Section 1b notes

Section 1B -

Can only write about one project, can be from foundation or advanced portfolio
You need to support or challenge ideas within one of the 5 areas

Structure - introduction
1. Define the concept. Define the one of the 5 areas the question is on
2. Outline the production you will evaluate
3. Tell the examiner you are going to discuss (x number of ideas about concept in the essay)

Essay should include minimum of 2 theories/ideas to support/challenge the area
4 theories is recommended

Areas - Genre, Audience, Media Language, Representation, Narrative

Genre, Narrative, Audience, Media Language and Representation 

Audience -

'the people that consume the media products. They have different ages, cultures and genders which create a target audience' 

Stuart Hall's theory discusses how producers 'encode' meaning into meaning text which is then 'decoded' by the audience with three different types of readings -

- Preferred reading - the meaning the producers meant to come across

- Negotiated reading - the audience may not agree with the meaning, but they accept it

- Oppositional reading - the audience read the text the way it is intended, however they do not agree with it at all

Hypodermic needle theory - Media injects directly into the consumer whenever it wants to. Media controls what the consumers think. This is a fairly out dated theory now though

Andrew Hart (1991) - ''the meaning is not in the text, but in the reading'' - the way audiences interpret a media text can vary depending on how the audience 'read' or 'decode' it.

Erving Goffman (1974) - Dramaturgy - study of every day life to study media audiences

Genre -
'types of texts or 'categories' with sets of conventions that make them recognizable to an audience'

Branston and Stafford -

Bell et all - 'Genre is good for media industries because their potential audience and consequently their potential profit that can be easily assessed'

Genres are easy to make sense of, people can easily chose a genre film to watch be it a comedy, thriller or a science fiction.

Profit is easy to make because different audiences like different genres, so a sci-fi film could be marketed to sci-fi audiences.

Media Language -
'is about messages conveyed to its audience and its affect. The way in which the story is interpreted'

Reading too much into things such as Micro and Macro elements

Micro elements - Sound, Editing, Mise-en-Scene and Camerawork - to convey meanings
Macro elements - Narrative, Characters, genre

Andrew Goodwin - ''music genres have their own music video style and iconography''
Studied this for music video project. For example indie rock music videos have performance and narrative, primarily conventional band set up, fast paced editing...

David Bordwell - Argues there is a difference between the story given to the viewer through the narrative and the story communicated to the audience though media language.
This is because different audience members may interpret the media language in different ways (links to the encode and decode theory by Stuart Hall)

Representation -
'process of showing real things, people, places and events. re-representing reality'

Tania Modleski - representation of gender favours the good mothers over the seductress. The good housewife stereotype does nothing but reinforce the dominant ideology of patriarchy. This means it reinforces male dominance in films.

Laura Mulvey Male Gaze theory - Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema -
Her theory discusses how female characters in films are 'objects' of the male gaze which softens females as characters and people.

Narrative -
'basic plot and storyline of a piece of media'
'the devices, strategies and conventions governing the organisation of a story'

Roland Barthes - Narrative is infinite, every person has a story, every object has a story

Vladimir Propp - broke narratives up into sections

Stefan Todorov -

Allan Cameron -

Thriller project narrative aspects - voiceover, cliffhanger, flashback, enigma