Every medium has it's own language that it uses to communicates its meanings. Languages tend to be constructed from codes and conventions that audiences can easily understand. Each form of communication has it's own unique creative language; scary music increases fear, close ups indicate intimacy, big headlines imply significance. Being able to decipher media language (Grammar, syntax, and metaphor system for example) increases our enjoyment of a text, and allows us to understand how it makes us feel what we're feeling. Recognising media language also allows us to become less susceptible to manipulation.John Fiske - "Detonation is what is being filmed, connotation is how it is filmed." Genre allows institutions to market films effectively and allows audiences to decide which film to what.
Roland Barthes - The idea that audiences interpret connotations from the denotation of signs based on their own previous experience.
Marshall McLuhan - 'The medium is the message' Spectators have specific expectations of each media form and the audiences expectations of these forms generate the meaning more than the content of the products themselves.
Adorno and Horkheimer - Behaviourist theory - Hypodermic Needle Model
Audiences are 'passive' as images and any idea can be 'injected' into the viewer's mind. A largely outdated view.
Stuart Hall - Audience as Active Participants. The idea that the producer does the 'encoding' and the spectator does the 'decoding'. This allows there to be a difference between what the producer intends and what the audience receives. Every spectator has their own personal experience and can actively question the text's representation. Everyone's personal experience of the world and pervious texts shapes their interpretation of narratives. There are three ways for an audience to interpret texts:
- Preferred Reading - As intended
- Negotiated Meaning - A combination of audience and creator
- Oppositional Reading - The complete opposite of the original purpose
Bummer and Katz - The Uses and Gratifications theory. Suggests that audiences actively seek out texts for specific reason to meet individual needs such as information, entertainment, personal identity, escapism, or social interaction.
Helen Mott - Conducted research into CBeebies in 2009 and found a significant under-representation of females in narrators and lead characters.
Evaluating media language is evaluating all the micro elements of a piece and how they create a meaning when they work in tandem. The meaning often refers to genre, narrative, representation, ideology, and targeting. To evaluate media language, semiotic terminology is used to explain how we decipher codes, and all analysis must come back to the preferred meaning (Stuart Hall).
Micro Elements:
Mise En Scene - A key aspect of the preproduction stage of a film that includes all features of set design, location, cinematography, costumes, lighting, and props. It creates the diegetic world, the place where the story takes place.
Camerawork - Shot types, movement, angles, and camera composition.
Sound - Layered onto tracks in order to create meaning. Sound bridges and motifs enhance meaning. Diegetic sound is a sound of something that happens in the narrative (dialogue, sound effects), non diegetic sounds would be 'mood music' or a 'voice of God commentary'.
Sound - Layered onto tracks in order to create meaning. Sound bridges and motifs enhance meaning. Diegetic sound is a sound of something that happens in the narrative (dialogue, sound effects), non diegetic sounds would be 'mood music' or a 'voice of God commentary'.
Editing - A postproduction technique in which the action shot is reassembled to tell a story. TV shows are not filmed in chronological order. There are two kinds of editing, continuity and non-continuity:
There are six kinds of moving images:
Kuleshov Effect - An editing montage used by Lev Kuleshov in 1910-20.
An experiment where he showed audiences a series of unrelated images and let them knit together what the story was about. This experiment demonstrated the power of editing to evoke response.
Semiotics - An attempt to create a science of the study of sign systems and their role in the construction and reconstruction of meaning in media texts. It is an excellent tool for analysing images, but it can be problematic in the sense that some of the terminology often makes it seem obscure and difficult.
Semiotics is the STUDY OF SIGNS, not just formal ones (e.g. the highway code) but any system of communication.
Ferdinand de Saussure - A sign is the sum of the signifier and signified. The signifier is the physical form in the real world while the signified is the mental concept evoked.
The basic act of signification operates at the level of denotation.
Langue -The rules of sign systems (e.g. grammar)
Parole - The articulation of the signs (e.g. writing)
There's also the vertical and horizontal dimensions of sign systems: Synchrony (vertical) and diachrony (horizontal). When we look at a still from a film from a film, or a freeze-frame of a video, we're looking at the synchronic dimension: the sequence from which the still is taken is the diachronic dimension.
Synchronic is like freezing a text whereas diachronic is concerned with changes over time. If you analyse a text in a synchronic way, you focus on it existing in one moment in history. If you do it diachronically, you acknowledge that we are looking at it as it arrives with a history, not something that is complete within itself.
The relationship between the signifier and the signified is usually arbitrary, determined by chance and universally agreed upon. This means they can have many meanings - they are polysemic.
There is a social consensus for many connotations.
Meaning cannot exist in individual signs because if their arbitrary nature. Meaning is derived from context.
- Transitions, the 180° rule, action match, eye line match
- Montages, flashbacks/forwards, ellipsis, graphic match
Pam Cook - The standard Hollywood structure should have linearity of cause and effect, a high degrees of narrative closure, and a fictional world that contains verisimilitude governed by coherence.
NVC - Non-verbal communication, an important code used by human beings, with 8 aspects
- Facial expression - Eyebrows are partially important
- Gaze - The focus of a person's look. Eye contact is meaningful.
- Gestures - How they move their hands when they speak
- Bodily posture - The body as a whole, the spine is used to convey mood
- Bodily contact - Western culture sees any form of contact as intimacy
- Spatial behaviour - The distance between people
- Clothes and appearance - This includes haircuts!
- Non-verbal aspects of speech - Tone, grunts, pace.
When analysing a visual piece, it's important to distinguish the difference between the form and the context. One of the key aspects of form is framing, the position from which the image is created:
- Angle - Straight on, low or high angle. The camera's line of vision = the audience's line of vision.
- Height - Normally eye-level, just under 2m.
- Level - Refers to the horizontal angle of the camera.
- Depth of field - The distance between the nearest and furthest area from the camera. Can be used to draw something in particular to the audience's attention.
- Lens type - Wide-angle lenses make the scene appear deeper than it is.
- Film stock - The speed at which the film responds to light.
- Distance - The space between the object and the camera. There are various kinds that convey different levels of intimacy or immediacy:
- Extreme long shot - a landscape
- Long shot - a group of people
- Medium shot - one or two people
- Medium close-up - part of a body
- Close-up - face
- Extreme close-up - part of the face
- Cropping - Choosing to focus on one particular aspect of a picture so by definition missing something out.
- Juxtaposition - Placing something beside something else to inform your opinion of both things. Can be played with to emphasise contrast.
- Genre - Provides audiences with a clear set of expectation which are used to interpret the text. Iconography is the objects we recognise as belonging to a particular genre e.g. a ten-gallon hat and six shooters in a western.
- Steve Neale - Theory of 'Repetition and Variation' Neale's reason for the success of genre products that genre films display repeated characteristics (conventions) that the audience are familiar with and recognise, but also provide variation to prevent the movies from becoming cliché.
There are six kinds of moving images:
- Panorama - The camera moves horizontally from a static position.
- Tracking or Dolly - The camera moves on tracks for smooth movement.
- Tilt - The camera moves up or down vertically from a static position.
- Crane - The camera is on a device that can move up, down or laterally.
- Handheld - Makes the frame shaky, often used for POV shots.
- Zoom - Changing focal length brings us closer to a far away object. Technically not movement.
Sergei Eisenstein - The Vertical Montage. A pioneer in filmmaking and experimentation with editing. He not only experimented with horizontal editing techniques (the arrangement of various shot into sequences) but vertical montage (synchronous arrangement of the various aspects within the frame or shot or the productive combination of the film picture and the sound.)
It's easier to think of vertical montage as all of the different devices used within one moment of film sequence (in one shot there may be text on screen, colour filter, actors, narration and these have been used to gather to create a desired effect.)
It's easier to think of vertical montage as all of the different devices used within one moment of film sequence (in one shot there may be text on screen, colour filter, actors, narration and these have been used to gather to create a desired effect.)
Kuleshov Effect - An editing montage used by Lev Kuleshov in 1910-20.
An experiment where he showed audiences a series of unrelated images and let them knit together what the story was about. This experiment demonstrated the power of editing to evoke response.
Semiotics - An attempt to create a science of the study of sign systems and their role in the construction and reconstruction of meaning in media texts. It is an excellent tool for analysing images, but it can be problematic in the sense that some of the terminology often makes it seem obscure and difficult.
Semiotics is the STUDY OF SIGNS, not just formal ones (e.g. the highway code) but any system of communication.
Ferdinand de Saussure - A sign is the sum of the signifier and signified. The signifier is the physical form in the real world while the signified is the mental concept evoked.
The basic act of signification operates at the level of denotation.
Langue -The rules of sign systems (e.g. grammar)
Parole - The articulation of the signs (e.g. writing)
There's also the vertical and horizontal dimensions of sign systems: Synchrony (vertical) and diachrony (horizontal). When we look at a still from a film from a film, or a freeze-frame of a video, we're looking at the synchronic dimension: the sequence from which the still is taken is the diachronic dimension.
Synchronic is like freezing a text whereas diachronic is concerned with changes over time. If you analyse a text in a synchronic way, you focus on it existing in one moment in history. If you do it diachronically, you acknowledge that we are looking at it as it arrives with a history, not something that is complete within itself.
The relationship between the signifier and the signified is usually arbitrary, determined by chance and universally agreed upon. This means they can have many meanings - they are polysemic.
There is a social consensus for many connotations.
Meaning cannot exist in individual signs because if their arbitrary nature. Meaning is derived from context.
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