Teaching Juno

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Teaching Juno

• Rick Instrell
• AMES Conference 29 May 2009
• www.rickinstrell.co.uk
• info_at_rickinstrell.co.uk

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Teaching Literacy Principles

• Study of the three functions of communication
• ideational (content)
• interpersonal (reader engagement)
• textual (form).
• Study of how texts employ rhetorical structures
  and devices to combine multimodal elements into
  coherent and enhanced communications.
• Practice and critique using a range of multimodal
  rather than purely monomodal communications.

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Teaching Literacy Principles

• Critical literacy
• textual critique of the effectiveness of the
  communication in terms of content, form and
  reader engagement
• contextual considering the text in terms of its
  institutional, cultural, individual and social
  contexts.
• Pedagogy should involve structured dialogue with
  pupils, posing relevant thought-provoking
  questions which project pupils and teachers into
  enthusiastic cooperative enquiry.

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Levels of fiction film analysis
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Levels and analytical tools
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Higher English SQP Section D

• 16. Choose a film which has a particularly
  effective or arresting opening. Referring in
  detail to the opening, discuss to what extent it
  provides a successful introduction to the text as
  a whole.
• 17. Choose from a film or TV drama a scene in
  which the conflict between two characters is at
  its most intense. Outline briefly the reasons for
  the conflict and then by examining the scene in
  detail, show how it gave you a deeper
  appreciation of the text as a whole.
• 18. Choose a TV drama in which the character
  struggles with her or his conscience. Outline
  briefly the reasons for the characters dilemma
  and go on to discuss how successfully the
  programme-makers engage your sympathy for her or
  him.
• 19. Choose a film or TV drama in which setting
  in time and/or place is significant. Explain why
  you think the setting is important for your
  appreciation of the text.
• TV drama includes a single play, a series or a
  serial.

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What Texts to Study?

• Texts which engage pupils
• Texts which exemplify the best use of rhetorical
  structures and devices
• Texts whose form best communicates their content
  to the intended audience in a coherent way
• Texts whose coherence and audience engagement is
  expressed at every analytical level
• Texts which show mise-en-abyme (seemingly endless
  rhyming of motifs at every level) cf. fractal
  zooms
• Texts which are susceptible to textual and
  contextual critique appropriate to level of
  age/stage of pupil

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Watching Juno Initial Questions

• Q. What is the story?
• Q. What is the moral of the story?
• Q. What are the recurring motifs? (situations,
  settings, images, audio, cinematography, editing,
  colour, lettering, )
• Q. What are the conflicts in the story and how
  are they resolved?
• Q. Compare the beginning and end of the film. How
  do they reflect the narrative arc?

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Beginning Ending
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Turning Point Moral of Story
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Recurring Motifs
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Recurring Motifs
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Recurring Motifs Colour
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Recurring Motifs Colour
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Recurring Motifs Colour
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Symbolism
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Key Aspects of Media Studies

• TEXT
• CATEGORIES
• purpose, medium, form, genre, tone, style, etc.
• LANGUAGE
• denotation/connotation motivations of
  technical cultural codes anchorage
  conventions mode of address signs, discourse,
  ideology, myth
• NARRATIVE
• narrative structure, conventions, codes
• REPRESENTATIONS
• stereotypes non-stereotypes repns of people,
  places events
• AUDIENCE
• mode of address (direct/indirect
  specific/general) preferred reading

decodes
encodes

• INSTITUTION
• company type (commercial, public service
  global, independent)
• finance (budget, income from sales,
  subscription, advertising)
• internal constraints (e.g. editorial policy,
  house style, hard/software)
• external constraints (legal, regulatory, market,
  target audience)
• production processes (planning, implementation,
  review evaluation)

• AUDIENCE
• target audience audience factors (individual,
  taste, textual knowledge, gender, age, class,
  ethnicity, interests, nationality)

• TECHNOLOGY
• technologies of production, distribution
  consumption

CAPITAL

• SOCIETY
• social, cultural, economic, politics
• ideologies myths

influences
selects
MEANING
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Purpose

• Purpose
• entertainment which allows us the pleasure of
  escaping from everyday reality
• emotional release/pleasure through comedy/drama
  gives a feeling of intensity which may be lacking
  in our lives
• profit from screenings in cinema, tv, DVD,
  soundtrack and merchandise sales (in Juno there
  was no product placement revenue for TicTacs or
  Sunny D Juno DVD for sale in Starbucks in USA)

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Soundtrack album cover
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Juno Merchandise
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Juno Pregnancy Kit iPod
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Categories Media

• Film
• DVD (including Blu-Ray) 2 disk-sets include
  IPod/PC downloads
• TV
• Download on iTunes
• Hit soundtrack album
• Social networking site Junoverse

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Official Website (www.foxsearchlight.com/juno)
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Junoverse (www.foxsearchlight.com/junoverse)
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Categories Form

• Studio independent feature film (Juno ideal
  length 92 min)
• Independently produced film backed by Fox
  Searchlight with small budget (6.5m) so no big
  stars, few extras in sports meet scene, small
  amount of digital work

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Categories Genre

• Generic hybrid
• Indie (oddball characters, indie music)
• Mainstream comedy/drama with upbeat happy ending
• High school movie
• Coming-of-age
• Romance
• Smart teen film
• Full-term pregnancy sub-genre (cf. Waitress,
  Knocked Up)
• Q. Genres can be identified by iconography
  (semantics) and narrative (syntax). Identify
  features of each genre in Juno.

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Categories Tone Style

• Director Jason Reitman aimed for audience
  perceiving the characters as real
• So uses conventional classical continuity editing
  which is restrained and does not draw attention
  to itself

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Language Technical Codes

• Q. Analyse how key scenes have been shot and
  edited. Note any unconventional techniques.

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Language Camera Angles

• Generally the camera avoids high angle shots
  looking down on Juno violating POV rules for
  continuity editing. Why?

Shot
Reverse shot
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Language Cultural Codes

• Q. Compare the framing in the two settings and
  mise-en-scène in these two shots
• Q. How does this contribute to telling the story?

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Language Cultural Codes

• Q. Examine how Marks wardrobe changes across the
  film. How does it reflect his character arc?

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Language Music

• Composer Mateo Messina The process came down to
  instrumentation. It was about trying to find
  Junos voice. She kind of has an indie rock vibe
  to her. But straight alt rock or indie rock
  didnt feel the right call I wanted to go with
  an acoustic guitar feel, something that jangled
  and was really loose, like Juno So almost every
  cue has this guitar in it.
• Q. The songs on the soundtrack have a faux-naïf,
  amateurish feel to them (Moldy Peaches, Belle and
  Sebastian). Why are these songs used?
• Q. If Junos favourite bands are the Stooges,
  Patti Smith and the Runaways, why is their music
  not on the soundtrack?

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Narrative Structure Todorov

• Tzvetan Todorov proposes that conventional
• narrative has this structure
• Equilibrium
• Disruption of equilibrium by some force
• Recognition of disruption
• Attempt to repair the disruption
• Return to a second equilibrium different from the
  first
• Q. Does Juno fit this structure?

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Narrative 3-Act Structure

• Story is split into three acts and an epilogue
  with intertitles indicating the season
• Act 1 Autumn (DVD chapter 1 - 0000) setup
• Act 2 Winter (DVD chapter 12 - 3601)
  confrontation
• Act 3 Spring (DVD chapter 19 - 5719)
  resolution
• Epilogue Summer (DVD chapter 27 - 8543)
• Q. How is the choice of seasons appropriate to
  the story?
• Q. Summarise in as few words as possible what
  happens in each act.

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Comedy Narrative

• Christopher Booker argues that the comedy
  narrative trajectory is
• Hero threatened by self or others or world in
  general
• This is a 3-stage process
• World where people are confused, uncertain,
  frustrated, isolated
• Confusion gets worse turns into nightmare
• Things come to light, perceptions change world
  brought together in joyful reunion
• Q. Does Juno fit this structure?

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Narrative Codes

• Barthes five narrative codes
• Action code typical actions of age group
  sitting in bedroom flirting and dating falling
  out and making up
• Enigmatic code enigmas
• Semic code e.g. connotations of acting, clothes,
  hairstyles, props used to convey characters
• Referential code references
• Symbolic codes binary oppositions (male v
  female, teen v parents, working v middle class)
• Q. Analyse a key sequence in terms of narrative
  codes.

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Narrative Archetypes

• We can analyse text in terms of character
  archetypes which recur in myth, literature, film,
  etc
• Protagonist (hero)
• Nemesis (shadow, antagonist)
• Attractor (animus/anima, contrasexual)
• Mentor (wise old man/woman)
• Trickster
• Q. Analyse the characters in Juno (Juno, Paulie,
  Leah, Bren (step-mother), Mac (father), Vanessa,
  Mark in terms of character archetypes.

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Representations

• Q. Are the following representations stereotyped
  in Juno?
• Girls
• Boys
• Teenagers
• Parents
• Family
• Social class

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Representations of Family

• Director Jason Reitman believes that because of
  its dealings with the nature of family, the film
  is also thematically Canadian.  It has a
  general nature of open-mindedness and Canadians
  are open-minded people, he said. To take on the
  notion of what family is, and what constitutes a
  family single mothers, adopted children,
  stepfamilies I think Americans have a too
  closed-minded view of what family is.

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Representation Ideological Discourses

• Q. Does Juno challenge or confirm dominant
  ideologies about teenage sex and family?

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Audience Target Audience

• Q. What is the primary audience for Juno? What is
  the evidence for this?
• Q. What other audiences might enjoy Juno? What is
  the evidence for this?

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IMDB Ratings for Juno
Q. What does this data tell you about the
reception of Juno?
www.imdb.com, 29/05/2009
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Audience Mode of Address

• Direct address at beginning where there is Junos
  voiceover (It starter with a chair)
• Indirect address events unfold in front of us
  generally either from Junos or bystanders POV
• General mode of address understandable to wide
  audience some references only understood by
  specific audience
• Unified mode of address in that it creates a
  single viewpoint for a mainstream audience

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Audience Preferred Reading

• The preferred reading is the interpretation of
• the text as intended by its creators
• Q. What is the moral of Junos story?
• Q. What are the themes of Juno?
• Q. What pleasures does Juno provide to people who
  enjoy the film?

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Audience Differential Decoding

• Some of the audience may read the text in
• ways different from the preferred reading.
• Q. Who might dislike the movie? Why?
• Q. How would you research negative views of Juno?
• Q. How does Juno reflect its contexts
  (geographical, social, institutional, audience)?

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Plaisir and Jouissance

• Roland Barthes notions of pleasure
• Plaisir easily digested gags and situations
• Jouissance (blissful pleasure) the audience is
  surprised by turn of events
• Q. Identify moments of plaisir and jouissance in
  Juno.

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Pleasure of Escapism

• Richard Dyer argues that entertainment is
  escapist as it allows us to escape temporarily
  from the inadequacies of real life

Q. Analyse Juno in terms of Dyers model.
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Pleasures of Juno

• Pleasure comes from narrative film sets enigmas
  and resolves them by the end
• Also comes from exercising intertextual
  encyclopaedia e.g. music, cultural knowledge,
  knowledge of social mores
• Characters give us a range of people to identify
  with, laugh at and/or desire

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Studio Independents

• The last 20 years has seen the rise of the studio
  independent (Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics,
  Focus Features (Universal), Warner Independent
  Pictures, Miramax (Disney), Paramount Vantage)
• Subsidiaries of major studios who acquire
  finished independent films or who develop and
  produce marketable films in association with
  independent companies
• Lowers the financial risk for both studio and
  independent
• Resulting films may show compromise between
  mainstream and independent values

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Fox Searchlight Pictures(www.foxsearchlight.com)

• Founded in 1994 by Fox Filmed Entertainment as
  the independent arm of Twentieth Century Fox
• Specialty film division of Fox Filmed
  Entertainment.
• Produces smaller specialized films in genres such
  as drama, comedy, horror, and science fiction
• Titles include notable indie films such as Little
  Miss Sunshine, 28 Days Later
• It has its own marketing and distribution
  operations. International distribution is handled
  by Twentieth Century Fox.

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Institution Internal Context

• Produced for Fox Searchlight by Mandate Pictures
  and Mr Mudd Productions
• Film shot in Vancouver, Canada Feb-Mar 2007
  (director and 2 leads are Canadian)
• Title sequence took Shadowplay Studio 7-8 months
• Budget 6.5m
• Marketing spend rumoured to be 50m
• US gross 143m
• International gross 88m
• Total 231m
• US DVD sales 50m

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Fox Searchlight Pictures

• Fox Searchlight bought script and brought in
  Jason Reitman as director who had previous
  success with the satirical comedy Thank You for
  Smoking
• Worked with Mandate Pictures and Mr Mudd
  Productions to produce Juno
• Fox Searchlight approved all casting decisions

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Mandate Pictures

• Mandate Pictures founded January 2005 and
  acquired by acquired by Lionsgate in 2007
• Mandate is a full-service production and
  financing company which finances, develops,
  packages and produces films

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Mr Mudd Productions(www.mrmudd.com)

• Mr Mudd productions formed by producer-partners
  Lianne Halfon, Russell Smith John Malkovich in
  1998
• For the Mudd team, the glue that binds are like
  sensibilities and a penchant for reading,
  attracted to material that crosses genres and in
  the end, defies classification. The result,
  hopefully, are smart films that resonate with
  audiences.

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Key Creatives

• Scriptwriter Diablo Cody (b USA 1978) -
  ex-stripper and media studies graduate
• Director Jason Reitman (b Canada 1977) (directed
  satirical comedy Thank You for Smoking) son of
  Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman. Has directed
  shorts and ads for Wal-Mart, Burger King,
  Nintendo, BMW, Buick

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Shadowplay Studio(www.shadowplaystudio.com)

• Artists photographed Page walking and taking
  swigs from a jug of Sunny Delight.
• Printed out some 900 still images, then
  repeatedly put each through a "bad Xerox machine"
  till they looked nearly hand-drawn, Reitman said.
  Smith invited friends over to his apartment to
  cut out the images of Page, which he then scanned
  back into a computer and linked together to
  create a stop-motion animation.
• The background was then filled in with scanned
  photos, prints and more cutouts.
• "There's this kind of cut-and-paste environment
  that we created with the music that's in the
  film, which has this home recording feel,"
• Reitman said. "And there's Juno herself, whose
  life has that kind of feel, and I wanted the
  opening title sequence to be sweet and homemade,
  and put you in a specific mood, almost put you
  into Juno's head."

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Creation of Opening Titles
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Marketing Juno Stage 1

• Buzz for Juno created at Telluride Film Festival,
  Colorado (1 Sep 2007) and Toronto Film Festival,
  Canada (8 Sep 2007)
• Fox Searchlight aimed to make Juno a film that
  press and audiences feel passionate about and
  becomes viral (via word of mouth and Internet)
• But worried about teen-pregnancy theme playing in
  small-town US
• Stage 1 Limited US release 5 Dec 2007
• Nov 2006 campaign and limited release in Dec 2007
  aimed at art-house audience and females 18-24
• On-line Junoverse launched
• Reitman and Page went on 11-city promotional tour

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Marketing Juno Stage 2

• Stage 2 General US release 25 Dec 2007
• Screened edited version of trailer to female
  18-34 through reality shows and adults 35-64
  through cable news election coverage and key
  morning and evening shows (the writers strike
  had knocked a lot of drama shows off the air)
• Online ads in social networking sites (MySpace,
  YouTube, Gawker) and smart sites (Comedy
  Central, NYTimes.com, Huffington Post)
• Number 1 album in US on 9 Feb 2008

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Teaser Poster
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Theatrical Poster
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Japanese Poster
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Publicity

• Publicity in New York Post (owned by Rupert
  Murdoch who owns News Corporation which owns Fox
  Searchlight and the tabloid New York Post)

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Institution external context

• PG-13 (MPAA www.mpaa.org) for mature thematic
  material, sexual content and language

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Technology

• Generally uses traditional methods of shooting
• Occasional use of Steadicam
• Small amount of digital work on digital
  intermediate (plus sign on pregnancy kit,
  changing leaf colours to autumn colours)
• Stop motion animation used for opening sequence

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Society

• Popularity suggests that Juno appeals to the
  zeitgeist (spirit of the age) of some social
  groups
• Appeal
• Strong-willed lead female
• Clever dialogue
• Juno starts cynical but idealistic but becomes
  more hopeful and sincere
• Hopefulness runs counter to most indie films
• Could be seen as reflecting a more optimistic
  generation (as seen in young support for Barack
  Obama key words in Obamas campaign were hope
  and change)
• Can Juno be seen as Generation Y movie made by
  Generation X?

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Generation X

• Generation X
• Born 1960s and 70s (approximately)
• Children of baby boomers
• Independent and sceptical
• MTV and video generation

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Features of Generation X ads

• Negativity
• Subcultural fit
• Intensity
• Gender blending
• Humour and irony
• Realism
• Postmodernism (hyperreality, fragmentation,
  intertextuality, )
• See Leiss et al, 453-518

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Generation Y

• Born 1980s and 1990s (approximately)
• Children of Generation X
• Idealistic and optimistic
• Internet and mobile phone generation
• Social networking
• Computer games
• Downloads IPod generation
• User-generated content
• Multitasking
• Watch less tv

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Features of Generation Y Ads

• Internet advertising
• Viral
• Brands

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Society

• Targeting Generation Y leads to a quirky indie
  cinema which is less likely to depict sex and
  violence (as per Tarantino)
• More likely to depict off-beat characters who
  screw up but appeal to the audience because they
  are well-meaning and kind

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References

• Booker, C. (2004) The Seven Basic Plots. London
  Continuum.
• Bordwell, D. and Thompson, K. (2007) Film Art an
  Introduction (8th edition). New York
  McGraw-Hill.
• Leiss, W., Kline, S., Jhally, S. and Botterill,
  J. (2005) Social Communication in Advertising
  (3rd edition). London Routledge.
• Marcks, G. (2008) The Rise of the Studio
  Independents. In Film Quarterly, vol. 61, no.4,
  pp 8-9.
• Perren, A. (2008) From Cynicism to
  Sentimentality The Rise of the Quirky Indie.
  Accessed 28/05/2009 at http//flowtv.org/?p1210.