Attorney Christopher Chambers Fatally Stabbed in Restaurant."  Without saying a word, the audience is able to make the connection between the man in the car and the headline.  Because of his mood, it is clear that this is recent news, but not someone he is very close with, at least in the present time (as it turns out, it was a childhood friend.)  What we are also able to establish from this is the setting of the movie from the newspaper itself, "The Oregonian", September 1985.  

The camera moves back to a medium shot of the man reflecting on the newspaper headline.  In the background, two boys move behind his left shoulder on bicycles down.  He doesn't notice yet.  The camera moves again to a longshot/point of view shot through the windshield of the jeep.  The camera stays positioned as the boys drive down the empty dirt road.  The man is clearly reminiscing about the boys, and a connection is made between the audience and possibly the man mentioned in the newspaper headline.  

Finally, the camera begins to slowly zoom into a close-up shot of the man concentrating on something.  The music continues to fade out, and he begins to speak. He says, "I was 12 going on 13 the first time I saw a dead human being.  It happened in the summer of 1959, a long time ago, but only if you measure in terms of years."

Scene ends.  Flashback to 1959.

What really struck me about this particular scene is the amount of foreshadowing.  Every single element of this scene is addressing something that will happen later on in the film.  The narrator, like the camera shot through the windshield, will obviously be telling a story from his childhood through his point of view.  This becomes clear when he begins to narrate the story.  What also struck me is the use of music to establish the mood.  It employed a sad, slower version of a popular song, reinforced the feeling of "the end" with sunset and autumn setting, and uses the technique of flashback to enforce the idea that we haven't heard the beginning of his story yet.  Further, his narration ("I was 12 going on 13 the first time I saw a dead human body") creates a sense of suspense for the audience.  Otherwise, it is unlikely the audience would be captivated by the opening scene.  The music eventually fades which closes out this potentially depressing, reminiscent, foreshadowing scene.

As far as teaching film/editing techniques in the classroom, I suppose I'm not entirely sure exactly how or why I would do it yet.  With this being my first exposure to this technique, I can however, see the value in taking a part a film the same way a student might be asked to take a part a text.  Something that I really want to employ in my classroom is the use of critical lenses to approach a text.  Using feminist, deconstruction, post-colonial, Marxist, reader response, etc., lenses to read a text helps the reader determine the author's intended (or sometimes unintended) purpose of their writing.  In that same note, I can see using film editing techniques to do the same thing.  Again, because this was the first time I really tried intentionally doing this with a clip, I realized a lot of things about the film that I wouldn't have before regarding mood, tone, setting, in conjunction with camera angles and effects.  I think it would also be incredibly useful in providing that outside purpose I'm so adamant on finding for the use of using movies in the classroom.  Because a film can be viewed as one person's interpretation of a text (just as Stand By Me is Rob Reiner's interpretation of "The Body" by Stephen King), it would be interesting to have students compare a professional movie version with their own.  I would love to take an important scene (or a few) from a movie version of a novel, for example To Kill A Mockingbird, and have students complete a similar assignment to what I just did for this blog.  In groups, they could closely examine the use of sound, lighting, camera angles, setting, etc., to determine it's effect on the audience.  Then they could employ those same techniques in their own movie version.  Just as a text positions the reader in a certain way, a film positions the audience.  Asking students questions like "what is the director's purpose?", "what is their tone?", "what is the meaning of doing _____?", can help students learn to critically analyze a film in the same way they would to a text.  By practicing with movies, they can hopefully be able to apply those same skills to the media they are encompassed by on a daily basis, helping them to be more critically aware, engaged, informed citizens in a changing 21st century.  

Why NOT teach film, television, or media in school?

There isn't a day that goes by that I didn't have to remind students to put their iPods away before we started class.  When having in-class work time, students frequently asked if they could listen to music while working.  The beginning minutes of class are always spent talking about the latest text message, movie, facebook event, iPhone, song, Hills episode, etc.  The point is, our students are so tapped in to media ("87% use the internet, 51% go online daily, 81% play online games, 76% obtain news online, 75% of online adolescents use instant messaging, and 33% have used a cell phone to send a text message"), why not use this to our advantage?

As teachers, of course our main goal is to get our students to learn something.  After that, my goal is to help students become independent, informed, and critically aware members who are able to function productively in a 21st-century society.  An incredibly large part of that society includes the use of computers, phones, instant results, multimodality, and pop culture.  I think it is not only important, but vital to teach media literacy in schools so that our students can be successful after they leave the classroom.

First of all, media literacy helps with student engagement.  As teachers, and English teachers especially, it is incredibly important and difficult to make centuries-old texts relevant to students' lives.  Tapping into a source they are already so consumed by will help them see that not only do the themes and ideas in the texts we read resonate with our lives today, but they also see this universality of cannonical texts that justifies their use in the first place.  If we can prove that the ideas talked about in Shakespeare are still used in Jonas Brother's songs or in most music videos, or that racism still exists today based on Family Guy episodes, or that satire isn't just found in Jonathan Swift but in Chandler Bing as well, why wouldn't we?

Second, along the lines of student engagement, I have found in my own experience that it is a struggle to get students to engage with a text, let alone be able to discuss it among their peers.  Using things like blogs and wikis holds students accountable for their thinking about a text, and forces them to take a side or make an opinion about the themes being discussed.  Second, it ensures that they feel comfortable talking and sharing their ideas with peers.  I've noticed that either apathy or anxiety over speaking in class causes some students to not participate in in-class discussions for fear of being judged by their peers.  A blog or a wiki allows students to adpot an online persona that, while not anonymous, removes some of the apprehension associated with defending one's opinions in class.  This is because students have the opportunity to censor or edit or at least think about their thoughts before writing them down and publishing them with the class.  Most importantly, it gives students the opportunity to have further reflection on their own thinking and be inspired hopefully by their peer's thinking too.

Finally, being able to navigate the internet and interactive collaborative websites in school helps students learn to be successful once they leave your class.  That is because there is an entirely different set of skills needed to write in an interactive document than in just an individual Word doc.  As Beach writes in chapter 2, "the fact that writers employ links to a range of other texts reflects the fact that hypertextual writing is highly collaborative - that rather than privilege single texts and the single tone author, hypertext writing consists of networks of texts in which the author herself is a part of the network" (13).  In this sense, using blogs and wikis also holds students accountable for creating credible work themselves.  Not only are they going to learn the skills necessary to be able to find credible sources and relevant material, they are also holding themselves responsible because technically their work can be made open to public viewing.  As more and more people turn to the Internet for easily accessible news and information, it is imperative for students to be able to decipher which information can be trusted and which can't.  As Beach writes, "through analyzing links, students are learning to scour sites to find a relevant topic and then filter posts to judge useful, credible, content that serves as the basis for posting reactions of their own ideas" (13).  As more of the workforce post high school and post college becomes dependent on the online community for success, the more important it is going to be for our students to be able to navigate the waters of an online community.  

The goal of any teacher is to help our students be successful.  Incorporating media into the classroom can help students not only make English class more relevant and applicable, but it can also help them to become critical thinkers and productive members of society once they leave high school.  While I can't necessarily tell my students what to think, I can help teach them how.  The skills gained through the use, analysis, and collaboration of media can help students learn to question and hopefully better the world around them.

Media Literacy with Purpose

Chapter 1 of Richard Beach's Teaching Media Literacy textbook focused primarily on justifying the use of media literacy in the classroom.  Beach bases his argument off of a reluctant school board member's beliefs about using media/film study in the classroom:  "To me, showing movies is  a pretty low skill level.  I would rather that teachers use the skills they have to get students involved in reading and discussing topics [...] if we're showng a lot of videos in the classroom then I view it as a problem.  We do get parents calling us saying: 'Why are they showing Schindler's List?  Why are we showing Pippi Longstocking?"  Essentially, the entire chapter is spent refuting this statement in support of using media literacy to engage students.  While I am completely in support of tailoring curriculum and activities to suit student's needs and interests, I have to admit that I agree with the point the school board member is making.  In the context of this chapter, I believe he may, in fact, have a point.

 

While I am aware of the fact that I am not, in fact, a practicing teacher yet (having just finished my student teaching literally today), I definitely can say I've learned an incredible amount about having a purpose for every lesson, for every activity, discussion, and piece of writing you have your students do.  I've also seen the successes and failures of many attempts to use media literacy both in my own classroom and in the classrooms of teachers I observed.  What I can say is that more often than not, movies are being used for filler days, for a "break".  Don't have anything planned for the day?  Watch a movie.  Substitute teacher?  Movie day.  Spent 4 weeks reading the text?  Now let's watch the movie version at the end  Is that really the way to engage students?  Teachers can't just show a movie for the sake of watching the movie version.  It needs to have a bigger purpose than that.  More importantly, movies can't be shown to replace poor teaching and instructional methods without expanding students' thinking beyond the film itself.  I don't think Beach would disagree with that.

I think that media literacy most certainly has its place in the classroom, especially the English classroom where there is the opportunity to teach big ideas and not just the words on the page.  Recently, I taught a four-week unit on To Kill A Mockingbird, and I was dead-set on using a movie clip of Atticus's final court room speech.  Being an award-winning movie, a powerful speech, and essentially the climax of the book, I thought this would be a completely relevant thing for my students to see.  After discussing it with my coop teacher, he kept asking me, "well, why?"  

To which I replied, "because it's a great scene, and I think it's important that they see it."  

"Well, why? 

"Because they'll get a visual representation of the movie? We're talking about appearance versus reality in the theme of empathy...."

"Still... why?"

Lesson learned.  The point is, movies need to be shown to expand on what students are already thinking.  While I never ended up showing the movie clip, we read lyrics from Phil Collins's "Another Day in Paradise" instead to talk about empathy.  Then we looked at present-day incarceration rates for African Americans and talked about white privilege.  And then in response to that, we talked about Tom Robinson's sense of hopelessness and listened to Tupac's "Dear Mama" and "Keep Ya Head Up", to which we had a final debate about whether all men really were equal in the eyes of the law.  Much more engaging and interesting for the students, because it fit my overall purpose.  

 

That being said, if the school board member is, in fact, talking about watching movies just for the sake of movie days, then YES, there is an extremely low skill level involved in comprehending that.  But, if Schindler's List is being shown not just because it is an Academy Award-winning film but because it resonates with themes and ideas in books like The Book Thief or Night,  present-day genocide in Darfur, or universal themes of perspective or power, then it has a bigger purpose.  Media literacy most certainly has its place in the classroom, it just needs to be done in a way that has some greater potential to get students to think critically about the world around them, to question what they've been told, or to take action against something they've learned.  Otherwise, really, what is the point?