Analyse on of your coursework productions in relations to the concept of audience.

Audience

Analyse on of your coursework productions in relations to the concept of audience.

To look into the  theories behind audiences I am going to analyse my AS thriller opening. Our thriller opening was targeted for audiences between 17 –30 for both males and females. We gained feedback from our target audience ad found that the younger end of around 17-20 found the thriller more entertaining.

Len Ang suggested the theory that we have an idea of what we want before we even make the media product.  This fits in with our thriller as when we were planning and creating ideas for our media product we were gaining visual ideas and styles by watching thrillers that already exist. By watching other peoples ideas and portrayls of thriller products we could see which styles suited our target audience more to ensure that our thriller reached their expectations. As well because audiences have become much more diversified so we need to ensure that finding the right style for the would ensure our thriller opening would be seen.

John Hartley’s theory of we must know our audiences before we can target them ties in with Len Angs theory. Audiences are changing and their behaviours make it harder to see what what types of films they are interested in.  This means it was more difficult for us to find a target audience and make a thriller that would be suitable for us to present to them. By keeping our target audience equally male and female meant we had more scope and room to our thriller opening and not worry about having imagery for just male audiences or female audiences. 

Julian Mcdougall states that we are now living in an online age and so the audience no longer fit into one media group. Now audiences watch different types of media online and do not actively stick to one media type this means it was a lot harder to make our thriller opening appealing to our target audience.

Dennis Mcquail states that the audience know consume media texts for escapism and to create a sense of identity. As an audience they want to feel that this is real and be able to place themselves into the media text they are watching. This is so they can escape all the pressures of what is happing in the real world.  By watching our thriller opening they were able to follow a story and enjoy it for entertainment purposes without having to stop and think about what they were watching. 

Analyse media representation in one of your coursework productions

Representation

Analyse media representation in one of your coursework productions

Representations are a way in which media show audiences messages and values without them being aware they are. There are many different representations within media texts. I am going to analyse some theorists against my AS thriller opening.

David Chandler’s theory looks into the idea that “everything is a representation” whether we realise it or not. When creating our thriller all our ideas would have been representations that we have taken from real events that have been happing around us or that we have seen through the media. This means that that our idea would not have been completely original and our own idea instead would just be based around other images. If everything were a representation of everything then our thriller would be the same, as another thriller film except for they would be styled differently.

Bathes ‘myth’ suggests that audiences will look at the hyper real and see it as still being real. In our thriller opening even though we set the scenes as being realistic we still set them and dressed them to look a certain way meaning that actually its hyper real. This also links into Baudrillard’s ideas of how we live in a hyper real society and we are just simulations. This also links back to the thriller opening as our actors were portraying characters by what we told them to do, they portrayed ideas of people that we created. This means that even though opening was made to look realistic it was still all-hyper real none of it was real.

Berger’s theory states that “men act and women appear” which fits in well to our thriller opening as in our thriller opening we see more of the male characters then we do with the only female character. In the opening we only see the female for a few short moments, once when she is being kidnapped and again when she greets her husband returning from duty. We only see the character within the opening and do not know anything about her other than her relationship with her husband although this is not yet fully established more the audience has an idea of their relationship to one another. In the opening the men do definitely act more than the female and they are the two characters that push the story forward, however there would not be a story without the female character.

Lippmann’s theory looks at the idea of stereotypes. He states that “to have one yu need the other”. In my thriller opening we used the stereotypes of good vs evil and men being stronger than women.  In our opening we have a strong sense of good vs evil as we can see that the husband is trying to find out what has happened to his innocent wife and the audience can see he is the good character as he has not given up trying to find out what happened to her, where as with the kidnapper character we can tell he is the evil character as he is the one causing the disruption in the story. Our opening also played on the idea that men are stronger than women as we used the stereotypical storyline of a female being kidnapped by a male character as the males tend to be more dominant and powerful then females. 

Our thriller opening portrayed the stereotypical ideas of males being the more dominant than the females and that woman are in films to be seen as men act. 

Analyse one of your coursework productions in relations to genre.

Genre

Analyse one of your coursework productions in relations to genre.

In AS I made a thriller opening that had to suit the thriller genre. We decided to make a crime/psychological thriller, which meant we had to follow certain characteristics in order to ensure our thriller fitted within the genre.  Some characteristics we had to ensure we incorporated were visual style, sounds, edits and conventional character types.

Altman’s theory looks into the idea that ‘people look for certain pleasures when choosing a film genre. These are emotional pleasures, intellectual puzzles and visceral pleasures. My thriller opening falls into all 3 categories to some extent.  The thriller opens with the wife being kidnapped, but we decided to reveal the kidnapper from the start. We then see flashbacks of the couple. The opening ends with the husband meeting a friend who claims he wants to help find his wife but is revealed to the audience has also being the kidnapper. This fits into the idea of the intellectual puzzle as they can make assumptions to suit the rest of the story. Also as we decided to make the thriller convincing  we hoped that this would bring emotional pleasures for the audience as they could make a connection to what is happening within the opening sequence. We also hope that this would give visceral pleasures as it would be a ‘rollercoaster ride’ of emotions for the audience as the story unfolds. We hoped that by using all three styles that this would be more appealing and interesting for the audience.

Jason Missel’s theory suggests that ‘industries use genre to sell products to the audience’. These are like cultural categories that audience members can relate to and gain pleasures from. By following certain codes and conventions found within the typical thriller genre we were able to make references and mirror real events in order to meet our audiences knowledge of society and other media texts. The genres also audiences to make choices about what they are watching and what the accept to be real or not.

Steve Neal sates that there are many different genre types  and that “genres are not systems they are processes”. The boundries surrounding the different genres have changed and evolved over time as we now have hybrid genres which means that these types of films cannot follow a certain of process. Our thiller could follow the process of an action film as well as a thriller which would fit into the hybrid genre of an action thriller.

Abercrombie’s theory that the “boundaries between genres are shifting” this links back to the idea of the thriller opening being more of  a hybrid genre and not just part of the thriller genre. Hybrid genres help keep the audience interests and to ‘refresh’ the look of the thriller genre as it had become tired and old and too predictable for audiences. By blurring the boundaries between two different genres and creating a hybrid genre you can surprise the audience and show them something that is more different and interesting.

In order to make the thriller opening a thriller we still had to follow the average thriller conventions in order for it to fit into the thriller genre and be suitable for audiences who enjoy thriller films. 

why is post modernism controversial?

Post modernism is controversial as it believes that nothing has any meaning to it as every idea is just part of cultral recycling as we have lost the belief in progress. If nothing had any meaning to it anymore then we are heading for a bleak dystopian future and everything would just become empty and superficial as our society is now idiots. This means that our society is becoming devalued.

Postmodernism is controversial as if all post modernism media has no meaning then why are we still being brainwashed with ideas and values without us knowing about this as our society no longer think about what they have just seen. Our society is being united in the idea that we all want to be the same as all the masses have been manipulated into thinking this way. Why as a society are we being brainwashed as a society and why do we need to be controlled. 

Apply theories of narrative to one of you coursework productions

NARRATIVE ESSAY

Apply theories of narrative to one of you coursework productions

The coursework production I have decided to apply my narrative theory to is my AS thriller opening sequence as it was a narrative video and had a structured story line to suit the thriller genre.

The narrative for my thriller opening set up the story of a young couple who have been separated due to the fact she has gone missing and her husband does not know anything about her disappearance. This follows in close connection to one of Kate Domaille 8 narrative types, the Orpheus which is the loss of something personal. This ties in with the thriller as the husband does not yet know the fate of his wife.

There are some aspects of Pam Cooks theory that I can apply to my thriller. I can apply her idea of narrative closure as the thriller does have a sense of closure from the beginning as we know the kidnapper will be found out as he is friends with the husband so the story has an obvious outcome from the start. The camerawork help suggest this by never revealing the kidnaper clearly enough until the end of the opening where we see him meet the husband character.  We can also see a realistic world aspect within the opening as we decided to keep the piece looking as realistic as we could. We decided to set the kidnapping and the meeting in two normal places, one at a house and the meeting along the water front. By keeping the piece looking  realistic we were able to keep the reveal a surprise which lead on to the narrative closure. All this also meant we could use cause and effect as there must be a reason as to why the couples friend would want to kidnap the wife and this is the effect of that. This shows that everything does have a consequence in one way or another.

Another theory that can be attached to my as thrilleris Levi – Strauss who used the idea of binary opposites.  We decided not to side the audience with one character more than the other through the use of the camera work as we wanted to add more depth to the story and not make a clear point of view to begin with and planned that this would be later decided for the audience as the movie progressed. The binary opposites we decided to use were good vs evil mainly. The use of the binary opposites set up the thriller structure and without the use of good vs evil we wound not have had a narrative to follow.

Another theory we followed in our thriller was Tzvetan Todorov. He understoof that the there needs to be some sort of structure whether it being a classic Hollywood narrative or a meta narrative. In our thriller we knew we would have to follow the classic Hollywood narrative and the idea of their being a equilibrium and a disequilibrium. We needed to do this in order to ensure our work actually fitted in to the structure of a thriller film. We decided to show the equilibrium of our married couple characters through flashbacks documenting important moments in their life (when he returned from the war).  We started the thriller showing the disequilibrium of the kidnap in order to grab the viewers attention and to ensure that we fitted into the thriller narrative by having a mystery feel.

We also used many of Vladimir Propps character types in our work. We used many of the typical character types such as the hero (husband) and the princess (the wife). The kidnapper/friend character portrays different types of propps characters he portrays the villain and the helper as he plays two contrasting roles. As a viewer we decided to show both his sides from the start and allow the audience to see our main characters in the story early on.  We felt this helped with the suspense within our thriller ad meant that we also broke the normal structures found in a thriller narrative.