Exam: G325 (1B)

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Exam G325 (1B)

• Section A Theoretical Evaluation of Production
• Question 1(b) requires candidates to select one
  production and evaluate it in relation to a media
  concept. The list of concepts to which questions
  will relate is as follows
• Genre
• Representation
• Narrative
• Audience
• Media language
• You may choose to write about work undertaken at
  AS or A2, main task and/or preliminary/ancillary
  tasks.

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Genre definition
GENRE

• A set of types/groups which any medium may be
  classified.
• Western Science-Fiction Comedy
• Sitcom Quiz Show Soap
• Reggae Drum n Base Jazz
• In each case the acknowledgement of genre
  depends on the acceptance of generic conventions.

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Genre - Timeless?
GENRE

• No - open to historical change - they are
  historical constructs.
• John Fiske - Any one programme will bear the
  main characteristics of its genre, but is likely
  to include some from others ascribing it to one
  genre or another involves deciding which set of
  characteristics are most important.
• Edward Buscombe felt that iconography was the
  best way to achieve generic definitions.

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Richard Maltby and Ian Craven
GENRE

• The success of Hollywood is reliant on the
  combination of predictable elements with
  variation.

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Auteurs
GENRE

• Auteurs - A group of film makers that were
  considered to be particularly influential and
  artistic. Does work show a particularly unique
  style?

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Rick Altman
GENRE

• Genre theory presumes that viewers pre-read
  texts.
• Viewers become passive voyeurs
• Genres are therefore restrictive
• Does not acknowledge or allow for the hybrid -
  the blending of genres.

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REPRESENTATION

• QUESTION 1B REPRESENTATION Example
• The piece of coursework I am choosing to write
  about for representation is the pop video we made
  for Dice by Finley Quaye. Representation is
  the way that media products construct a sense of
  reality and offer us the idea that what we are
  seeing on the screen is related to the real
  world, so it is being RE presented to us.
• This is a major aspect of media literacy the
  more you know that the media are representing
  things in particular ways and not just showing us
  things as they are. People who think that the
  media just shows us a window on the world are
  less media literate. People who create their own
  media and publish it on the internet are often
  very media literate because you have to
  understand how the media is produced to make it
  yourself. Pop video is representing two things
  the song itself (in a promotional way to make
  people buy or download it like a form of
  advertising) and the ideas and messages that are
  in the song. Andrew Goodwin writes that the pop
  video often anchors the meanings of the song
  which might be quite abstract with the imagery
  of the main performer as a star a kind of
  signifier, in semiotics. He says that this is
  more of a commercial than artistic idea. Thinking
  about our video, I think this is a weakness of
  what we did because our video really represents
  the story of the song a relationship breaking
  down without really creating a star image for
  the singer. If we had more performance
• in the video this would have worked but to have
  neither performance or a star image means it
  looks less like real pop videos. Goodwin says the
  pop video is usually an extension of the
  aesthetics of performance and I dont think ours
  manages much in the way of aesthetics. One
  important thing I have learning on my Media
  course is that representation is about who is not
  in the frame as much as who is, and looking at
  our video all of the characters are white, and
  the mise en scene is a suburb and a rural area,
  so we havent represented anyone from an ethnic
  minority or anyone with a disability. And we
  chose a heterosexual couple for the romance and
  the affair is also heterosexual. So we are
  not really doing anything challenging. But most
  media is like this and if you think about MTV,
  what you see is mostly music being represented
  through very old fashioned gender roles what
  Kaplan calls the male gaze in pop video.
  Compared to lots of videos on MTV our
  representation of women is quite progressive
  they are not shown as objects and they can give
  as good as they get. So overall our video was
  quite mainstream in how it represented a
  relationship and didnt challenge conventions.
  And its main weakness was that it didnt really
  manage to offer an aesthetic extension of
  performance.

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REPRESENTATION
Answer these questions in a new blog post

• Who have you represented? Why
• How have you represented? Why?
• How you are talking to your audience?
• What techniques have you used to commuicate with
  the audience, i.e, camera, sound,
  mise-en-scene, editing?

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REPRESENTATION
Answer these questions in a new blog post

• Who have you represented? Why
• How have you represented? Why?
• How you are talking to your audience?
• What techniques have you used to commuicate with
  the audience, i.e, camera, sound,
  mise-en-scene, editing?

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REPRESENTATION
Answer these questions in a new blog post

• Who have you represented? Why
• How have you represented? Why?
• How you are talking to your audience?
• What techniques have you used to commuicate with
  the audience, i.e, camera, sound,
  mise-en-scene, editing?

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NARRATIVE
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NARRATIVE
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NARRATIVE
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NARRATIVE
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NARRATIVE
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Todorov theory of narrative structure
NARRATIVE

• Equilibrium Disequilibrium - Equilibrium

Vladimir Propp - characters and actions (31
functions of character types)
Barthes decided that they could be categorised
in the following five ways?Action/proiarectic
code enigma code (ie Answers
questions)?Symbols Signs?Points of Cultural
Reference?Simple description/reproduction
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Binary Oppositions
NARRATIVE
Levi-Strauss Another method of analysing the
meaning and structure of texts. Texts are
structured by a series of binary conflicts.
Man Woman
Active Passive
External Domestic
Public Private
Producer Consumer
Gender
Think about film genre, which portray very
specific binary oppositions?
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Binary Oppositions
NARRATIVE

• In the mid-20th century, two major European
  academic thinkers, Claude Levi Strauss and Roland
  Barthes, had the important insight that the way
  we understand certain words depends not so much
  on any meaning they themselves directly contain,
  but much more by our understanding of the
  difference between the word and its 'opposite'
  or, as they called it 'binary opposite'. They
  realised that words merely act as symbols for
  society's ideas and that the meaning of words,
  therefore, was a relationship rather than a fixed
  thing a relationship between opposing ideas.
• For example, our understanding of the word
  'coward' surely depends on the difference between
  that word and its opposing idea, that of a 'hero'
  (and to complicate matters further, a moment's
  thought should alert you to the fact that
  interpreting words such as 'hero' and 'coward' is
  itself much more to do with what our society or
  culture attributes to such words than any meaning
  the words themselves might actually contain).
• Other oppositions that should help you understand
  the idea are the youth/age binary, the
  masculinity/femininity, the good/evil binary, and
  so on. Barthes and Levi-Strauss noticed another
  important feature of these 'binary opposites'
  that one side of the binary pair is always seen
  by a particular society or culture as more valued
  over the other.

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Andrew Goodwin
NARRATIVE

• Music Videos are simply an extension of the
  lyrics
• Images add new layers of meaning to the words of
  the song.

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NARRATIVE
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NARRATIVE
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NARRATIVE
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AUDIENCE
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The Hypodermic Syringe theory
AUDIENCE

• The media is like a syringe which injects ideas,
  attitudes and beliefs into the audience who, as a
  powerless mass, have little choice but to be
  influenced.
• You watch something violent, you may go and do
  something violent. You see a woman washing up on
  T.V. and you will want to do the same yourself if
  you are a woman and if you are a man you will
  expect women to do the washing up for you.

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The Culmination Theory
AUDIENCE

• One media text does not have too much effect,
  years and years of watching more violence will
  make you less sensitive to violence, so years and
  years of watching women being mistreated in soaps
  will make you less bothered about it in real
  life.
• What do you think? Can you think of any
  criticisms of these theories?

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Two-Step-Flow
AUDIENCE

• Another argument suggests that the masses will
  experience the media individually but then they
  will discuss what they have watched with others
  and it is the discussion which can then influence
  peoples opinions/behaviour.

• Are there any ways in which you share your
  experiences of the media with other people who
  weren't around when you experienced the text?

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The five ways that we are gratified by the media?
AUDIENCE
Uses and Gratifications theory
We make choices about what we watch and we also
have certain expectations we expect to be
gratified by what we watch

• Information
• Identification
• Interaction
• Entertainment
• Escapism

The 3 Is and the 2 Es
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Will everybody watching the same programme react
in the same way?
AUDIENCE

• One major criticism of mass theories is that
  they assume that the audience will all read a
  text in the same way. In actual fact our
  individual reading of a text can be affected by
  our culture, gender, class, age etc.

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Encoding/Decoding
AUDIENCE

• This theory extends the idea that we, as
  audiences, view texts in different ways.
• Everybody brings different experiences to a text
  and this may alter how the text is decoded.
• Watch the following clip and then share with the
  person next to you what you thought about it. Are
  your opinions the same? What do you think has
  affected your opinion?

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Encoding and Decoding Theory
AUDIENCE

• As consumers we have learned to read a media
  language.

We decode signs in the same way that we decode
language.
Media texts or messages are constructed for
recognition and interpretation. This process is
called encoding.
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Semiotic Theory
AUDIENCE

• Denotation What can I see?
• Connotation What does this signify?
• The cross becomes a sign.
• The actual cross is the signifier.
• What is being signified?

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Ferdinand Saussure, C.S. Pierce, Roland Barthes
AUDIENCE

• Barthes We are likely to read photographs by
  interpreting the various elements within them
  rather than reading a universal message.
• Mechanical photographic process
• (images are denoted by transfer to photographic
  paper)
• Cultural process
• (camera angle, framing, lighting etc.)
• Encoder photographer
• Decoder viewer
• How we read a photograph may depend on our
  cultural knowledge and experiences.

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AUDIENCE

• Iconic signs which actually look like what they
  represent.
• Symbolic/arbitrary signs which have a meaning
  that must be culturally learned because they
  dont actually look like what they represent.
• Indexical signs which have a connection to what
  they represent and are suggestive rather than
  directly resembling what they represent.

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Media texts are polysemic
AUDIENCE

• Potentially open to many interpretations

Class
Past experiences

• What could affect your reading of a text?

Gender
Age
Ethnicity
Beliefs
Lifestyle
Values
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McMahon and Quinn
AUDIENCE

• Identify three categories of codes that may be
  used to convey meanings in media messages
  technical codes, which include camera techniques,
  framing, depth of field, lighting and exposure
  and juxtaposition symbolic codes, which refer to
  objects, setting, body language, clothing and
  colour and written codes in the form of
  headlines, captions, speech bubbles and language
  style. For instance, a journalist aiming at
  readers' sympathy for an imprisoned political
  activist may choose to publish a photograph of
  the activist, crouched behind bars, next to a
  picture of a caged animal (making use of body
  language, setting, and juxtaposition) and anchor
  the picture to a caption that reads "CAGED!"

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"Pop stars are, to some extent symbolic vehicles
with which young women understand themselves more
fully, even, if, by doing so, they partly shape
their personalities to fit the stars" alleged
preferences.
AUDIENCE
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AUDIENCE
'Audience' is a very important concept throughout
media studies. All media texts are made with an
audience in mind, i.e. a group of people who will
receive it and make some sort of sense out of it.
And generally, but not always, the producers make
some money out of that audience. Therefore it is
important to understand what happens when an
audience "meets" a media text.
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Constructing Audience
AUDIENCE

• When a media text is being planned, perhaps the
  most important question the producers consider is
  "Does it have an audience?" If the answer to this
  is 'no', then there is no point in going any
  further. Audience research is a major part of any
  media company, using questionnaires, focus
  groups, and comparisons to existing media texts,
  they will spend a great deal of time and money
  ascertaining if there is anyone out there who
  might be interested in their idea. It's a serious
  business media producers basically want to know
  the
• income bracket/status
• age
• gender
• race
• Location of their potential audience, a method of
  categorising known as demographics. Once they
  know this they can begin to shape their text to
  appeal to a group with known reading/viewing/liste
  ning habits.

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MEDIA LANGUAGE
Useful linkshttp//www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/
language_of_film.htmlhttp//www.mediaknowall.com
/as_alevel/alevel.php?pageIDfilmlang

• If language is defined as how we communicate,
  then it can be interpreted in many levels when it
  comes to the medium of film. We know that each
  language consists of learnt words, phrases,
  grammar, punctuation, rules and common practices
  (Wohl, Michael The Language of Film 2008).
  Therefore we could transfer this understanding to
  the micro elements of film, camera, sound,
  mise-en-scene, editing etc, and/or go to a deeper
  level of analysis with a detailed look at choices
  of shot sizes, match-on-action, rules of
  continuity, framing and how they are
  pieced/edited together to create a sentence and
  therefore a language of communication.Unlike
  the other concepts in this part of the exam, we
  are not so much looking at what we are
  communicating but how we are communicating it.
• All of the decisions you made in your short
  films about which shots, angles, costume, set
  design, location, lighting, character movement,
  etc, play a part in this discussion.Arguably
  the language of film cant be discussed
  separately from genre, narrative, representation
  and audience as your knowledge of each of these
  influences the decisions you made throughout
  production.

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