Daily Blog. November 20, 2017. Tori Flynn

Today Mr.Rivers started class with the usual good morning and then went into reminding us to sign up for our blogs for MP2. The sign up calendar can be found on classroom. He told us that Be Reel Blogs are now going from 30 points to 50 points  so he warned us it would be a very bad idea to leave them til last minute and try and cram them in at the end of the marking period. After talking about this Tony brought up a great question of after you post your blog or even be reel blog, can you make improvements. Rivers told us that we can make a draft of our blogs BEFORE WE POST and bring it to him or Mr. Moriarty and they will help guide us and make sure you hit all the points giving us feedback but they won't let us edit after we already post and already have a grade. Todays notes were about what we want to hit in our blogs and our movie reviews. Here were my notes I took in class today in case any of you who were absent or are just reading these blog posts need them or missed something while taking them!

Notes:  Talked about what we hit in our blogs

1. Deliberately title article
• Title is the first introduction to the tone/argument/purpose of your review
• We looked at 3 different titles and saw how two of them incorporated the Author which still keeping their argument clear and the last one was intriguing because of the hair puns.
• ‘Fantastic Beasts’ Unleashes J.K. Rowling’s Magic on Old New York
• Interstellar - 'science trumps story in latest Christopher Nolan epic'
• Tangled: rooted in traditional animation with 3D highlights.
2. Credit relevant artists
• Who is IMPORTANT?
• Director's, Actor(s)? Screenwriter(s)? Original Author(s)?  
• Credit EXPLICITLY - naming artist within your sentences/ paragraphs
• Credit PARENTHETICALLY - did you mention a character but don't want to spend the whole review on him? “On the ship. Neo meets other futuristic characters like Mouse( Matt Doran) and Cypher (played by the deliberate rat faced Joe Pantoliano) .” from the Matrix
3. Provide necessary content
• What do we NEED to know about this film/its production?
• Series?
• Does it reflect a certain current event/ trend?
• What is happening OUTSIDE the film( or as part of the films production)?
4. Summarize Plot
• AVOID SPOILERS!!
• Premise- the main basis/ conflict for the film
• One sentence premise: you should be able to explain the main focus of the narrative in a single sentence that is both specific and clear.
• The Matrix follows Neo as he learns that the world is not(and has never been) what it seems
5. Evaluate Content
• BULK of your review: specific paragraphs
• Remember that this is not an academic essay:
• Paragraphs may be short!
• SPECIFIC paragraphs about SPECIFIC content
• This is where objectivity comes into play
6. Evaluate meaning/theme
• Consider the text as a whole: what does it ASSERT?
7. Conclude
• BRIEF AND SPECIFIC
• In 1-3 sentences, you should be able to answer “So what?”

After we concluded our note taking in our groups, partners or by ourselves we had to find an actual review of movie, go on the classroom page, open the document posted and paste the whole review in the document so tomorrow we will be able to read the review and comment on those 7 steps we learned about today. The overall objective of this class was to help us be able to realize what should be hit when we do our Be Reel Blogs. This really helps us outside the classroom as well because as you can see in bullets 3,4 and 5 it teaches us how to avoid spoilers when reviewing, how to summarize what is important and what is not and to consider the specific information which makes the movie/ TV shows objectively pleasing.