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Welcome to our Media Courses!

Welcome Years 12 and 13 to what we hope will be an exciting and stimulating term. Year 12 are focusting on Local Radio and 13 on Music videos.We know you will produce some fantastic work;)

Welcome to The Gosford Hill Media Studies

Firstly, we would like to welcome you to Gosford Hill's Media blog. This is where you will find up to date information and useful resources to help you with your study. Please spend some time reading the blog and getting yourself familiar with the course.

If you have any questions or need some extra help you can email your teacher or reply to this post.

The A level Course

The AS GCE is made up of two units that form 50% of the corresponding four-unit Advanced GCE. Candidates complete unit G321 and G322 or G323.

G321: Foundation Portfolio in Media
This is a coursework unit where candidates produce two paired media artefacts from a series of briefs. This process involves progression from a pre-production, preliminary exercise to a more fully realised piece. The briefs offered are: print, video, audio and website. This unit is internally assessed and externally moderated.

G322: Key Media Concepts (TV Drama)
This paper covers the two areas of Textual Analysis and Representation alongside Institutions and Audiences. In Section A, candidates answer questions on an unseen moving image extract that is then linked to some aspect of the representation within the sequence. In Section B, candidates study a specific media industry from a choice of: film, music, newspapers, radio, magazines or video games. This unit is externally examined.

The chosen topic for the G322 examination in 2011 is TV Drama.

The chosen topic for the G321 coursework portfolio in 2011 is Audio.

The coursework portfolio is divided into two parts, a preliminary exercise and a main task. Students need to show progression from the preliminary task to the main task. If a student fails to complete the preliminary task then fifteen marks will be deducted from the total final coursework mark.

Preliminary exercise: the introductory music/jingle for a show on the radio with a presenter introducing and greeting their guest (who must respond) and playing an archive sound clip relating to the guest (approximately 30-40 seconds duration in total).
This exercise is to demonstrate understanding of sound editing and mixing and conventions of radio.

Main task: A five minute news bulletin (local radio) to include title music, presenter, specialist reporters, OBs, recorded interview, a vox pop and appropriate sound fx and structure.

All audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of music or audio effects from a copyright-free source.

Presentation of work

All work must be submitted via a blog site. Students must create a blog using the blog instructions and teachers should ensure that the blog addresses are recorded, along with student passwords. Students should use the following format for blog addresses www.rjones.blogspot.com

All work must be backed up onto a CD and be available for moderation by the examiner.

Working in a group

The production element and presentation of research and planning may be individual or group work (maximum group size is four candidates). Where candidates have worked in a group, the evidence for assessment may be presented collectively but centres will still assess candidates on an individual basis for their contribution to aspects of the work, from planning, research and production to evaluation.

Assessment procedure

The unit is marked out of a total of 100 marks: 20 marks for the presentation of the planning and research; 60 marks for the construction; 20 marks for the evaluation. Teachers should ensure that a coursework cover sheet has been completed for each student, clearly stating the bog address.









Unit G322 Moving image examination

The examination is two hours (including 30 minutes for viewing and making notes on the moving image extract) and candidates are required to answer two compulsory questions.

The unit is marked out of a total of 100, with each question marked out of 50.

There are two sections to this paper:
Section A: Textual Analysis and Representation (50 marks)
Section B: Institutions and Audiences (50 marks)

Section A: Textual Analysis and Representation

An ‘unseen’ moving image extract with one compulsory question dealing with textual analysis of various technical aspects of the languages and conventions of TV Drama.
Candidates will be asked to link this analysis with a discussion of some aspect of representation within the sequence, such as gender.

The scheme of work for TV Drama will prepare candidates in advance of the examination, using a range of examples from texts to demonstrate textual analysis of all of the following technical areas:

• Camera Angle, Shot, Movement and Composition
• Mise-en-Scène
• Editing
• Sound

The focus of study for Section A is the use of technical aspects of the moving image medium to create meaning for an audience, focusing on the creation of representations of specific social types, groups, events or places within the extract.

Extracts can be found in a variety of places;

www.youtube.co.uk
www.screenonline.org
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/catch-up
http://www.itv.com/ITVPlayer/

are the easiest websites to download or stream material from.

OCR Website

http://www.ocr.org.uk/qualifications/type/gce/amlw/media_studies/documents/index.html

Audience Demographics website...

Have a look at http://www.barb.co.uk/

which should help you catagorise your target market.

You could also look at slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/thedinosaw/abc-of-audience-demographics-presentation

for information on how audience demographics have changed due to the internet.

For info on podcast and a variety of music genres audience demographics:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=597303
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=34291
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/mar/10/6-music-commercial-demographic-bbc

More Audience Theory

Critical Perspectives: Key Media Concept: Audience

The concept includes a consideration of how audiences read texts and how they
interact with them. Media audiences can be defined in terms of location,
consumption, size and subjectivity.

• Location – the domestic consumption of media output raises questions about
regulation and control.
• Consumption – Audiences are defined by what they consume i.e. are they an
audience of a particular genre, medium or text. Fans can be defined as
passionate/ well informed about a programme
• Size – there is a need to distinguish between mass audiences that are
broadcast to and niche audiences who are involved in narrowcasting.
• Subjectivity – The impact that membership of pre‐existing groups will have
on audience members. These groups include: gender, nation, religion,
education, to name but a few.

One of the key areas of concern when discussing the concept of audience is the
‘Passive vs. Active Audience’ debate. The following models will help to explain each
side of the debate.

The Passive Audience and the Effects Tradition:
One way of looking at audiences is the power that the media text has over its
audience. This point of view is represented by the whole tradition of the effects
studies. There are many studies including conspiracy theory, the copycat effect and
desensitisation.

One model of key significance is:
Hypodermic Needle Model (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1970s)

• This model sees the media ‘injecting’ values, ideas and information directly
into each individual as part of a passive, powerless audience, thereby
producing a direct and unmediated effect.
• This model is commonly encountered in debates concerning the mass media
and violence. It rarely discusses the positive outcomes of a direct effect
caused by the media, such as the response to world disasters once the media
begins to portray devastation to its audience.
Active Audiences and Reception Theories:
There are many different theorists who argue that audiences are comprised of
active individuals who are directly involved in the selection and consumption of
media output, one of particular interest is:
2 ACJ

Uses and Gratifications Model (Denis McQuail, 1987)
• This model proposes that audience member consumption of media is
motivated and directed towards the gratification of certain individually
experienced needs.
• The emphasis of this model is on an active audience, actively seeking
combinations of gratifications from the range of media output selected and
used.
• McQuail offers the following typical reasons for media use: information;
personal identity; integration & social interaction and entertainment
• Information – this may include self‐education; seeking advice on practical
matters; information on issues or events that affect the individual; satisfying
curiosity or general interest.
• Personal identity – finding reinforcement for personal values; models of
behaviour; gaining insight into oneself; the contents may be used to explore;
challenge, adjust or confirm the individual’s sense of identity and self.
• Integration & social interaction ‐ gaining insight into the circumstances of
others (social empathy); identifying with others & gaining a sense of
belonging; finding a basis for conversation; substitute for real‐life
companionship.
• Entertainment – escaping or being diverted from problems; relaxing;
emotional release; filling time; aesthetic enjoyment.
• The gratification received from a media output will vary depending on the
individual audience members needs.
The introduction of the uses and gratifications model encourages researchers to get
away from the habit of thinking in terms of ‘what media do to people’ and substitute
it for the idea of ‘what people do to the media’ (Halloran 1970)

Evaluation Questions

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

• How does your media product represent particular social groups?
• What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
• Who would be the audience for your media product?
• How did you attract/address your audience?
• What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
• Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Research and Planning

For your research and planning you must include information on the following:

1) Research into a variety of local radio stations
2) Conventions of local radio news
3) Examples of local radio clips
4) An analysis of how these clips fit into theory of your choice
5) A detailed timeline of your radio News
6) Notes about how you contributed to the task


Level 1 0–7 marks

There is minimal research into similar products and a potential target audience.

There is minimal organisation of actors, locations, costumes or props.

There is minimal work on shotlists, layouts, drafting, scripting or storyboarding.

There is minimal care in the presentation of the research and planning


Time management may be very poor.
Level 2 8–11 marks

There is basic research into similar products and a potential target audience.

There is basic organisation of actors, locations, costumes or props.

There is basic work on shotlists, layouts, drafting, scripting or storyboarding.

There is a basic level of care in the presentation of the research and planning

Time management may not be good.
Level 3 12–15 marks

There is proficient research into similar products and a potential target audience.

There is proficient organisation of actors, locations, costumes or props.

There is proficient work on shotlists, layouts, drafting, scripting or storyboarding.

There is a good level of care in the presentation of the research and planning

Time management is good.
Level 4 16–20 marks

There is excellent research into similar products and a potential target audience.

There is excellent organisation of actors, locations, costumes or props.

There is excellent work on shotlists, layouts, drafting, scripting or storyboarding.

There is an excellent level of care in the presentation of the research and planning

Time management is excellent.
Audio
Level 1 0–23 marks
The work for the main task is possibly incomplete. There is minimal evidence in the work of the creative use of any relevant technical skills such as:

recording voice(s) clearly in studio/confined setting;

recording voice(s) clearly in location/outdoor interviews/presentations;

accurately using language and register;

integrating recorded material, as appropriate;

editing and mixing sounds appropriately;

editing to create continuity and meaning;

integrating jingles, music, location sounds and sound effects, where appropriate.
Level 2 24–35 marks
There is evidence of a basic level of ability in the creative use of some of the following technical skills:

recording voice(s) clearly in studio/confined setting;

recording voice(s) clearly in location/outdoor interviews/presentations;

accurately using language and register;

integrating recorded material, as appropriate;

editing and mixing sounds appropriately;

editing to create continuity and meaning;

integrating jingles, music, location sounds and sound effects, where appropriate.

Level 3 36–47 marks
There is evidence of proficiency in the creative use of many of the following technical skills:

recording voice(s) clearly in studio/confined setting;

recording voice(s) clearly in location/outdoor interviews/presentations;

accurately using language and register;

integrating recorded material, as appropriate;

editing and mixing sounds appropriately;

editing to create continuity and meaning;

integrating jingles, music, location sounds and sound effects, where appropriate.
Level 4 48–60 marks
There is evidence of excellence in the creative use of most of the following technical skills:

recording voice(s) clearly in studio/confined setting;

recording voice(s) clearly in location/outdoor interviews/presentations;

accurately using language and register;

integrating recorded material, as appropriate;

editing and mixing sounds appropriately;

editing to create continuity and meaning;

integrating jingles, music, location sounds and sound effects, where appropriate.

How to Podcast

Hi All
Please have a go at uploading any podcast work to www.podbean.com. Don't worry about what is on there for now as we can always edit it later.
Thanks!

Andrew Crisell: Semiotic analysis

Semiotics is described as 'a highly sophisticated classification of signs devised by the American philosopher, C. S. Peirce (1839—1914). Peirce, who is commonly regarded as a founding father of semiotics or semiology, the study of signs, distinguishes between the icon — a sign which resembles the object which it represents, such as a photograph; the index — a sign which is directly linked to its object, usually in a causal or sequential way: smoke, for instance, is an index of fire; and the symbol — a sign which bears no resemblance or connection to its object, for example the Union Jack as a symbol of Great Britain.


In radio all the signs are auditory: they consist simply of noises and silence, and therefore use time, not space, as their major structuring agent.

Since words are signs which do not resemble what they represent, they are symbolic in character. Their symbolism is the basis of radio’s imaginative appeal, for if the word-sign does not resemble its object the listener must visualize, picture or imagine that object. But there is an important difference between words which are written or printed on a page and words on the radio, and that is that words on the radio are always and unavoidably spoken.

They therefore constitute a code in which the words themselves are symbols of what they represent, while the vo ice in which they are heard is an index of the person or ‘character’ who is speaking — a fact which was perceived and researched fairly early in the medium’s history (Pear, 1931). In other words
such factors as accent and stress have semiotic functions, or at least effects (O’Donnell and Todd, 1980:95). Almost irrespective of what is said in a French accent, for example, the listener may automatically ascribe a romantic personality to its speaker.

Sample of Exam Question for Section B

Section B: Institutions and Audiences

Answer the question below, making detailed reference to examples from your case study material to support points made in your answer.

Discuss the issues raised by an institution’s need to target specific audiences within a media industry which you have studied.
[50]
Total [100]

Audience and Institutions

Hi All

Some of you have emailed me with queries about institutions and audiences. You are studying institutions with either Miss Beer or Miss Clinch at the moment so you should be able to decide the sort of production and distribution company you would use for your film.

Below is a huge document about audience which you would have received a few months ago. I would say that you need to mention the following:

NRS
Psychographics
Maslow

Please email me rj0076@gosford-hill.oxon.sch.uk or reply to this thread if you have further questions. Your work must be in by the end of tomorrow as I have to get it markled, moderated and sent off! Please also remember that I need a copy of each group's film on a DVD or memory stick.

I will be available at lunch time tomorrow in E5.

Miss Jones




Audience Information

It is virtually impossible these days to go through a day without encountering the media in some form. You may wake up to the sound of the radio, play a walkman on your way into college, pass billboards in the street and watch television or go to a film in the evening. We are all therefore part of the audience for these different kinds of media products, but what does this rather obvious statement actually mean?
Since the early days of the media this question has been discussed widely throughout the world. Some people have seen media audiences as being easily manipulated masses of people who can be persuaded to buy products through advertising, or to follow corrupt leaders through propaganda. There have also been fears that the contents of media texts can make their audiences behave in different ways- become more violent for example. On the other hand there have been other critics who have seen the media as having much less influence and working in more subtle ways.
This page will attempt to explain the various different ways of looking at audiences and help you to come up with your own version of the relationship between the media and their audiences. As you read it, remember that while the truth about the media is probably in here somewhere, it has so far been impossible for anyone to actually prove that any of these theories is right. What is important is that you should make up your own mind about all of this and then be able to back up your opinions with examples from media texts and possibly your own research.

When studying media texts, we need to understand the following points:

That all texts have intended audiences and how the identification of the audience for any media text might be determined;
How media institutions and producers research and target audiences;
How audiences respond to representation (including self-representation) in media texts;
Be able to reflect upon our own role as members of audiences for our own media consumption;
How audiences receive and consume media texts; The everyday use of the media made by audiences.








First a bit of history
All of the different media that we think of as "The Media" are actually quite recent inventions. If you were living a hundred and fifty years ago photography, film, television, radio and computers as we know them would all have seemed like fantasies. The cliché about pre- media times is that people made their own entertainment and there is obviously some truth in this. The kinds of things that people did in their leisure time were either likely to be fairly independent things such as reading, or they would involve mixing with many other people such as going to a play or musical.
The arrival of the media changed a lot of this- while films are often watched in theatre sized audiences. The vast majority of our times with the media are spent on our own or in small groups so in one sense the media can seem to split people up- you have probably heard the worry from parents that since the arrival of video games and portable televisions, children don't go out as much as they used to. On the other hand, there is an opposite sense in which the media can be seen to bring us closer together- if you watch a soap or look at a picture in the paper of Mike Tyson, the chances are that millions of people across Britain or even the world will have experienced the same media event. This brings with it another fear- that because so many people are seeing the same things and because they are often experiencing them alone without anyone to explain what is good and bad about them, the media has an unprecedented power to affect us in negative ways.
The audience as mass
The key ideas about media audiences that you should remember are these:
The media are often experienced by people alone. (Some critics have talked about media audiences as atomised- cut off from other people like separate atoms)
Wherever they are in the world, the audience for a media text are all receiving exactly the same thing.
As you will see from what follows, both of these ideas have been questioned.These points led some early critics of the media to come up with the idea of media audiences as masses. According to many theorists, particularly in the early history of the subject, when we listen to our CDs or sit in the cinema, we become part of a mass audience in many ways like a crowd at a football match or a rock concert but at the same time very different because separated from all the other members of this mass by space and sometimes time.
In the rest of this section we will trace the history of this idea and attempt to question how well it works.
If you look at the early history off the media, it is fairly easy to see where the idea of a mass audience came from. Within less than a hundred years photography, Film, radio and television were all invented. Each one of them allowed works of art or pieces of entertainment that might once have been restricted to the number of people who could fit into an art gallery or a theatre to be transmitted in exactly the same form to enormous numbers of people in different parts of the world. It can be very easy, living in this media saturated world to forget how strange this might once have seemed. These media quickly became extremely popular and at the same time there was an important difference between them and older forms of entertainment. Whereas in the past, many forms of entertainment were only available to those who could afford them, now suddenly films and radio particularly were available to all. Early media theorists struggled to understand this and found it easiest to compare the media audiences with the kinds of crowds they were used to from the world before the media- they came up with the ideas of the mass audience. Here is how the sociologist Herbert Blumer described it in 1950:
First, its membership may come from all walks of life, and from all distinguishable social strata; it may include people of different class position, of different vocation, of different cultural attainment, and of different wealth. ..... Secondly, the mass is an anonymous group, or more exactly is composed of anonymous individuals [Blumer means anonymous in the sense that unlike the citizens of earlier communities, the people who are members of the mass audience for the media do not know each other]. Third, there exists little interaction or change of experience between members of the mass. They are usually physically separated from one another, and, being anonymous, do not have the opportunity to mill as do members of the crowd. Fourth, the mass is very loosely organised and is not able to act with the concertedness or unity of a crowd.
Another history lesson
Blumer was writing about the media in 1950, five years after the Second World War. During the war and before it, Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia had attempted to use the media as propaganda- through films, radio and poster art they had attempted to persuade mass audiences to follow their policies- to the critics of the time it is not surprising that the media must have seemed like a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands, capable of persuading millions to follow evil men. In the recent general election, you will have found it difficult to avoid seeing similar, if less offensive propaganda. How much influence do you think the posters that covered Britain's roadsides might have had on the final outcome of the election? It is impossible to give a certain answer to this, but the different political parties obviously believe in their power, if you consider the millions of pounds they spend on them.







Key Theory 1: The hypodermic syringe
There have been a number of theories over the years about how exactly the media work on the mass audience. Perhaps the most simple to understand is the hypodermic syringe. This has been very popular down the years with many people who fear the effects of the media.
According to the theory 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- in other words, 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.
This theory has been particularly popular when people have been considering violence in films. There have been films such as Straw Dogs and The Evil Dead which have been banned partly because of a belief that they might encourage people to copy the crimes within them but on the other hand no-one has ever really claimed that every-one will be affected by these texts in the same way. Many people have therefore seen the theory as simplistic because it doesn't take any account of people's individuality and yet it is still very popular in society particularly for politicians looking for reasons why society has become more violent which can't be blamed on them. A good example of this is Dumblane- there has never been a real suggestion that Thomas Hamilton watched a lot of violent films but a kind of woolly thinking has allowed newspapers and MPs to link his dreadful crime to video violence.
Another interesting example of the theory in action is the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Before every one of his murders, he watched a clip from his favourite film in order to get himself excited. This is the kind of fact that might seem to prove the hypodermic syringe theory but the film was Star Wars and no-one has ever suggested that that should be banned- clearly the film meant very different things to him to what it means for us.Key Theory 2: The Culmination Theory
Because of the difficulty of proving the effects of individual media texts on their audience a more refined version of the theory has been created called the culmination mode. According to this, while any one media text does not have too much effect, years and years of watching more violence will make you less sensitive to violence, years and years of watching women being mistreated in soaps will make you less bothered about it in real life.One difficulty with both of these ways of looking at the media is that they are very difficult to prove either way. Many people have a general sense that the media do affect our behaviour and advertisers certainly justify their fees by working on this assumption, but it can be extraordinarily difficult to actually prove how much effect if any a text might have on an audience. In fact researchers have spent enormous amounts of time and effort trying to prove the validity of the culmination theory with no success- this of course does not mean that there is no truth in it as an idea.

Criticisms of mass audience theory
Some critics of these kinds of theory have argued that the problem is not just with the idea that the media has such obvious effects, but about the assumptions that mass audience theory makes about the members of the audience. Critics of the idea often claim that it is elitist- in other words that it suggests a value judgement about these masses- that they are easily led and not so perceptive and self- aware as the theorists who are analysing them. Here for example is a 1930's advertising executive talking about the radio audience of his day:
The typical listening audience for a radio program is a tired, bored, middle-aged man and woman whose lives are empty and who have exhausted their sources of outside amusement when they have taken a quick look at an evening paper.... Radio provides a vast source of delight and entertainment for the barren lives of the millions.
The chances are that you have heard similar comments about the viewers of soaps or quiz shows or even that you have made them yourself. The phrase couch potato has this kind of idea behind it- that watching the television is in some way brain numbing compared with other possible forms of entertainment.One problem that people have suggested with mass audience theory is that it relies on the assumptions of the people analysing the masses. The early theorists who came up with the idea were generally lovers of classical music and hated television and so they tended to look down at the viewers of television who they saw as "the mass." There is obviously a problem with this if any theory ends up as just being a chance for people to air their prejudices.To try to make a final judgement about mass audience theory, you really need to carefully question its main assumptions.Lets look at these in turn. The first idea seems to be suggesting that because we often watch the media independently, it has more chance of affecting us. Certainly many parents think this is true and will make a point of sitting with their young children while they watch potentially disturbing programmes so that they can have some influence on the way the children take in the messages and explain confusing issues, but do you feel adults need to be protected in the same ways? Some of the critics of the idea of the mass audience have pointed out the many ways that individuals who watch programmes alone will then share their experience with others in conversations about what they have seen. One argument is that these kind of conversations have much more influence on potential behaviour than the programme from which they may have sprung.






Key Theory 3: The two step flow
A theory that springs from this idea is called the two step flow. The idea of this is that whatever our experience of the media we will be likely to discuss it with others and if we respect their opinion, the chances are that we will be more likely to be affected by it. (The theory calls these people opinion leaders.)
Further criticisms of mass audience theory
The second major idea of the mass audience theory was that the mass were all watching the same text. This suggests that a single film will be the same for every person who watches it.
We are all individuals with different views and opinions. Our interpretation of a media text is influenced by our individual world view. In other words one viewer might interpret Fatal Attraction as being a sexist film but others have a perfect right to argue an opposite case- they could experience the same text in very different ways- so different, in fact that viewer 1's Fatal Attraction could almost be another text to the one that viewer 2 saw.
The Mass Market
Before going on to look at some more recent approaches to audiences, it is worth considering one last use of mass audience theory. The idea of the mass market. It wasn't just academic theorists who were interested in audiences and their relationship with the media texts they encountered. The producers of media texts and the advertisers who used them were if anything even more interested in these audiences who they could contact through the new media. To investigate exactly how large their share of the mass market was, television companies and advertisers pioneered new techniques of market research which involved quantitative surveys where they attempted to count how many people they reached. The most obvious example of this is the system of television ratings which still has enormous effect on the workings of TV stations. You may be able to think of a show that you enjoyed which was taken off because it did not achieve high enough ratings. If so you may agree with the thinking of Todd Gitlin:
The numbers only sample sets tuned in, not necessarily shows watched, let alone grasped, remembered, loved, learned from, deeply anticipated, or mildly tolerated.

Quantitative and qualitative research
Many of the people who use mass audience theory tend to back it up with quantitative research. This kind of research is based around counting the number of people who watch certain kinds of programmes and making simple judgements about these quantities. The criticisms of mass audience theory are made equally about quantitative research- that it fails to take into account the differences in peoples' experiences of the same texts. The opposite of quantitative research is qualitative research. This involves the researchers looking not just at the numbers of people watching a certain programme but also at the ways that they watch it and what they are doing while it is on. The idea of this is that it gives them a clearer idea of what exactly the programme means to its audience and how important it is to them.
We will now examine some theories of audiences which have used qualitative research to look for a more subtle view of the audience and then look at the ways the advertisers and media producers themselves have changed their methods to go beyond the idea of a mass audience.
Key Theory 4: Uses and Gratifications
This is probably the most important theory for you to know. According to uses and gratification theory, we all have different uses for the media and we make choices over what we want to watch. In other words, when we encounter a media text, it is not just some kind of mindless entertainment- we are expecting to get something from it: some kind of gratification.
But what does this actually mean? What kinds of gratification can we be getting? Researchers have found quite a few, but there are four main ones:
Information- we want to find out about society and the world- we want to satisfy our curiosity. This would fit the news and documentaries which both give us a sense that we are learning about the world.
Personal Identity- we may watch the television in order to look for models for our behaviour. So, for example, we may identify with characters that we see in a soap. The characters help us to decide what feel about ourselves and if we agree with their actions and they succeed we feel better about ourselves- think of the warm feeling you get when your favourite character triumphs at the end of a programme.
Integration and Social Interaction- we use the media in order to find out more about the circumstances of other people. Watching a show helps us to empathise and sympathise with the lives of others so that we may even end up thinking of the characters in programme as friends even though we might feel a bit sad admitting it! At the same time television may help us to get on with our real friends as we are able to talk about the media with them.
Entertainment- sometimes we simply use the media for enjoyment, relaxation or just to fill time.
You can probably recognise yourself in some of these descriptions and not surprisingly uses and gratification theory has become quite popular amongst media critics. It is important to remember with this theory that it is likely that with any media text you enjoy, you will be getting a number of Gratifications from it and not just one
However, despite this popularity amongst critics, there have also been criticisms made of some features of the theory. First of all, it ignores the fact that we do not always have complete choice as to what we receive from the media. Think, for example, about your family who may end up having to listen to the same music as you sometimes. Similarly, you don't have that much choice about the posters that you see on your way to college however objectionable you may find some of them.
A second problem relates to this last example. The poster that you see on a billboard, may be extremely sexist. However, you clearly cannot choose a different poster that you want to see that you might find more pleasant. If you think about it, this problem also affects us in our other encounters with the media- we are generally having to choose the media that we consume from what is available. This undermines the idea of uses and gratifications- we may not all have the same potential to use and enjoy the media products that we want. in society there are in fact plenty of minorities who feel that the media does not provide for them the texts that they want to use. One of the difficulties of assessing uses and gratifications like this is that people won't often be aware of the real uses of a text in their lives- how many people would admit for example that they watched a certain program because they were lonely even if that were the truth.
Key Theory 5: Reception analysis
In a sense, this is an extension of uses and gratifications theory. Once you have come up with the idea that people are using the media in different ways, it is just one stage on to actually look in more detail at how this happens. Reception analysis does this and it concentrates on the audience themselves and how they come to a text.
The most important thing about this that you should bear in mind is that reception analysis is based on the idea that no text has one simple meaning. Instead, reception analysis suggests that the audience themselves help to create the meaning of the text. We all decode the texts that we encounter in individual ways which may be a result of our upbringing, the mood that we are in, the place where we are at the time or in fact any combination of these and all kinds of other factors. So viewer 1 may watch a television programme and enjoy every minute of it and viewer 2 may hate the same show. But of course, it goes way beyond just how much we enjoy the text. We will actually create a different meaning for it as well.
Reception analysis is all about trying to look at these kinds of differences and to understand them. What reception analysts have found is that factors such as a gender, our place inside society, and the context of the time we are living in can be enormously important when we make the meaning or a text. Take the example of a performance by S Club 7 on Top of the Pops. A 12 year old girl watching this may find it very meaningful for her personally - she may feel that the image the group project has important things to say to her about how she might behave. Her father, on the other hand, may create different meanings for the text - he may disapprove of their clothing or behaviour and so the same performance that the girl finds so inspiring may be disgusting to him.
Often when our views of the media differ, it can say as much about us as it does about the media text itself. In this example, the most important factor is probably how S Club 7 trigger off in the two people's minds ideas that they have about their own lives. The girl may relate to the female members of the group because they are of the same gender as her and because, while they are not the same age as she is, they are probably more like the age she would like to be. For the father, his views of the group are probably influenced by the fact that his daughter likes them so much - the idea that she might want to become like them, may make their performance seem more frightening.
Of course this kind of thing is often closer to psychology- the study of personality- than Media Studies and can be very difficult to research. While quantitative researchers simply count the number of people watching a programme, reception analysts have to make use of interviews in order to get some kind of idea of the meanings that people attach to texts. This can be very time consuming- a simple questionnaire is rarely enough and often the researchers will have to ask quite detailed and spontaneous questions.
The ideas that reception theorists come up with are also not so neat and straightforward as those of other approaches. If you remember, Uses and Gratifications made up a simple list of four types of use for the media. Because reception theory concentrates on the individual it can never do this - we are all different and no one theory can comprehend that.
This can be seen as a strength of the theory - that it takes into account the complexity of our response to the media. At the same time the theory has a weakness which has been pointed out. This will be clearer if we return to our example of S Club 7. The girl's reaction to the programme may also have been affected by the day that she had had at school - the way that her teacher shouted at her may have made her particularly excited about the idea of being someone else. Similarly, an encounter with a strong woman who he was not keen on, may have affected the father's reactions to the programme. Reception analysis takes none of this into account it ignores the context of everyday life, something which we will turn to in the final theory concerning audiences.
The media in everyday life.
Uses and gratifications theory looked at why we make use of the media, Reception analysis looked at what we see when we watch a media text- what both of them leave out is the question of how the media fits in with our everyday lives - how do we live with the media?
One researcher who has looked at this is David Morley. He has come up with the idea of the "politics of the living room"- the idea that the media is just part of all the different things that may be going on in your home, that a television can become more than just a form of entertainment but in a typical family can be a subject of argument or a symbol of power. This may be a concept that you will find quite familiar. Imagine a situation where a man comes home from a terrible day at work. He is in a bad mood and does not want to talk to anybody in his family so he switches on the TV. Anyone doing quantitative research would simply see him as the another viewer of whatever programme is on but in fact he is probably barely watching it - the television is simply a way of shutting the rest of the world out. This is one simple example of the media in everyday life - here are some more general principles. We can never consider one example of the media on its own- we are always choosing from many different alternatives and more confusingly our understanding of one text may be affected by our knowledge of another - to go back to the earlier example the man watching S Club 7 may have read about them in that morning's Daily Mail.
It is very rare for us to concentrate fully on any media text- we may skim read through a magazine or glance at various different channels while using the remote. Once again, quantitative research cannot cope with this - it simply counts the number of texts encountered but doesn't consider whether the audience have taken them in.
The media can become an important part of the routines of our lives - you may want to watch Neighbours when you get in from college or listen to the Chart Show every Sunday when you do your homework. In these examples, the exact time and the way that the media text fits in with the pattern of your day are almost as important as what the media text actually is.
It is very rare for us to be completely alone when we encounter a media text. If you think back to the mass audience theorists, they talked about the media audience being isolated like atoms, but in fact, even when you are reading a newspaper, you are often surrounded by other people - even when you are in your room watching the TV, your family are close at hand.
Gender differences
One interesting thing that Morley found in his research was that there were clear differences in the uses that people made of the media in their everyday lives depending on their gender. He found that men tended to prefer factual programmes eg News and sports while women preferred fiction Soaps and other drama series. Also, men preferred watching the programmes extensively while women tended to be doing something else at the same time. Another thing that he found was that if someone had control over what the family was watching, it was more likely to be the man - often with the remote control in his hand.
Of course, this does not necessarily mean that there are fundamental differences between men and women. What it does relate to is the kinds of lives they are often leading - for a man, working during the day outside of the home, television is seen as a form of relaxation. For women, on the other hand, the home is often a place of work and so it is likely that that work will have to continue during the evening's television as well. Of course, the account given of typical lifestyles of men and women is now becoming quite out of date and so it is very likely that research such as Morley's, if carried out today, would come up with quite different conclusions.
New ideas about the audience
What you have been reading about up to now are very much the classic ideas about audiences. You need to be familiar with these theories if you are to answer questions in the media studies exam successfully. However, there are other ways of looking at the audience which are a bit stranger, but maybe even more up to date. The rest of this page will cover these weirder ideas. A lot of what follows deals with the relationship between advertisers and the programmes that you watch on the television. Obviously, the vast majority of the programmes that you watch (with the single exception of those produced by the B.B.C) are made with money raised from advertising but it can be easy to ignore the effect that this might have on what you end up seeing. The theories that follow look at the relationship between advertisers, media producers and audiences in more detail.

Audience Surveillance
While you were reading about Morley's ideas about the politics of the living room, you may well have thought that it was all very different from your own family life at home. The truth is that the traditional idea of a family sitting down together to watch the same programmes on the TV is very much out of date. Many of you will have your own televisions, stereos and game consoles in your bedrooms. The result of this is that the mass audience is even more divided than ever before. This is a problem for us when we try to analyse the media, but it is even more difficult for the people who produce media texts. It has always been very important for media producers to have some kind of idea about the people who are consuming their texts. This was confusing enough in the old days when they might have been trying to analyse a cinema audience - it is well nigh impossible today.
But advertisers do not give up easily and their need to find out exactly who is consuming what and how is resulting in some new techniques of surveillance. Our media use is being watched more than ever before. One recent example can demonstrate how easy this kind of thing is becoming - your parents may have recently got a loyalty card from the supermarket, the idea of this is not just to give away lots of free goodies, but it also allows the supermarkets to keep an exact track of what you are buying week by week. They can build up a profile of you as a consumer and then, by buying up advertising space in the magazines which they sell and which they can see from your receipts that you buy, target you more directly. As Cable, Satellite and the Internet become more commonplace, this kind of direct individual advertising will become much more common and will affect us all as audiences.
Of course all of this is only possible now because of computers. In the past it might have been feasible to look in detail at the buying behaviour of people, but it would have been impossible to come to any useful conclusions. Today, on the other hand, a simple computer program could be written which would analyse your shopping receipts in detail and then produce a list of suitable adverts which could be sent to you alone during your evening's T V viewing. This would mean that in the future, you could end up watching the same programme as your friends, but seeing different adverts in the middle of it.
Audiences as products
Audience surveillance in extreme form is probably still a few years away, but something that is very much with us already is the idea of audiences being the products of television companies. This is a strange way of looking at the media - but quite a useful one. It is usual to think of media texts as being made for the audience - so, for example, Match of the Day is a show that has been made for football fans - a group of people who already exists. The idea of the audiences as products theory is that the process works the opposite way round: the media producers will create a text in such a way that it will produce an audience which they can then sell to advertisers.
A good example of how this works is Friends. It might be normal to think of this as just being a funny program that happens to be on on a Friday night. According to the theory, though, Friends is actually a way of selling beauty products. In America where the series started, the producers would have been looking for advertising revenue and so they came up with the idea of a show which would feature beautiful people in funny situations with happy endings. They would have seen this as a great way of selling beauty products as the show would attract an audience of young people who would want to follow the fashions of the main characters particularly as the feel good endings would make this audience want to lead the same lives as the beautifully manicured main characters. To help them to attract this audience they would have scheduled the programme at a time when they could catch these people.
We have been talking about the producers attracting this audience as if the bunch of people who watch the show were already there beforehand as a recognisable group in society, but in fact, by assembling such a group of people to watch the show, in a very real sense they have produced this audience, and the same pattern has been repeated in Britain where the programme was at first sponsored by a hair products manufacturer.
You can probably think of almost any media text in the same way. It is rare today for texts to be created just for fun - much more often, commercial companies are trying to produce a certain audience. This would be fine if we were all as attractive to the advertisers - we would all get the programmes that we want. Unfortunately, some types of people have more money and are therefore more attractive to advertisers- they therefore will get more programmes tailored for them. Strangely enough, as teenagers, you are one of these groups. You may not feel as if you have a lot of money, but as a group, compared to older people who have their money tied up in mortgages and buying essentials, you spend a much higher proportion of your money on consumer products.. This has meant that in recent years, media producers have been bending over backwards in order to try to produce teenage audiences. The most recent example of this has been Channel 5 who have geared a lot of their programmes around the kinds of things they think you are interested in - with not much success so far! This theory was first thought up by American theorists and does not fit British Television quite so much because of the existence of the BBC. This channel is different because since it was first set up by the government it has been funded by public money in the form of the license fee and therefore does not have the same kind of need to produce specific types of audiences. This allows it to make programmes to attract different kinds of audience who may be left out by other stations and also allows it to follow its stated aim of "informing and entertaining"
However, the BBC is now quite competitive for audiences and so will try to produce similar audiences to ITV which is commercial. The BBC now sells a lot of it programmes abroad, particularly to America and it therefore is in the business of producing audiences in different countries. Many of the famous costume dramas that fill up Sunday afternoons are full of are partly intended to produce a certain kind of audience on American television.
Niche marketing
All of this is happening at the same time as the number of different media products available to us is increasing constantly. So we have a situation where there are more and more media texts and they are being targeted more and more precisely at certain groups. This process can involve something called niche marketing. A niche is a small part of the market and advertisers have found that they can get a greater return on their investment if they produce an audience who although smaller can more easily be targeted. A good example of this is the specialist hobby magazines that you might see in W H Smith's. There can't be that many people who are interested in Carp Monthly, but the producers of the magazine can be fairly sure that they will attract a large proportion of them. So although profits will not be large, they will probably be secure. Another good example of this is computer magazines: one company, Future Publishing, produce dozens of different magazines each aimed at one particular niche of computer users - there are magazines for people who use the Internet, for those who are new to computers, or those who are experts and for those who just play games on them. Once again, no single one of these magazines has a large enough niche to make lots of money, but the company has become very successful with all the magazines combined. All off this might help to explain why programmes with quite high ratings can be inexplicably taken off the air and why at the same time a minority show might flourish. The high rating texts might well have been popular with a part of society with little buying power- for example the elderly, while the niche for the minority show might be much more attractive to the advertisers.
An example of this is the enormous success of the various types of Star Trek over the years. The American producers of these programmes discovered a long time ago that although they did not produce large audiences, the particular niche they attracted included a high proportion of intelligent single men in quite well paid jobs- a niche that was very attractive to advertisers.The opposite of this can be seen in the case of Hello magazine which has had financial difficulties in the past because of this - although it has produced a large audience, the kinds of people it attracts like the working class and the elderly, are not those that advertisers are interested in.
Audiences as Labour In a sense this next theory takes things a little bit further. The idea of audiences as Labour is that rather than the media producers working for us when they make shows, we are working for them. The advertisers who put up the money for the programmes that we watch are clearly trying to make money out of us. You could see us, therefore, as working for them by watching their adverts. This might seem even more important, when you think about all the other work that you have been doing during a typical day - after a hard day at college, the last thing that you want is to have to sit through a load of adverts - you simply want to be entertained and the adverts sometimes get in the way of that. In America, the work that audiences have to do in order to be able to watch their favourite programmes has increased as adverts have become more and more frequent. In Britain, you can see this same process in action if you compare satellite television with ITV - the massive amount of advertising on satellite means that you have to work harder for your entertainment.

Sound Effects

Hi All

We have used the following websites for downloading music and sound effects recently - they seem ok and you should be able to access from school.

http://www.soundclick.com/default.cfm (MP3 music)

http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/ (Sound effects)

Thanks
Miss Jones

Coursework Assessment Criteria

Video - Main Task

Level 1 0–23 marks

The work for the main task is possibly incomplete. There is minimal evidence in the work of the
creative use of any relevant technical skills such as:
• holding a shot steady, where appropriate;
• framing a shot, including and excluding elements as appropriate;
• using a variety of shot distances as appropriate;
• shooting material appropriate to the task set;
• selecting mise-en-scène including colour, figure, lighting, objects and setting;
• editing so that meaning is apparent to the viewer;
• using varied shot transitions and other effects selectively and appropriately for the task set;
• using sound with images and editing appropriately for the task set;
• using titles appropriately.


Level 2 24–35 marks
There is evidence of a basic level of ability in the creative use of some of the following technical
skills:
• holding a shot steady, where appropriate;
• framing a shot, including and excluding elements as appropriate;
• using a variety of shot distances as appropriate;
• shooting material appropriate to the task set;
• selecting mise-en-scène including colour, figure, lighting, objects and setting;
• editing so that meaning is apparent to the viewer;
• using varied shot transitions and other effects selectively and appropriately for the task set;
• using sound with images and editing appropriately for the task set;
• using titles appropriately.

Level 3 36-47 Marks

There is evidence of proficiency in the creative use of many of the following technical skills:
• holding a shot steady, where appropriate;
• framing a shot, including and excluding elements as appropriate;
• using a variety of shot distances as appropriate;
• shooting material appropriate to the task set;
• selecting mise-en-scène including colour, figure, lighting, objects and setting;
• editing so that meaning is apparent to the viewer;
• using varied shot transitions and other effects selectively and appropriately for the task set;
• using sound with images and editing appropriately for the task set;
• using titles appropriately.

Level 4 48–60 marks
There is evidence of excellence in the creative use of most of the following technical skills:
• holding a shot steady, where appropriate;
• framing a shot, including and excluding elements as appropriate;
• using a variety of shot distances as appropriate;
• shooting material appropriate to the task set;
• selecting mise-en-scène including colour, figure, lighting, objects and setting;
• editing so that meaning is apparent to the viewer;
• using varied shot transitions and other effects selectively and appropriately for the task set;
• using sound with images and editing appropriately for the task set;
• using titles appropriately.

IMPORTANT: COURSEWORK

This is a reminder that your coursework is due to be completed and uploaded on to your blog by Monday 20th April. OCR have issued further guidance in a Q&A form as outlined below. If you have any further questions then PLEASE email me or reply to this thread.

Remember - you will lose 15 marks if you do not submit a preliminary task.


Q. How does OCR want evidence of the preliminary task presented for moderation?
A. In this case it is video and we'd want the DVD if the work was selected in the moderator's
sample. (as well as on the blog)

Q. Can we produce a trailer for the main task?
A. No, the main task must be the opening of a film with titles.

Q. Technically, what is the 180 degree rule in the context of this task?
A. It is akin to drawing an imaginary line down the centre of the frame - with the two
characters probably at either end of the frame - and keeping the camera on one side of the
line - but able to move it up, down, left, right etc but not cross the line as that changes the
audiences' perspective on the shot.

Q. What is match-on-action?
A. Action in one shot, is continued into the next e.g. in this task an exterior shot of the
character opening the door moving to an interior shot of them entering the room.

Q. What is shot/reverse shot?
A. In this case most people would do the shot/reverse shot with one character sitting down
looking at the other character who is off screen, with the shot then switching to them
looking back at the original character. It's how most conversations on TV and film are
shown, often over-the shoulder of each character in turn.

Q. What's best practise for keeping track of, or authenticating candidates work when
they are out filming with no supervision?
A. There isn't one answer to this as it is what best suits the centre and candidates but
keeping a log of who has done what immediately after each piece of filming would be
useful. You have to take candidates’ word for it when they are off site and unsupervised
but if they are logging the work immediately afterwards and bringing it to the next
classroom activity you should soon get a feel for which students are contributing more than
others.

Research and Planning
Q. Does research and planning have to be submitted as hard copy or electronic
format?
A. Research and planning evidence may be presented in electronic format

Evaluation
Q. What is the word limit?
A. There is no word limit. The evaluation needs to address the seven key questions posed on
page 13 of the specification. Visual evidence is encouraged

Q. Does the evaluation need to be submitted in electronic format?
A. Yes, the evaluation needs to be submitted electronically in one or a combination of the four
specified formats at the top of page 13 of the specification.

Q. If using blogging or PowerPoints does the evaluation have to be in continuous
prose?
A. No, definitely not. As long as the questions in the specification are answered candidates
could answer in bullet point style if necessary, specifically answering each question. For
DVDs and Podcasts candidates can answer the questions aurally.
Blogs / Websites / Podcasts / PowerPoints / DVD extras

Q. How do we submit blogs to OCR for moderation?
A. Blogs must be available online for the duration of the moderation period. The URL (web
address) must be supplied to the moderator. This can be added to the CW coversheet.

Producing Work
Q. Can candidates use found work?
A. No, all work must be original, with the exception of audio and music, this doesn’t have to
be original but must be from a copyright free source.

History of the growth of British cinemas (useful for mass audience)

During the 1930s, virtually every town, suburb and major new housing development gained one or more new cinemas, often relegating existing picture houses to secondary status. Many older cinemas were modernised or virtually rebuilt in order to compete with the newcomers. Some outmoded and surplus cinemas closed, especially in city centres where they were replaced by expanding chain stores.
By the end of the 1930s, three national cinema chains had emerged to dominate British film exhibition.
Associated British Cinemas opened 93 new cinemas in the decade, reconstructed several others, took over existing circuits (including a major competitor, Union Cinemas in 1937), and at maximum operated around 460 cinemas, the largest total of any company in this country. Its cinemas used a variety of names, with Regal, Rex and Savoy being the favourites.
Gaumont entered the decade with a larger number of properties than ABC (including the PCT circuit) and had less need to expand. Nevertheless, it constructed 51 new cinemas, including many opulent Gaumont Palaces. It had 303 cinemas by the end of the decade.

Odeon, Kingstanding, 1935
The Odeon circuit opened its first sites in 1933, but rapidly expanded, adding 136 new cinemas and taking over nearly as many existing properties, reaching a total of 255 properties by 1940. The brainchild of entrepreneur Oscar Deutsch, it particularly epitomised the modern, streamlined look in architecture and fittings and had little interest in organ interludes, stage shows, restaurants and ballrooms that were prevalent elsewhere, particularly in the first half of the decade.
Many smaller regional circuits emerged, erecting some of the largest individual cinemas. Granada Theatres, for example, built the huge Granada Tooting (1931), south London, with its cathedral-like interior, while the Green brothers in Scotland followed the Playhouse Glasgow with another huge Playhouse at Dundee (1936). The Hyams brothers, in association with Gaumont, were responsible for the largest cinema in England: the State Kilburn, north London (1937, 4004 seats).

Odeon, Leicester Square, 1937
These super cinemas flourished particularly in poorer areas, where the warm and luxurious surroundings were most appreciated. Some patrons walked on carpet for the first time; others, particularly the unemployed, would sometimes take refuge for an entire afternoon and evening, watching the continuous performances repeatedly.
Although ABC, Gaumont and Odeon between them owned just over one fifth of British cinemas, they controlled the release of mainstream films in Britain through their large cinemas in the major cities and through the selection of the weekly release to be shown throughout each circuit. This was usually a double bill of main feature and 'B' feature, supported by a newsreel. The choice of films reflected the ties that each chain had established with particular distributors and, in the case of ABC and Gaumont, gave priority to the output of an associated production company and distributor. The one major restraint on the film bookers was the legal obligation to show a certain 'quota' of new British films. This was helpful to British producers as it was essential to obtain a release on one of the three major circuits to show a profit. Where the three main chains lacked an outlet, an independent or small circuit cinema would usually step in if it had sufficient seating capacity to satisfy distributors.

Odeon, Leicester Square, 1937 (int. gutted & partly reinstated)
Sunday opening usually was not allowed in Scotland and normally required a local poll to come out in favour before it was permitted in England. Sunday opening time was widely restricted to 4.30pm and a donation to charity was required. Most circuit-release cinemas played revival double-bills on Sundays rather than new films.
New releases were shown Monday to Saturday for six days at most locations, but often played half the week in smaller towns with only one or two cinemas. These films would subsequently be played by other cinemas without access to a circuit release as 'second runs', 'third runs', etc., often taking a year or more to complete their initial round.
Children's shows had been presented from the cinema's early days, but during the 1930s the idea of Saturday morning shows really took hold, and each of the major circuits established its own club with special badge and song. These clubs encouraged charitable activities and good citizenship but were, of course, primarily intended to sow the cinemagoing habit.

Granada, Tooting
Certain types of specialised cinemas were also established. The 'art house' evolved from The Film Society and gave a new lease of life to an old cinema, renamed the Academy, in London's Oxford Street. Other old cinemas followed suit and a few ultra-modern art houses were purpose-built, including the Cosmo in Glasgow. The newsreel cinema was an American phenomenon imported to Britain in 1931: these tiny halls provided an hour-long show in busy city centres, particularly at main railways stations, to amuse delayed passengers and weary shoppers. Newsreel cinemas were often conversions of early, struggling picture houses, sometimes completely rebuilt; but many were specially constructed. Additionally, there were picture houses specialising in the revival of old films, notably those of the Classic circuit, which built its own flagship cinema in London's Baker Street.

Waterloo Station News Theatre, 1934 (demolished)
Cinemagoing was never as pervasive as watching television later became. A newspaper survey in 1938 concluded that only 31% of the population went to the cinema once a week, 13% attended twice, 3% three times, and 2% four or more times. 12% never went, the rest occasionally. Only 4% of twelve-year-olds never visited the cinema, rising to 25% at age 50. RKO Radio estimated that its huge hit, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (US, d. David Hand, 1937), was seen by a third of the UK population.

Shot types

Click here for shot types

Example Essay Answer

The significance of props, setting, make-up and clothes in the extract convey the representation of age and gender greatly; the female protagonists are portrayed as stereotypical teenagers, wearing short skirts which are currently in fashion. Their make-up is quite natural with an emphasis on the eyes, which is an important facial feature that highlights femininity. Their costumes are a sharp contrast to the middle aged woman in the shop, who is dressed in black, reflecting the formality of her character. She is also holding a pen, suggesting she is working, creating another contrast with the teenage girls who are portrayed as being idle: both in the extract and stereotypically in the media. The setting of the wedding shop, where the main action takes place, is important as it has connotations linked to female gender. The church is equally important as this represents the stereotypical dream that girls may have about marriage and romance.The links between various shots are mainly transitions using cross-cuts. The transitions are fast-paced, which represent the protagonists’ fast lives. Often, teenagers are perceived by society as leading hectic personal lives, which may include drugs, sex and drinking alcohol. The narrative flow is created by retaining the same characters throughout the different scenes, and also by the cross cutting which maintains the continuity of time and space. This helps the audience to relate what they are watching with reality. The use of eye line matches in the shop reinforces the communication between the teenagers and the woman, which comes across as awkward due to the language employed by the young girls. Words such as “spunk” would not commonly be used in such situations and makes the audience feel uncomfortable. The majority of the sound in the extract is diegetic, which adds to the naturalism of the scenes. In the first scene, the audience can detect the sound of bells being rung; this is a subliminal message, which hints at the theme of marriage. Consequently, at the end of the extract these bells sound out the tune of the wedding bells that you would associate with the end of a traditional ceremony, which signifies the end of the narrative.
When the protagonists meet at the beginning of the scene, there are ambient sounds of cars; this shows that these characters are not isolated and therefore represents that they live in an urban area. As the girls enter the store, incidental piano music is playing. This gives a more composed atmosphere, and creates the illusion that the character's time in the shop will be a positive experience. After an exchange of dialogue between the two protagonists and a third character, they leave the shop accompanied by the non-diegetic sound of the traditional wedding march. This sound is more up tempo and more dramatic than the previous piano music and fits in with the narrative, whereby the girls have stolen the wedding attire that they were looking at. Furthermore, the idea of getting married is often associated with female fairytale dreams. The first scene begins with a low angle shot. This represents how important the protagonists feel. The camera points upwards on a canted angle, showing that they are in a superior position; something that a lot of teenagers stereotypically believe they are in. In the next scene, the camera is hand-held, making the scene seem more like a documentary and closer to real life, possibly being filmed by friends as opposed to a cameraman. Whilst in the shop, over-the-shoulder shots are used to show the conversation that's going on from both points of view and helps the audience follow the action that is taking place. The way the characters are positioned allows the audience to notice the wedding dresses behind them, showing the gender of the characters. In the final scene, the spinning point of view shots link to the idea of drugs that the characters talked about earlier in the first scene, as these shots seem almost disorientated. This again represents a stereotype of teenagers and drug use.

USE TECHNICAL TERMINOLOGY
GO INTO DETAILED DESCRIPTION AND EXPLANATION
USE PEE
USE KEY CONCEPTS

Sound Presentations

Hello All,

It's been a while since we last were together. I hope you have had a good time during your work experience week. Just to remind you that when we have our lesson on Tuesday we will be doing the sound presentations in your groups. I expect each group to have analysed the sound of a 2 minute TV drama and to bring in the sample on their memory stick so everyone else knows what you're talking about!

Any questions, just ask. I expect everyone to be prepared on Tuesday.

Have a good weekend!

Miss Beer

Representation Notes

Representation

Representation is the process by which the media presents the ‘real world’ to an audience. Media texts construct meanings about the world – a picture, a film, a T.V programme or a newspaper article represents the world to help audiences make sense of it.

What is the real world? Can it ever be presented to us in a wholly unconstructed way and is there a process that presents ‘reality’ as it really is?
Representation is not just about how we see people, places and objects but also how we interpret what our senses tell us. This is very dependant on who we are, what we read, see or hear.

In some cases, the text may have a persuasive representation as in a T.V commercial. It can have ideological connotations – you, the audience, can also share the aspirations ideals and lifestyle of characters in friends and you can share the ideals of the consumerist American dream. In a simple case of political representation: his insurgent is your freedom fighter; one country’s resistance movement is another’s rebel army.


Mediation
Every time we encounter a media text, we are not seeing reality, but someone's version of it. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is something that is easily forgotten when we get caught up in enjoying a text. The media place us at one remove from reality: they take something that is real, a person or an event and they change its form to produce whatever text we end up with. This is called mediation.

You should be looking for this with any media text. Think about the new Oasis album, for example- this is not just the sound of five musicians playing together in a studio. Instead, the reality of the sound that they might make has been mediated before it reaches you. Engineers and producers have re- modelled the sound and artists have packaged the album. Newspapers and magazines have reported the group and created a context for the album so that most people probably had an opinion about it before it came out. Once again, whatever sound the group made in the studio has been highly mediated before it gets to you.

If you ever go to see a comedy show recorded for the television, you will see the process of mediation in action. What might end up as a half hour broadcast, will be recorded over an entire evening - jokes that might seem spontaneous when watched on the TV will have been endlessly repeated until "just right". The studio audience will have been trained into laughing in exactly the right way by warm up men and the text that finally reaches the public will also be given context by use of soundtrack music and computer graphics. The whole experience of hearing a few jokes will have been mediated.

Of course, most of us are aware of this- we know that what we are seeing in a film or a Soap isn't real- we just allow ourselves to forget for the time that the programme is on that it is a fiction. At the same time we all have ideas in our heads of some kinds of texts which might be somehow less mediated- it is obvious that a fictional programme isn't real but when we encounter something like the television news, we are more likely to believe in the straightforward nature of the "truth" we are receiving.

In fact, the News is just as sure to be mediated as anything else- someone has decided that these are the few news items that are the most "newsworthy" and has chosen the shots that are used to tell the stories, the graphics that will go with them and the tie that the presenter will be wearing which will distract you so much while you are watching. Whatever version you get of what has gone on will end up being highly mediated- very different from the experience of someone who was at the scene- as you will know if you have ever seen a news event taking place.

Mediation- three things to look for:

Selection- Whatever ends up on the screen or in the paper, much more will have been left out- any news story has been selected from hundreds of others which the producers decided for you were less interesting, any picture has been chosen from an enormous number of alternatives.

Organisation- The various elements will be organised carefully in ways that real life is not- in visual media this involves mise-en-scene and the organisation of narrative, in the recording of an album the production might involve re-mixing a track. Any medium you can think of will have an equivalent to these. This organisation of the material will result in…….

Focusing- mediation always ends up with us, the audience being pushed towards concentrating on one aspect of the text and ignoring others. If you are watching a film the camera will pan towards an important character, in a tabloid the headlines will scream, for your attention. It can be easy to ignore how different from our everyday lives this is. If you are walking through a field, you are unlikely to see a sign saying "look at this amazing tree." You make your own decisions about what is worth our attention. The media text, through mediation, tries to do this for us.

Representation

The result of this process of mediation is that we are given a version of reality which is altered- those are never the real people that we are seeing but representations of them which have somehow been created. It is time now to look at this idea of representation and how it happens.

What is representation?

The Oxford English Dictionary gives two definitions of the word:
To represent something is to describe or depict it, to call it up in the mind by description or portrayal…..; to place a likeness of it before us in our mind.
To represent also means to symbolise, stand for, to be a specimen of or to substitute for; as in the sentence, "In Christianity, the cross represents the suffering and crucifixion of Christ."
It is worth thinking about each of these for a moment- the first one is the more straightforward- the media are in the business of describing things to us- they represent people and types of people to us so that we end up feeling that we know what they are like.
In most of these cases it is unlikely that you know these people personally- what impression that you have of them must come from the media. They have given us descriptions that have affected our views of these people.

The second of the two dictionary definitions is slightly more difficult but also useful. A representation is something that symbolises something else. The example the dictionary gives of the cross is an obvious one, but in the media you can find plenty of others. Liam Gallagher, as he is represented in the media is not just the singer in Oasis, but also a symbol of many things which some in the media think is wrong with young people in England today- drug-taking, hooliganism lack of originality etc.

Society, the individual and representation

Of course it is too simple to talk just about the media mediating reality and creating representations- we need a more subtle understanding of the process. To get this we need to look briefly at some different ideas people have had about how representation works.
You could broadly separate these into three:

The Reflective view of representing
According to this view, when we represent something, we are taking its true meaning and trying to create a replica of it in the mind of our audience- like a reflection. This is the view that many people have of how news works- the news producers take the truth of news events and simply present it to us as accurately as possible.

The Intentional view
This is the opposite of the Reflective idea. This time the most important thing in the process of representation is the person doing the representing- they are presenting their view of the thing they are representing and the words or images that they use mean what they intend them to mean. According to this theory, if you see a picture of an attractive person drinking a can of Coke in an advert, it will have the same meaning to you as the advertiser intended- go away and buy some!

The Constructionist view
This is really a response to what have been seen a weakness in the other two theories- constructionists feel that a representation can never just be the truth or the version of the truth that someone wants you to hear since that is ignoring your ability as an individual to make up your own mind and the influences of the society that you live in on the way that you do so. This text will broadly be taking a Constructionist approach to representation so it is worth spelling out this idea again.

Any representation is a mixture of:
The thing itself.
The opinions of the people doing the representation
The reaction of the individual to the representation
The context of the society in which the representation is taking place.

Here's an example of how this works:
If you've seen the film Independence Day, you may have been amused or annoyed at the way that British people were represented as upper class idiots. If you consider the different parts of the Constructionist approach to representation, they would work like this:
There must be some British people who the producers either encountered in reality or in other media texts.
They formed an opinion of them that they were stuck up idiots which they used as the basis of their representation.
As an individual watching this, you chose whether to believe the representation was valid or not.
In doing this, you were influenced by the fact that you are yourself British- an American watching the film would probably have come to a different conclusion.
In the last two parts of this equation- the individual and society are an enormously difficult area. For now it is worth thinking about the influence of society on what representations we receive. In society there are ardent royalists and republicans, people who hate loud women and those who respect them- a multitude of views- so how can we say that society has an influence on our views of someone or something? The truth is that amid all this confusion of opinions, some kinds of ideas dominate and are shared by a majority of people.

We call views about how things should be and how people should behave an ideology and if an ideology is shared by the majority of people in a culture it is called the dominant ideology.
The group of ideas that make up the dominant ideology in Britain are not something that remains static- they change as new ideas enter the are encountered and people discuss them. For example the dominant ideology in Britain used to be anti- gay but this is happily changing at the moment.

Here are some things that are generally agreed to be part of the dominant ideology in Britain:

People should put their families first.
People should work for their money and not show off too much about how much they have.
Women should behave modestly.
Women should look after their appearance.
You may not agree with all of these morals, but they are part of the dominant ideology, the chances are that they are the feelings of most people.Stereotypes
We've spent quite a long time dealing with society and how it effects the process of representation, it's worth now looking in more detail at what is going on in the other parts of the process- the individuals and the media and their relationship with what is being represented. This brings us on to the question of stereotypes- another word which is maybe worth a dictionary definition:
A standardised, usually oversimplified, mental picture or attitude that is held in common by members of a group.

A stereotype is a simplification that we use to make sense of a real person or group which is much more complicated. In reality there are many different kinds of Germans who are all individuals, but it is much easier to fool ourselves into believing that all Germans cheat with beach towels and eat strange sausages. The example that I have just given may seem harmless, but in fact it is arguable that it is racist. Stereotypes are potentially highly dangerous but stereotyping itself is impossible to avoid- it is a natural function of the human mind- something that we all do in order to survive mentally in the confusing world around us. The following theory explains how it works.

Representation- How we stereotype:

Implicit Personality Theory
Finish the phrases below:

John is energetic, eager and (intelligent/stupid)
Julie is bright, lively and (thin/fat)
Joe is handsome, tall and (flabby/muscular)
Jane is attractive, intelligent and (likeable/unpleasant)
Susan is cheerful, positive and (attractive/unattractive)

If you compare your answers with those of others, the chances are that they will be exactly the same. There is no logical truth based reason for this- it is simply part of the way that we stereotype. The fact that we naturally see the world in this kind of shorthand way with connections between different character traits, allows the media to create simplistic representations which we find believable. Implicit personality theory explains this process.
As humans we use our own unique storehouse of knowledge about people when we judge them.
Our past experience is more important than the true features of the actual personality that we are judging.- traits exist more in the eye of the beholder than in reality.
We have each a system of rules that tells us which characteristics go with other characteristics.
We categorise people into types (e.g. workaholic, feminist etc.) to simplify the task of person perception.

Once we have in our minds a set of linked traits which seem to us to go together, they form a pattern of connections that can be called a prototype. In other words the mix of traits that we may consider "typical" of feminists are a prototype of what a feminist is like to us.
If we encounter someone in reality or in the media who seems to fit neatly into a prototype, we feel reassured. It confirms our stereotyped view- we do not need to think further.
Also once a few of the traits seem to fit our prototype, we will immediately bundle onto the person the rest of the traits from the prototype even if we do not know if they fit them in reality.
Research has shown that if we find people who do not fit into our prototypes, we will form very strong often impressions of them- it is surprising to us and disconcerting- it forces us to think more deeply.On the other hand, if it is at all possible, we will try to twist the truth to fit in with our prototype, often ignoring traits which do not fit into our neatly imagined pattern of characteristics. This will particularly happen as time passes and we have time to forget things that do not fit in. This can lead to enormous differences between our perceptions of people and the reality.
All of this distortion happens naturally in our minds before the media have had their chance to simplify and distort. We do a lot of the business of stereotyping ourselves. It is almost as if we conspire with the media to misunderstand the world
So stereotyping is something that we all do- a natural part of the way our minds work and not in itself necessarily a bad thing. If, for example, you were a teacher attempting to plan out a course which would be suitable for your class, you would need to work from the basis of a kind of stereotype of the needs of "typical" students. Having said this, even in cases where stereotypes are valuable like this, the good teacher would have then tried to go beyond the stereotype and looked for exceptions.
This is probably something we should all do when we encounter stereotypes- be aware that just as with the process of mediation the stereotypes involve selection, organisation and focusing of the complicated reality.

The four parts of a media stereotype

How can the media build a stereotype?
With any group of people, there will obviously be an enormous number of things that can be used in a stereotype, but because stereotyping is a form of simplification, normally the most obvious things are used. These are:

Appearance- this can include, physical appearance and clothing as well as the sound of the voice. e.g. "all teachers wear dreadful old clothes"

Behaviour - typical things that people in this group might do. "Grannies like to knit"(These first two features of media stereotypes are the same when we make our own stereotypes. They simply involve us thinking of something that may be true of some of the group in question and applying it to all)The third feature of media stereotyping is peculiar to the media:
The stereotype is constructed in ways that fit the particular mediumThis is more difficult to understand but it is crucial for you to look for it. If you watch a film such as Silence of the Lambs and then look at the tabloid coverage of Fred West, you are seeing the same stereotype (the typical Serial Killer) being used, but there are obviously big differences which will depend on the specifics of the media used. The film will use close ups of the killer's leering face, soundtrack music and reaction shots of terrified victims to create their version of the stereotype. The newspaper will use emotive headlines, blurred pictures of victims and police mug-shots of the killer along with shocking text and interviews with survivors. In each case the text will create a stereotype which it's audience will find familiar, but it will do it in very different ways.
There will always be a comparison whether real or imaginary with "normal" behaviour.
The features which make up a stereotype are always those which seem somehow different from every-day behaviour. In fact you could almost start any stereotyped description by saying: "this group are different because they……."
Of course the idea of what is normal in any society is an absurdity and therefore in order to make it clear to us that the stereotyped characters are not behaving "normally" there will frequently be "normal" people used to act as a contrast to them.
So, to use an earlier example, Jodie Foster is used in Silence of the Lambs to give the audience someone to compare Lecter's behaviour with. On the news, tales of striking workers (another stereotype) are always contrasted with interviews with "normal" people who are suffering as a result of their actions.The normal person will act as a representative of us in the text- at the same time reflecting what we might feel, or telling us what to feel depending on your point of view.

Ways of strengthening the power of a representation-Realism.
Even taking the use of anchorage into account, it can still be sometimes surprising how easily we will believe the most astonishing stereotypes to be true. One of the reasons why we will often accept representations at face value is that they are presented to us within texts that seem realistic-but what does this word "realistic" actually mean? The following pages come from Graham Burton's book More Than Meets the Eye where he gives an excellent explanation of realism in the media.

Realism
At least for some of the time, we judge a great deal of media product in terms of whether or not it is realistic. This is especially true of story type product. So it is very common to hear people react to a film with phrases such as "it wasn't very realistic, was it?" Even the lyrics of popular music can be judged in this way : " it was just like something that happens to be, it was so truthful". And we expect newspapers to be about things that really happened. So it is important to look more closely at a "realism" because it suggests that some media product is more believable, and so we are likely to take it more seriously, and to take on its ideas more readily.
But the first problem that this idea raises is simply, what do we mean by realism?
There is a whole set of words which we use in various ways to define realism, without thinking about it. It is these words which we should now look at.

Definitions

Believable or credible: what we see or read is something which could have happened. That is to say it resembles the world as we know it. [But remember that there is a lot which we believe to be true, but which we have not really checked out for ourselves-so how violent are the streets of San Francisco?!]

Plausible: what we view or read is at least possible within its own terms of reference. Someone could have acted in the way they did in a given story, or the development of the story line is basically possible. There is some consistency in the material, even when we know it is basically fiction. So for example, we may find it implausible to be told that the murder has been committed by the long lost twin brother of the accused hero.

Actual/Actuality: the material seems to have an immediate kind of physical reality about it as if it is really happening before us, or even as if we are really there. Often documentary material has the quality of actuality.

Verisimilitude: this word, like " actuality" suggests that something is true to life. But we also tend to use it when we feel, for example, that people's behaviour has an authentic quality, that it is like life [as we believe it to be].

Truthful: this is an important word because material doesn't have to be entirely believable in a literal way to seem truthful. A story and say something truthful about human behaviour and motivation, even when it is improbable in terms of its situation and background. Many plays, not least Shakespeare's, are fairly improbable in terms of story lines, and certainly in terms of how real their settings are. But they might say something important about the beliefs and values of the characters, which the audience agrees with. These beliefs and values then become the "truth" that we are talking about.

Some criteria for realism

So when we say that something has the quality of realism we could be talking about a number of elements
How accurately the background is depicted
How believable the behaviour of people seems to be
How probable the story line is [if we're talking about fiction]
How true the points made by the material seem to be.
In all this the complication is that realism is all relative. It is relative to our experience. So if we have experienced or even read about something which then appears in a magazine, we may find it more believable than does someone who has not had that experience. It is also relative to the mode of realism.

Modes of realism
These are the categories of realism that we learn and have in our heads when we are making judgements based on ideas such as realism, truth, believability. We change the basis of our judgements according to the mode of realism that we think we are dealing with. We do not expect a computer game to be all that realistic ; we do not expect it to look as real as film material, nor the situations to be as plausible as those we read about in a newspaper. We do expect a TV documentary to be realistic; we expect it to be more real and believable than a dramatic novel, for example.

Conventions
We are back to these hidden rules. The fact is that all these different modes of realism have different rules. A change in the rules changes what is expected. The particular medium, or mode within the medium, has particular expectations. These expectations are aroused as soon as we start reading, viewing, listening. We expect an autobiography to be different from a novel; a situation comedy to be different from a current affairs programme, and so on. We have prior knowledge about the newspaper medium, we do not expect it to make up stories. We will have read reviews or publicity material about a film and so will know if it is fiction, and even what kind of fiction.
Ghostbusters 2 is not going to be the same in terms of realism as Gorillas in the Mist. In the case of television, programme title sequences are crucial in letting us know what set of conventions our brains should switch into before the main part of the programme starts.
The rules that we are talking about come across in many different ways. For example, in situation comedy canned laughter is acceptable. In documentary, long shots of someone talking to the camera are acceptable. In radio journalism recordings of someone talking through a poor telephone link line are acceptable. In film fiction, sudden bursts of romantic music are acceptable-you can easily extend these examples. But generally we don't mix these sets of rules. So once we have locked into a particular set of rules for a particular kind of realism then we have set up particular standards for and expectations of the quality of realism in the product.

Sources of realism
It is important to remind ourselves that all our views about what is real or truthful depend on a number of kinds of experience.
One is cultural experience. We draw on the years of learning throughout our lives about what our culture sees as real. For example, we have learned a language of visual imagery and so believe that a larger object concealing a smaller one in a picture is closer to us than the smaller one. But this is just a convention of the code of visual communication. It is just another one of these sets of rules. Another culture which has not learned the rules this way would say, what a silly picture [painting, photograph or film] -- the creator has put one thing in the way on another-or-the big object must be more important than the smaller one. And of course all the sets of rules for the various modes of realism are learned through our upbringing in our culture.Another experience is that of all real life. That is to say we may judge what is or is not real on the basis of what we have seen, done, felt. In particular, we may judge realism in terms of probability from our life's experience. From life we know something about cause and effect, about likely human behaviour. So then from that experience we can judge whether or not what happens in the media is probable.
Another experience is that of the media themselves. This is also woven into our reality. If we have seen part of a documentary about American Indians, and then watch a TV drama set among Indians in New Mexico, we will judge the realism of that drama partly in the light of the other piece of media material. The point is that we may never have been to New Mexico in our lives. So we will base our judgement on this second-hand media experience which someone else has created.

Realism and production
Realism affects how we relate to media material, especially fictions. It is important to understand it because is affects the credibility of messages in the material. And for both those reasons the media producers find it important to maintain and promote the various modes of realism and their rules. It is convenient to package material into kinds of realism just as it is pre-packaged into genres. The producers want the audience to feel comfortable with their product, to know where they stand. They want the relatively realist modes such as documentary, or media such as newspapers to have credibility. It is especially important in the case of television that viewers are able to distinguish one programme from another in the endless stream of material. If you take up books from shelves labelled fiction or travel, then you have a pretty good idea about their kinds of realism before you start. But television is like an endless procession of open books in different modes, without the shelf labels. This is where the title sequences and programme reviews come in, as well as the cues in the programs themselves.
It is perhaps no accident that some of the most hot-tempered public debates about the media revolve around television in particular. The arguments, while sometimes seeming to be about programme content, are actually as much about programme treatment. In other words, the debates about bias in news on television are also debates about how items are handled, about the fact that it is generally believed that people believe what they see on the news. Similarly, the debates about certain dramas-Death of a Princess, showing a fictional Arabian royal family in a partly unfavourable light-are often about how conventions of realism are used. There was concern that documentary treatment implied that this was a true story and so had to be taken seriously as a criticism of the behaviour of the real Saudi royal family. Drama documentary productions such as this example are by definition a blurring of the lines between fact and fiction. The argument about this drama had a particular edge because it looked pretty real and because parts of the story line had some connection with known events in real life.

News and fiction
The truth of the matter is that there is no absolute reality or truth in the media. We may like to think there is, we may find it convenient to have sets of rules to define relative kinds of reality and truth. But look of the facts. A newspaper such as the Independent reads as somehow more realistic than the Mirror. The former has more hard news stories and a less dramatised style than the latter. And yet one cannot say that because the Mirror may prefer a majority of human interest items [perhaps a film star's divorce] to an item about what is happening in the House of Lords, that the divorce item is not actually true-not real. Similarly, television news, while not being simply untruthful, has qualities of drama in the way that it selects some exciting stories or makes excitement out of something like a kidnap story. And it certainly is not simply THE TRUTH. If it could achieve this then we could make do with one news programme only. So the lines between one kind of realism and another may be more blurred than we think.
All of these notes from Burton's book about realism may not seem obviously to relate to representation, but there is an important link-if we remain unconvinced by the modes of realism that the media adopt, we will be more likely to question the representations and stereotypes that they produce. On the other hand, if modes of realism have been carefully manufactured, these representations will seem natural and therefore truthful.
Representations changing over time
It can be easy to become quite depressed by the skill that the media can use in creating representations and stereotypes which are convincing and persuasive. However if we return to Schramm's model, we are reminded that the communication of the media producers with the audience is a circular process-he suggests that the media do respond in the end to our beliefs and therefore that representations and stereotypes will change over time.