1b - Narrative

Applying narrative to your text

Revision Guide A2 Media OCR G325

 

Media Language

I have seen this on Eleanor Watson's blog from the other A2 class & believe it is useful.

Media Language.

Medium has its own language - they use familiar codes and conventions

Denotation - literal meaning, the signifier

Connotation - infered meaning, the signified

Barthes argud that in film connotation can be analytically distinguished from denotation


Fiske "denotation is what is filmed, connotation is how it is filmed"

Charles Sanders Pierce - "we only think in signs" Signs only represents anything when society attributes meaning to them.


Micro-ElementsHow they have created meaning to inform us about genre, narrative, representations/ideology, targeting of audiencesHall - there is a preferred meaning that the film makers want the audience to decode.



Seminotic Terminology


Mise-en-scene creates the diegetic world:

• Location

• Character

• Cinemography

• Layout/ Page Design

Camerawork:

• Shot types

• Camera composition

• Camera movement

• Camera angles

Continuity:

• Establishing/re-establishing shot

• Transitions

• 180 degree tule

• Action match

• Cross-cutting

• Cutaway

• Insert shots

• Shot-reverse shot structures

• Eyeline match

Non-continuity:

• Montage sequence

• Flash back/forward

• Ellipsis

• Graphic match

3 types of signs:

• Icon/iconic - it looks like what it is

• Index/indexical - infered sign

• Symbol/symoblic - signifier doesn't resemble the signified - arbitary or convential

Stuart Hall - texts can be encoded by producers and meaning is decoded by the audience

Genre

Media Language

A2 Media Exam

Creativity - 1A

One of the possible areas you could be asked about in the exam is creativity. The projects you have undertaken will hopefully have felt like an opportunity to display your creativity, but you will need the chance to discuss what you understand by creativity and what it might mean to be creative.

The assignment options at AS and A2 all offer constraints for your work, whether it be making pages for a music magazine, the opening of a film or the packaging for an album; one of the reasons why you aren't offered total free choice is because people often find that working within constraints gives them something to exercise their creativity, whereas total freedom can sometimes make it really difficult to know where to start. It's why genre can be interesting- how has something been created which fits with certain structures and rules but plays around with them to give us something a little bit different?

The word 'creative' has many meanings- the most democratic meaning would really suggest that any act of making something (even making an idea) might be seen as a creative act. In more elitist versions of the term, it is reserved for those who are seen as highly skilled or original (famous artists, musicians, film-makers etc). an interesting third alternative is to think about how creativity can be an unconscious, random or collaborative act that becomes more than the sum of its parts.