Audience theories research

Here is a collection of different theories I found on the internet when researching audience.

The first is the 'Two step flow' :
Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters' decision-making processes during a 1940 presidential election campaign and published their results in a paper called The People's Choice. Their findings suggested that the information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts. This is sometimes referred to as the limited effects paradigm.

Mode of address :
Still in line with the active audience idea is the concept of mode of address. This refers to the way that a text speaks to us in a style that encourages us to identify with the text because it is 'our' kind of text. For example Friends is intended for a young audience because of the way it uses music and the opening credits to develop a sense of fun, energy and enthusiasm that the perceived audience can identify with. This does not mean that other groups are excluded, merely that the dominant mode of address is targetted at the young. Mode of address can even be applied to entire outputs, as in the case of Channel Four which works hard to form a style of address aimed at an audience which is informed, articulate and in some ways a specialised one. Newspapers, too, often construct their presentation to reflect what they imagine is the identity of their typical readers. Compare The Sun and The Guardian in this context.

'The Truman Show' analysis

When watching 'The Truman Show' I struggled to pinpoint a genre as it doesn't specifically fit into any category. At first, I felt it was a comedy but then the revelations about Truman's 'fake' life and his reactions gave it a sub-genre of a drama. The whole series of deaths and upset, aswell as Truman's dramatic anger and reactions made me think it was a comedy-drama.

Throughout the film it was clear 'The Truman Show' broke most theorists conventions. For example Vladimir Propp's theory of stock characters included in almost every narrative, doesn't specifically apply to 'The Truman Show'. Although you assume Truman is the 'hero' and the 'stolen lover' from his teens is the 'princess' the other characters are almost made out all to be villains. All of the characters are lying to Truman and producers of the show even attempt to kill Truman in order to stop his escaping his 'bubble world'. There is no 'helper' or any of Propp's stock characters.

The same applies to the binary opposites theory created by Levi Strauss. You have the obvious good vs evil, with Truman being the good and the producers of his world being the evil, and of course the light vs dark that works alongside it. Aside from that there are no other clear binary opposites

However 'The Truman Show' does include Roland Barthes semiotics. At the very start of the film, a piece of film set falls into the middle of the road, and the audience immediately recognises this is a sign, that all in Truman's world is not as it seems. The secretive camera angles adds to this. Throughout the film you work alongside Truman, discovering more signs that suggest the issues with Truman's world.
ROLAND - SIGNS/SEMIOTICS

Personal Experience

Finally all of our work is completed including the film, the directors commentary and the presentation aswell. Overall I have mixed feelings about the whole course. I enjoyed filming and working in a group but I struggled to enjoy using Pinnacle Studios, it's hard work. I've learnt a lot from the experience though. I've learnt how to use a camera, different camera angles, institutions, audience and certificate and of course, Pinnacle. It's hard to imagine how much work actually goes into a film and even a film idea. It's been a good experience though and I've learnt skills that I can use in later life and that could help me if I ever chose a career in media. I think my group and I did eventually get everything together and managed to pick up where we had previously fallen behind. I feel that overall all of work was a success and we worked hard to perfect every part of this project. I have enjoyed it.

Final Pieces

This is our final film. Unfortunately our film with a directors commentary over the top was also supposed to be on this blog, but it wouldn't upload.

Audience Feedback

After completing our film opening we decided it would be good to get some audience feedback from our media class as they are who are audience would be if our film was released.
Here is some of the feedback we got -
When we asked if there were any improvements we could make to our film they said that the film companies should be real, we disagreed with this statement as we researched into film companies before creating our film to ensure they were real.
We also asked the audience to rate our film out of 5 with 1 being poor and 5 being excellent. On average we receieved a rating of 3.5 which we were really pleased with as it meant the audience did quite enjoy our film.
Finally we asked if they could find any continuity errors within our film and were pleased to find that nobody saw any, which was good considering how hard we had worked to ensure there were none.

Evaluation

In this blog I'm going to be focusing on only three main points of the evaluation as our recorded directors commentary covers all of the other points.
To start with I will be looking at how we attracted our audience. We refered back to our notes of the age and gender of our audience which was teenage females in particular. We know, being part of that audience, that most teenagers revel in watching horror or thriller films as they like the adrelin rush of being terrified so we knew that we wanted our film to be a thriller, made to scare our audience. We also used the male stalker and female victim scenario as we aware that some audience members could relate to this theme and that's what makes it so appealing. The characters in our film opening were also meant to be young in age, teenagers going into adulthood, so this attracts the audience as all people are interested in things they can relate to and enjoy watching people similiar to themselves.
In the opening the audience are made to put themselves in the position of the stalker as this helps set the story. We did this because it adds to the thriller theme, you feel uncomfortable having to see and actually become the stalker as this is not a natural thing to do. I feel all of these points help us to attract an audience of teenage girls as they can relate to the theme of the film and it is also well known that our audience are particular to watching scary thriller films.

Whilst constructing our film opening, myself and my whole group learnt about a variety of new technologies, starting with of course the camera. Although we had already completed a preliminary task with the camera creating a whole film opening and using all the different camera shots revelent to our thriller film was completey different. We did very well though using the camera but however we did have one issue when someone rewound the tape and erased half of what we had just filmed. We also developed our skills in Pinnacle Studios. We had managed to use it well previously but we found it a lot easier this time round because we didn't have too much to edit as we had try to film only what we needed and in the correct chronological order. To get our music we used a non-copyrighted website and just downloaded the song we wanted and uploaded it to our film. I feel the piece of technology we have learnt about it the camera and Pinnacle Studio as we learnt about all the different camera angles and the best way to film things and also NEVER to delete anything from our camera. On Pinnacle Studio we learnt how to cut shots, prolong certain shots by slowing down the pace of the recording and how to zoom in on a shot that previously had no effect on it.

Looking back at our preliminary task I feel we have learnt a lot in the progression to a full product. We've discovered new camera angles which helped enhanced our opening and varied greatly from our premlinary task. We found new effects we could use in Pinnacle Studio which also enhanced our film opening, such as changing the speed of a clip and changing a shot completely by making it zoom in or out.
We also learnt about factors that were nothing to do with the technology, like thinking through a whole story line with characters and reasons for actions in the film. We also had to look at audience and why that would be audience. We had to create an animatic film which was a whole new experience. All of these things helped make our film opening run smoothly, but even whilst we were filming we had to think about continuity errors, whether things would fit with the story line. Overall the whole task was a huge step up from the preliminary task. We had to look at things in more and different detail, we had to think about more things to put into our film, but I know that this has made a huge difference to our work and you can see the improvement between the two films and I feel that we have completed our task to the best of our ability but of course if we could do it again, with more time, it could go even further than it had already done.

Editing our opening (finally)

This week we finally finished all the filming and yes, were finally able to edit our opening scene. Again this didn't come without our usual problems. We had to change laptop (again!) as the first laptop kept dropping the frames as it uploaded our film onto Pinnacle Studios. After much 'messing about' and deciding what the problem was we just gave up and swapped laptops. We intended to take our work with us on a memory stick to save us uploading it all again and starting from the beginning but because we saved it in the wrong format on the memory stick, this didn't happen and because we were running out of time we just decided to upload it all again. Whilst this was all going on Saffron and Charlotte took a look at some different music as we had intended to use the same piece of music as we had for the anamatic film, but when we had a look at it against some of our clips, it didn't create the scary suspense we had intended. So they found a website with non-copyrighted music on and put the best one onto a memory stick which we uploaded later. Due to the erasing of previous recordings, me and Chloe were left with only the new clips we had recorded last week to edit, which was missing some of our original and perhaps key scenes, so we made the best of what we had and adjusted all the timings, slowed certain clips down, put all of the frames in the right order, which was made all the more difficult by the fact that we hadn't adjusted the timing of frame cut off when uploading our tape so all of the clips were 'merged' into one another. After many tantrums and slamming of the keyboard we finally finished the editing and created a masterpiece, kind of, it looks okay and I'm pleased with all the work and effort we put into it The only final problem is we had created our own film company to make our film more authentic, but for some reason or another Pinnacle couldn't change the film into a mpeg with our image in the film so that had to be removed, so after audience feedback we will have to see whether or not it is possible for us to put the logo back in!