Thursday 24 November 2011

Slumdog Millionaire

Description & Advertising

Slumdog Millionare is a very inspirational movie about a young Mumbai teen who was born and raised in the slums. He becomes a contestant on the Indian version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionare?" Which he actually wins. He is then arrested under the suspicion of cheating, and while being interrogated by the police, past events and experiences are shown which explains how he knows the answers.

Here are some of the ways in which the movie was advertised:
  • Posters
  • Tv adverts
  • Internet
  • Radio
  • Cinema
This poster is a good example on how Slumdog Millionare was advertised. Not only is it a very interesting poster inspired by the medium camera shot with a variety of colour, but its also in a different language. This is beacuse this poster is from another country, so this is another way of how the film got such a huge reputation because it was advertised all over the world such as:
  • Australia
  • North america
  • Europe
  • India
  • Asia-Pacific

Production

Screenwritter Simon Beaufoy wrote Slumdog Millionare inspired by the Boeke prize winning and commonwealth writers' prize nominated novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup. To help him hone the script, Beaufoy had made three research trips to India and interviewed many street children and he was impressed with their attitudes. He mentioned his goal, "I wanted to get (across) the sense of this huge amount of fun, laughter, chat, and sense of community that is in these slums. What you pick up on is this mass of energy."

In 2006 , British production companies Celador films and film4 productions invited director Danny Boyle to read the script. Boyle was impressed with Beaufoy's work and fully trusted it, so he decided to commit to the project. The initial project was to cost $15 million, so Celador sought a US distributor to share costs. The first offer was from FOX  Searchlight Pictures which was aroung $2 million but Warner Independent made a $5million offer to win rights to the picture.

After Warner Independent Pictures closed, the movie was sold to Fox searchlight pictures. Fox searchlight pictures are also famous for producing various other films, such as:
  • Napoleon Dynamite
  • 28 Days Later
  • Juno
  • Street Kings
  • Black Swan
  • Sexy Beast

Distribution

Slumdog Millionare was distributed by Pathe ( UK ), Fozx Searchlight Pictures ( U.S ) and Warner Bros. Pictures ( U.S )


...... Not finished yet.


Thursday 20 October 2011

Ferdinand De Saussure




Ferdinand De Saussure: Applied/Linguists

Ferdinand De Saussure 26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913, was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics.

Saussure choose the term "sign" over "symbol" because the latter implies motivation. For Saussure, the sign is arbitrary. Virtually all signs, Saussure maintains, have only arbitrarily ascribed meanings. Since Saussure, this notion has been taken as axiomatic in Western linguistics and philosophy

most modern linguists and philosophers of language consider his ideas outdated.

A common mistake is to construe the signifier and the sign as the same thing. In my view, another common mistake, perhaps related to the first, is to speak of a signifier without a signified or a sign, or to speak of a signified without a signifer or a sign. Used in reference to Saussure's original formulations, both locutions are nonsensical. In language, a lone signifier would be an utterly meaningless sound or concatenation of sounds. But it is even more absurd to speak of a signified without signifier or sign: It would, I believe, have to be a sort of half thought, something never thought before, a thought that exists solely outside the domain of language, a fleeting, private, chaotic thought that makes no sense even to the thinker -- an unthought. Another mistake is to endow a sign with meaning outside the presence of other signs. Except as part of the whole system, signs do not and cannot exist.