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!

Film certificate and target audience

For our film opening, we had to decide on a target audience and thus a film certificate. We agreed on a certificate rating of 15, as despite the thriller theme and storyline, if we were to create a whole film there wouldn't by intense levels of violence and so on. We decided that our main audience would range from teenage girls to young women in their early 20's. This is because our film is based upon a victim and stalker relationship, which is a real issue in the world currently particularly I feel, for girls and women in these age groups, and so it would be most appealing to them and probably interest them greatly. The characters in the film are almost meant to represent young men and women who have just started life away from the family home, which again appeals to the women at the 'older' end of the scale. Younger audiences are also genereally most likely to enjoy the aspects of a thriller, with the mystery and scary occurances.

Filiming so far...

We managed to start filming on Thursday 19th November and we thought everything went well. It wasn't until Monday morning that we realised by rewinding the tape during film had wiped off some of our important scenes and shots. We also realised that some of the filming wasn't up to the standard we had desired and so most of it need to be re-done this Thursday coming up. We are also trying to think of some other ideas to add into our film at this point to try and make it more scary and thriller-like. We will film in the same location using the same actors but we are going to try and create more lighting effects alongside some more different camera angles. The shots we did get weren't too bad but they weren't what we expected of our film so we may end up re-filming the whole opening!

Font ideas

Here I have collected some examples of fonts that could be used for the titles within the opening of my groups thriller opening. I liked this examples in particular as they reminded me of titles to previous examples of thriller films. They all look different and perhaps even a little bit scary. They emphasise the theme of anonymous letters that exert fear into the main character.

Problems so far...

At the moment, every group within our class has filmes something, all apart from us. We were due to film on Saturday 14th, however, someone, didn't get the tape for us to record on. So despite having all the other equipment, it was deemed useless without a tape, so we decided, obviously not to film that day. The reason we wanted to film at a weekend was to give ourselves more time and because the boy who had agreed to star in our film as a stalker couldn't make any other day. To help speed up production we have decided to film during the week with the help from one of the boys in our class. We will now film on Thursday 19th when we would normally be in lesson. As most of the other groups have had to record their films twice because they missed out important clips or scenes or broke conventions and made continuity errors, we are anticipating having to do the same, so in some ways recording during school time has been a better idea than previously. We will film at Saffron's house as she has a room with the ideal measurements and setting that we need. Luckily she lives reasonably near to the school so taking the camera and camera equipment straight to her house shouldn't be a major issue. In the mean time we have be struggling to fill out our lesson time as all we really need to do is film so we can begin editing and creating our final piece. We have however been making sure we are more organised. I have the tape and me and Chloe will collect the camera from the school to ensure we get everything right this time round! Seeing some of the other groups problems with their filming has helped though. We're more aware of things to pay attention to and what kind of mistakes can be made avoidable. Being the last group to film isn't a big problem but I do feel we need to act quickly and efficiently in order to make sure that we get everything done in time. As soon at the filming is complete I will feel a lot calmer about the situation.

Before we can start filming there are a lot of points we need to think about which are important to the creation of our thriller opening. We need to think about costume. Above I have uploaded some pictures taken from the internet of the kind of costumes our female character could wear. Despite not actually being in the film, it includes a huge number of pictures of her where she will need to look casual and fashionable. I also got a picture of a very common looking house, which is our location for the film, even though you won't see the house, it's still important for the story. The male charcter will not actually be seen in the film either, but his costume will be a black jumper or tee-shirt so you can't see any of his features.

This is our final anamatics piece.

Anamatics

Before we can make our own film opening we have to create an anamatic story board and films. This is to help give us an idea of timing and how many shots we would have to include. For once everything went smoothly within my group. Our opening is only allowed to be 2 minutes long at the maximum and ours is dead on that, so despite cutting it close, it is allowed. It also allowed us to create our own music as we cant use anything copyrighted. The anamatic storyboard is literally hand-drawn pictures of what we think our shots will look like, although our drawings weren't anything like Picasso's work, they still demonstrated what we wanted to happen in each clip and how long we could and would focus on each shot and different camera angles. The music we made was also good enough that we are strongly considering using it for our final piece, as it works really well to build up suspension and fits perfectly with our film ideas.
I really enjoyed creating the anamatic film opening and it's made me more ready for the real thing.

Opening to a thriller film

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnKG8C-svaM

This is opening to the thriller film Donny Darko. I chose this film to compare to our opening because it has a slightly similiar soundtrack to ours and is a very unusual opening with no hint of storyline or character. This is also one of my favourite thriller films. It uses unusual camera angles and we tried to use some different camera angles in our opening. The shot of the back of Donny's head is exactly the same as one of our shots.

Institutions

In my media studies AS course we are also looking at institutions. Institutions are almost like huge companies, that own a chain of things or places. The owners of these institutions opress their opinions and ideas upon their companies so that every part of the institution holds the same values and express these values.
This biggest example of institution is The Disney Corporation. Disney own a whole host of things from expansions of their company such as Disney Interactive, Disney Pixar, all of the Disney Land resorts and of course all the merchandise sold there and in Disney Stores. They also own a variation of television channels, including all of their own branch, ABC, ESPN, The Discovery Channel, The History Channel and even 25% of GMTV. On top of this they own the other films companies Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Miramax Films and are currently in the process of owning Marvel Studios. By owning a company like Marvel Studios, Disney doesn't just make a profit from their films, but also all of their merchandise, which is in huge demand. Disney own their own book publisher and have even created their own town in America called Celebration, which only allows people without a criminal record to live in it, it has a sensational ratio of more white people to black people and prefers to home families.
The issue with Disney owning so much is that they press family values. They make all of their companies do this, even if the viewers or customer isn't aware of this. Disney tends not to make people aware of their control over big names such as ESPN and ABC because most people would find it strange to have their news delievered by a company known for making family films and that express every inch of family values in their products. It also stops other peoples thoughts and opinions being expressed. In all of these products we are gaining the values of one person or company and this is spread throughout all of Disney's investments. It also stops money going into other companies and investments. Disney is the worlds largest conglomerate.

Coursework (so far)

Well so far for my media studies AS coursework, me and my group have been told we have to create an opening to a film of any genre, which is a miniumum of 1 minute 30 seconds and a maximum os 2 minutes. The first thing we decided on was of course a genre. We chose thriller/horror simply because we are aware of the elements included in this type of opening and from watching other examples of student's work, this seemed the easiest type of genre to produce.
The next thing we had to decide on was a plot to our 'film'. We instantly came up with very stereotypical openings, like a girl running through the woods and being chased. We developed this into a group of teenagers all camping in the woods and one of the group is murdered. The only problem with this idea is that it was extremely similiar to another groups idea, and although we could have stuck with it, we felt in a way that our great plan had been stolen and we wanted to top this originial idea.
We have finally ended up with a film about a girl being stalked and idoloised by her neighbour, and the opening will include images of the girl upon a shrine, to show an obsession with her. We will leave the neighbour as anomymous. This idea led us to the creation of a name for our film. It will be called Mr Anomynous.
A member of a our group has allowed us to film in her home and we have yet to arrange a date for this as we have a lot to do before then! The next thing we intend to do is research the type of film companies that create films with a thriller genre so that we may include this perhaps in our film.

Film opening

The purpose of a films opening sequence is to introduce it's viewer to characters, location, plot, genre and themes as well as establishing the visual style of the film.
The opening to Bridget Jones's Diary does this. It is a romantic comedy realeased in 2001 and was written and directed by Richard Curtis. It's a Working Title film who are famous for producing romantic comedies and the rom-com combination of Richard Curtis, Working Title and the actor Hugh Grant, who appears in Bridget Jones's Diary and many other Working Title films, came togehter in 1994 with Four Weddings and A Funeral and again in 1999 for Notting Hill. This kind of predictable formula allows film producers to reuse scripts, actors, sets and costumes to continually create many modified versions of the same popular and successful film.
The opening scene of Bridget Jones's Diary immediately introduces the main character, played by Renee Zellweger, as she is shown in this first shot and she narrates the film with her voiceover. The voiceover also successfully shows the location of the film as we hear Renee speaking with an British accent. The opening shot also shows Renee walking through snow, which not only indicates the season the film is set in but we know snow is often associated with love and romance, which demonstrates the films genre.
The opening then progressess to Renee's mothers' house where the comical side of the genre is shown again by Renees narration as she complains about her mothet always attempting to pair her up with a man at every new years eve party.
Overall the opening sequence communicates theme and genre to the viewer by it's use of narration and opening shots. I feel it is also obvious that the film is likely to be more comical than romantic by the use of narration.

Evaluation

For As Media Studies I have just had to complete a preliminary task. The task was to produce a short film which included a character walking through a door, walking across a room, sitting in a chair and then commencing in a conversation. I got into a group of four for this task.
First of all we had to create a script which not only included a story line but also a list of all the camera shots we intended to use within our film. We knew we had to include match on action, shot reverse shot aswell as keep to the 180 degree rule. However we also included a point of view shot, side shot, birds eye view and a close up.
We didn't have too much trouble actually creating and filming our work, the real problems occured when we attempted to upload our video onto a laptop. We changed everything from the video camera to the battery charger and it wasn't until we'd gone through about 3 laptops before we finally managed to upload the film completely.
The editing of the film went really well as there wasn't much to do aside from shorten the length of frames and discard clips we couldn't use, but we did make two continuity mistakes, where one of the characters moved suddenly from one place to another and changed positions slightly. We tried to cover up these mistakes using different editing techniques. For the first we used a fade transition and for the second we tried to use a close up. The only problem with this was that they looked out of place within our film.
We also added transitions and text to both the start and end of our film to make it look professional. We put music at the end aswell to compensate for silence.
Overall I was very pleased with our preliminary work. I felt everything went well and that in the end the film ran smoothly and looks really good . We used camera work and edited it well and I feel that as a group we worked extremely hard to make it to the best of our standards.

Why I chose AS media studies..

I chose AS media studies as I took media studies as a GCSE and not only really enjoyed it but also achieved a good grade. In the future I would like to pursue a career in media, although at this moment in time I am not sure quite what that might be. Media is an interesting topic that plays a huge part in our daily lives and I think it's important to look at it more closely.