Sigmund Freud

Freud was an Austrian Philosopher who always expressed an interest in psychology of the human mind.

He is famous for his work on Psycho-Analysis and his theory of Psycho-sexual Development.
He developed theories behind the existence of the unconscious mind. Freud believed that our unconscious mind was responsible for the decisions we make in day to day life. Freud was also interested in the mechanisms behind repression. He created three 'personalities' that he felt our minds were split into. They were:

• The ID - This part of our mind, we are completely unconscious of. It is a 'child-like' state and seeks immediate gratification and pleasure. 

• The Ego - This part of our mind tries to create balance between the impulsive, impatient nature of the ID and the impractical  morals of the Super Ego.

• The Super Ego - This is responsible for our morals and what we consider to be the right decision to make in certain situations. 

As well as this, Freud created the well know 'Oedipus Complex'. In this, Freud explained that every child is born with this desire for incest, but we are forced to repress this into our unconscious mind. For boys, they are born with a constant love for their mother and a desire to kill their father. This eventually subsides during the five Psycho sexual Stages of development. 

• Stage One - The Oral Stage - At this stage, children are pleasured by their mouths. E.g, breastfeeding and putting objects into their mouths to learn what objects are. 

• Stage Two - The Anal Stage - Children are pleasured by the need to empty their bowels. 

• Stage Three - The Phallic Stage - Children become aware of their genitalia. 

• Stage Four - The Latency Stage - This relates to the Oedipus Complex. Children realise that their sexual desire for their parent cannot be pursued so they seek love in another individual of the same gender as their parent.   

• Stage Five - The Genital Stage - This stage occurs just before the child hits puberty. They begin to realise they have sexual urges. 

An Iceberg model has been created to show how Freud thought the three 'personalties' in our minds were shown. 

Freud also discussed dreams. He said that having dreams fulfilled our wishes and desires. Without dreams, Freud claimed we would always be awake.  He published his work on dreams in 1899.

Yoga Show

Our first ever feature filmed in London! What an adventure!
One of the things that I am consistently learning each week working on Features, is how essential planning really is and this week was no different. I don't think I've ever sat looking at my email accounts so much in my life! I had arranged 'Press Passes' for Zoe and I this week and at this point, I definitely felt like a true member of the press (although carrying the camera to London was very heavy.)

Yoga is not really my forte, so I knew that walking into the National Hall at Kensington Olympia was going to be a whole new world for me. And yes, yes it was. We walked in with blue wristbands and were surrounded by women in tracksuits carrying  1-2 litre bottles of water. There were hundreds of stalls selling different health products including coconut water and barley grass juice, which Zoe and I happily tried. Yoga classes were being held throughout the day, with a variety of different teachers and teaching styles. Unfortunately, Zoe and I didn't get involved in these, which upon reflection is something we should have definitely done. Involvement in our feature would have improved the quality drastically, and would probably have helped the viewers feel more engaged. That's a lesson for next time!

Due to the fact, that I had never been to any sort of convention like this before, I was slightly unsure as to how to go about filming and what sort of content to include. In the end, we tried to approach it as if we were trying to lose some weight before Christmas. We spent most of our time there filming the many different health products that were available. We also spoke to a variety of different people all trying to tell us that their product was the very best and the one that we should invest in.

I am happy with our finished piece, although we could have improved it by participating in the yoga classes. This is something we will definitely do if we ever attend an event like this in the future.
When editing the footage, I wanted to use music that created a calming, tranquil effect however, I think this backfired slightly and makes the feature appear too slow, perhaps even too calming!

Our feature was used in WINOL Life, Winol's fortnightly chat show. There we met Elizabeth Barnett, Editor of Hampshire Life. This was really helpful and incredibly interesting as she offered valuable feedback. I also taught George a few moves. Take a look:

Restaurant Review at Giraffe.

I was really excited to create a Restaurant Review, (mainly because it was an excuse to go out for a lovely lunch!)

In reality, we were told that it might be a lot harder than we anticipated it to be. 

I would say that one of the more challenging area's of creating this feature had to be the organisation. As Giraffe, is a large restaurant chain, it was difficult to know who to contact but once we had found this information, everything fell into place. 

We arrived and were immediately greeted with a warm welcome and to our delight promised lots of free food and drinks. I felt like an absolute princess! Once we had set up our equipment and sat down, it dawned on us how stupid we looked. After all, it's not exactly the norm to go into a restaurant, eat bu sit there filming everything you do. At this point, we realised that packing content into our review was going to be difficult. In the end, we tried to be as natural as we could, we ordered food that we would have naturally chosen and generally we tried to have a nice time. One problem we discovered, was yet again the audio. Not only had our microphones let us down again, but the noise of the restaurant was making it much harder to speak at a level that could be recorded clearly. This resulted  in Zoe and I to sharing one microphone, although it worked, this definitely wasn't the sound quality we had hoped for. Note to self* ALWAYS, Always, Always check equipment that the Loan Counter give you before you set off.

The food and drinks we ordered came very fast and tasted lovely, we really had very little to fault on the whole experience so naturally, we made our review very positive and complimentary of Giraffe as a company but we also praised the staff members who served us.
When we had finished editing this feature and exported, we were very proud of our achievements and felt like the whole thing has overall, been very successful.

This is the moment we were then told by Chris, that due to the fact that we were so complimentary and included very few criticisms, this could be seen as a form of malice. Malice can cover a range of different areas in Journalism, one of them being that a Journalist should never promote one company over another and this is effectively what Zoe and I had done without realising. We quickly hit the drawing board a second time, and included voice overs of the areas of the meal we felt could have been included. We also used a text graphic to show the prices of the food so that viewers could then make up their own mind. This then made the whole feature much more fair and removed any malice that may have been found in our first attempt.

I will put up the newly edited version of the Restaurant Review at Giraffe soon. Watch this space.
Zoe and I are also hoping to create many more Restaurant Reviews so again watch this space!

Cooking in Comfort

I found making this feature challenging. However, I learnt a lot from doing so. I feel our concept was strong and one that would appeal to a lot of people. After all, restaurants can be expensive and cooking isn't always very easy especially if you want to tuck into luxury food. Despite this, Zoe and I felt we could prove that you can create exactly that, in the comfort of your own kitchen without much effort. We decided to give ourselves a budget of just £12. With this we wanted to create a three course meal that would feed four people. Now that works out at just £1 per course per person. Perfect!

Or so we thought...
We severely underestimated the time that would it would take to not only cook but prepare and film the food. On our first attempt we felt that one camera would be enough, but without a camera man it became extremely difficult to capture good, interesting shots whilst also being the ones doing the cooking. We spent the best part of four hours, trying to solve the problem and eventually we gave up. Disappointed and £12 lighter.
To top this all off, one of our microphones let us down meaning that not all of our audio was picked up and the parts that were picked up were not the best quality. We decided to do the whole thing again.

Attempt #2
THIS WENT SO WELL. It's amazing, what planning can achieve. Note to self* Always plan each feature in great detail before filming. We started the day nice and early, we also had our ingredients delivered meaning we didn't have to do the horrible uphill walk with five heavy shopping bags. So far, so good. We also changed location and I know this sounds silly but I really think it helped us have a much more positive attitude towards filming. It felt like a new start and unlike last time, I really thought we could do it. This time, we filmed using two tapes, we had back up headphones and microphones. The very definition of organisation. At last, everything was running smoothly. By the end of our third course, we were exhausted but we realised that benefits of re filming.

I learnt a lot from the experience, one actually being the point we were trying to prove. Our food was delicious (even if i do say so myself) and I've been asked by a few people if they can borrow our soup recipe!
It just goes to show that you can have nice food at home, you can stuff your faces for very little money and above all, do not give up. Just stop when things go wrong, take a break and come back to it. If you do this, things will improve. I have to say I think it was the most stressed I have felt so far, but strangely it was the feature I have most enjoyed filming.

Take a peek below at our work:

Bugger!

The brown stuff really has hit the fan this week. What a total nightmare. Filming was a complete disaster from start to finish. Re - filming tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

So this is what drowning feels like....

I've survived my first week working as part of the Feature Team for WINOL.  I feel amazing! Despite the fact, that on more than one occasion this week, I felt like I was drowning in my work load and seriously questioning the camera's safety when in my company.

My first feature is based all around fashion, with its main angle trying to capture what this year's Autumn trends are going to be and whether the general public (or Winchester locals) are interested. It was a challenging week with the con's definitely outweighing the pro's but as we've all been reminded, making the mistakes now will benefit us in the long run and even the very best make all kinds of errors.

Zoe and I worked together for this feature as Fashion is a mutual topic of interest and we were both excited to be going out there and film. I think we underestimated how much balls it would take to go up and actually ask people questions when it came down to it. The minor detail that technology was constantly failing on us and our giant camera attracting quite an audience didn't really help matters. Thursday was a very stressful day and despite the fact, we spent almost six hours on Winchester High Street, we did not come back with a single second of footage. A lesson everyone should learn is to ALWAYS check your equipment before you make the long trek to town. When we arrived and had set up the camera, we annoyingly found out that we only had one microphone when it was vital to our feature that we had two. So, we climbed back up the hill, back to uni and got the second microphone we needed. 2pm arrives, and we are finally back on the high street, but things weren't going our way. The audio was having a bad day too and nothing seemed to work. The audio levels on the camera were moving, the microphones were all set to exactly the same frequency but still nothing worked. Even the headphones were working fine, the reason why the audio failed remains a mystery. In the end, we packed up shop and went home feeling annoyed and irritated that we had nothing of any use and had mentally prepared ourselves to come back with tonnes of brilliant footage and could then spend the next couple of days editing. How wrong we were...


Monday morning comes and today was the day we made another attempt to go out onto the streets and film. Hooray - it was about a billion times more successful. I definitely wasn't prepared for the amount of rejections we would get when we asked people if they wanted to be filmed, but luckily there were a kind few, who didn't mind at all and actually really liked being in front of a camera lens. Girls were usually more than happy to participate once you mentioned 'fashion', whilst boys took a bit more convincing. We had another tough time with the microphones in places and eventually settled on using the gun mic. I was very pleased when six o'clock came and we had nearly a full tape worth of footage. At least that meant, we had plenty to play around with. We took a quick detour to KFC for dinner, and then it was straight back to uni for a long night of editing. I wasn't wrong, it was a long night and we got back home at  about 1.30am. Shattered would be an understatement. However, i'm so glad we put the time in to do it, it seemed to pay off although there were a few technical glitches that I will definitely learn from next time. An example was the fact that the radio mic wires were in shot, so much so that they couldn't be edited out. Definitely an error not to do next time!

So through the up's and down's, we did it. Zoe was good fun to work with and I think although far from perfect, i'm proud of our first feature. Maybe one day in the future we will look back and laugh at our mistakes. Take a peek at this year's Autumn Trends....

Karl Marx and Evil Capitalism...(Also, my Seminar Paper.)

The Communist Manifesto,

By Karl Marx and Frederich Engles.

Communism is defined in the dictionary as a ‘theory or system of social organisation based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.’ This essentially means that no one has private ownership and money is distributed in a fair way through taxes etc.

Communism was something Karl Marx and Frederich Engles supported and this is a key idea throughout the Communist Manifesto.

At the very start of the Manifesto, Communism is described as having the potential to be very powerful, Marx suggests that he believes that there are a lot of clear supporters of communism and links this to a theory he has in which he believes that the proletariat will or should come together to form a revolution and overthrow capitalism.

Marx recognises that throughout history, there have been several revolutionary actions and many have been a result of class conflicts. This is something that I do agree with and I think it can also be applied to modern day life too; perhaps not in terms of a ‘class conflict’ but there is definitely a division within society and this is mainly due to income and materialism.  For example, there are students like myself who are not exactly rolling in money and there are adults who possess a nice house, nice car and generally have more disposable income etc and then you have the multi millionaires like Lord Alan Sugar, for example and instantly there are three different types of people in three different situations. Naturally, there is more to social class than income but I’m just demonstrating that Marx is right in terms of recognising divisions within society.

Marx, however, differed in the sense that he believed that society was split into two main rivalry ‘camps’ as he described. One being the proletariat (working class) and the other being the bourgeoisie (ruling class). It was Marx’s idea that the proletariat were constantly being exploited by the bourgeoisie in the means of production.

              

Although Marx is very much against capitalism, I like the fact that during the manifesto he discusses in some detail how the bourgeoisie gained so much power and his explanation for this is the discovery of other countries resulting in the expansion of market and trade, ultimately meaning that manufacturing grew alongside this.

“The discovery of America, the rounding of the cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising of the bourgeoisie.”

“…Meanwhile, the markets kept ever-growing, the demand ever-rising.”

“Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America has paved the way.”

Marx claimed that while the expansion of the market continued, lower classes were being ‘pushed into the background’. Alongside the bourgeoisie’s power in terms of production they also had political movements and according to Marx, the modern state are supportive of this. This is where Marx, believed exploitation of the proletariat really begun. He refers to this ‘exploitation’ theory numerous times throughout the manifesto.

“The bourgeoisie has stripped the halo off of every occupation hitherto (up to now) …”

“…It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid labourers.”

I really like those quotes as I feel they demonstrate how strongly Marx feels about the destruction capitalism and the bourgeoisie can cause to society.

Marx goes as far to say that capitalism is simply all about profit and earning money and seems to adopt this idea that it does not have many cares for people. He does acknowledge that vast amount of production that has emerged, thanks to capitalism but this is not in a positive way. Marx suggested that there was too much civilisation and too many industries; society did not need as many. Capitalism has a thirst for profit.

Marx also suggests that ‘thanks to machinery and the division of labour the proletariat have lost all individual character and consequently all charm for the workman’. This I infer as meaning that the proletariat have no job satisfaction and are not treated well. They have little individuality and are simply there to serve a purpose for the bourgeoisie.  The division of labour is simply referring to further exploitation, longer working hours on a lower wage.

This I found really interesting and I tried to understand how awful it must be to be stuck in that vicious cycle. Due to mass increase in the market (as mentioned earlier) the bourgeoisie had full control, the proletariat on the other hand did not and needed the money, therefore the bourgeoisie could lower wages and still be assured that the proletariat would remain in their job, working longer hours to gain extra money without arguments as they had no other choice. This is the extreme form of exploitation, Marx is referring to throughout the whole of the manifesto and he is simply suggesting the proletariat are slaves to the bourgeoisie.

“Masses of labourers, crowded into a factory, are organised like soldiers.”

Marx discusses how skilled workmen are slowly shrinking into the proletariat as machinery is being added at an increasing rate to the means of production (again reinforcing the idea that there are two classes within society). Competition between small businesses and large factories meant more and more people were sinking into the proletariat.

Marx also explains how the proletariat were fragmented all over the country and in order to defeat capitalism, they needed to clump together and form larger bodies. They needed to form ‘trade unions’ as a way of doing this.

Ironically, Marx suggests how the very production of goods the bourgeoisie are using to make profit are also the weapons the proletariat are using against the bourgeoisie. An example, Marx offered was the telephone. This device allows the proletariat to communicate and gather in larger groups, adding even more potential for a revolution.

Marx claims that the bourgeoisie only have one true enemy and they are the proletariats, he claims that all the other classes just fade away.

“The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”

He describes a difference between those that have ‘fallen’ into the proletariat and the actual proletariat. Marx explains that the shop keeper, the craftsman are all fighting against the bourgeoisie to save the extinction of their own profession rather than to create a revolution, they therefore were ‘conservative’, according to Marx.

Marx explains that throughout history, most revolutions have been for the benefit of minorities, however, Marx feels that the proletariat is the majority in this situation. He also suggests that the proletariat gaining victory of the bourgeoisie and ending capitalism is inevitable. According to Marx, capitalism is just incompatible with society.

During the manifesto, Marx also makes it clear how communism supports the proletariats.

Marx states communist aims in the manifesto:

1. The formation of the proletariat into a class
2. The proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie.
3. The proletariat will gain political power.

An overall aim being not to abolish private property altogether but simply to eradicate any bourgeois property.

“To eradicate property that allows the fruit of mans own labour.”

This I infer as meaning that no property is allowed that will ultimately put one man in a better financial position than the next.

Towards the end of the manifesto, it is explained that communism wants to change the idea that labourers are there to increase capital with no other purpose. Marx also suggests that the capitalism ‘family’ is based on profit and private gain.

“ Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this we plead guilty.”

The manifesto also surprisingly mentions gender as well as class when attacking the bourgeoisie, suggesting that the bourgeoisie have degraded women and have made them feel like they are a part of production rather than an actual being.

“ A legalised system of free love.”

This quote is how Marx described prostitution and naturally disagreed with this given his stance on women being a form of production themselves. Marx aimed to abolish both private and public prostitution.

The last part of the manifesto listed several targets that communism would hope to reach when they had overthrown capitalism.

These included a graduated income tax, abolish the right to inheritance and free education for children in public schools to prevent child labour from continuing.

It also discusses different types of communists across different countries but ends by saying that all communists no matter where they are located are fighting for the same thing and that is to defeat the bourgeoisie and end capitalism.

Just before the end of the manifesto, there is a quote that reads:

“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains, they have the world to win!”

Throughout the whole manifesto, the main theme is simply for capitalism to end and the bourgeoisie to get overthrown by the proletariat and this I think is show very clearly by the previous quote.

I think communism is a nice idea but I think in the long term, it could not work successfully. Everyone wants money for their own gain, people moan about taxes even though they are there to benefit society as a whole and I think it is just human nature that we want to succeed and earn and be the best we possible can and not be the same as everyone else.