Audience

A2 Audience Presentation by amhammond

Genre Analysis

Note that an analysis of a text which is framed exclusively in terms of genre may be of limited usefulness.
Generic analysis can also, of course, involve studying the genre more broadly.
This is something we simply don't have time to do in class so you will need to spend time outside of class doing this (although you will hopefully have done lots of this when planning your production).

General

• In what context did you encounter it? (web, film, TV etc)

• What influence do you think this context might have had on your interpretation of the text?

• To what genre did you initially assign the text?

• What is your experience of this genre?

• What subject matter and basic themes is the text concerned with?

• How typical of the genre is this text in terms of content?

• What expectations do you have about texts in this genre?

• Have you found any formal generic labels for this particular text (where)?

• What generic labels have others given the same text?

• Which conventions of the genre do you recognize in the text?

• To what extent does this text stretch the conventions of its genre?

• Where and why does the text depart from the conventions of the genre?

• Which conventions seem more like those of a different genre (and which genre(s))?

• What familiar motifs or images are used?

• Which of the formal/stylistic techniques employed are typical/untypical of the genre?

• What institutional constraints are reflected in the form of the text?

• What relationship to 'reality' does the text lay claim to?

• Whose realities does it reflect?

• What purposes does the genre serve?

• In what ways are these purposes embodied in the text?

• To what extent did your purposes match these when you engaged with the text?

• What ideological assumptions and values seem to be embedded in the text?

• What pleasures does this genre offer to you personally?

• What pleasures does the text appeal to (and how typical of the genre is this)?

• Did you feel 'critical or accepting, resisting or validating, casual or concentrated, apathetic or motivated' (and why)?

• Which elements of the text seemed salient because of your knowledge of the genre?

• What predictions about events did your generic identification of the text lead to (and to what extent did these prove accurate)?

• What inferences about people and their motivations did your genre identification give rise to (and how far were these confirmed)?

• How and why did your interpretation of the text differ from the interpretation of the same text by other people?

Mode of address

• What sort of audience was your text aimed at (and how typical was this of the genre)?
• How does the text address your classmates?
• What sort of person does it assume they are?
• What assumptions have you made about their class, age, gender and ethnicity?
• What interests does it assume they have?
• What relevance does the text actually have for you?
• What knowledge does it take for granted?
• To what extent do you resemble the 'ideal reader' that the text seeks to position you as?
• Are there any notable shifts in the text's mode of address (and if so, what do they involve)?
• What responses does the text seem to expect from your audience?
• How open to negotiation is their response (are they invited, instructed or coerced to respond in particular ways)?
• Is there any penalty for not responding in the expected ways (think in terms of enjoyment for the audience or consequences for the institution)?
• To what extent did people find themselves 'reading against the grain' of the text and the genre?
• Which attempts to position your audience in this text do they accept, reject or seek to negotiate (and why)?
• How closely aligned is the way in which the text addresses you with the way in which the genre positions you (Kress 1988, 107)?

Relationship to other texts

• What intertextual references are there in the text you have created (and to what other texts)?
• Generically, which other texts does the text you created resemble most closely?
• What key features are shared by these texts?
• What major differences do you notice between them?

Her: Love in the Modern Age Documentary

The Moon Song

Her: The Digital Muse & Postmodern Culture (Amy Edelstein)

Illuminating critical perspective of the Spike Jonze film 'Her' by Amy Edelstein.

What in the World is Holy Motors About?

Critical appraisal and explanation of Holy Motors. 

Question 1A (Practice)

Question 1A

"Postmodern Media Break the Rules of Representation" Discuss.

Postmodern Media Break the Rules of Representation

1B Question

Analyse media representation in one of your coursework productions. [25]

Barthes Five Codes

Linguist Roland Barthes described Five Codes which are woven into any narrative.

The Hermeneutic Code (HER)
The Hermeneutic Code refers to any element of the story that is not fully explained and hence becomes a mystery to the reader. 
The full truth is often avoided, for example in:

• Snares
: deliberately avoiding the truth.

• Equivocations
: partial or incomplete answers.

• Jammings
: openly acknowledge that there is no answer to a problem.

The purpose of the author in this is typically to keep the audience guessing, arresting the enigma, until the final scenes when all is revealed and all loose ends are tied off and closure is achieved.

The Proairetic Code (ACT)
The Proairetic Code also builds tension, referring to any other action or event that indicates something else is going to happen, and which hence gets the reader guessing as to what will happen next.
The Hermeneutic and Proairetic Codes work as a pair to develop the story's tensions and keep the reader interested. Barthes described them as:
"...dependent on ... two sequential codes: the revelation of truth and the coordination of the actions represented: there is the same constraint in the gradual order of melody and in the equally gradual order of the narrative sequence."

The Semantic Code (SEM)
This code refers to connotation within the story that gives additional meaning over the basic denotative meaning of the word. 
It is by the use of extended meaning that can be applied to words that authors can paint rich pictures with relatively limited text and the way they do this is a common indication of their writing skills.

The Symbolic Code (SYM)
This is very similar to the Semantic Code, but acts at a wider level, organizing semantic meanings into broader and deeper sets of meaning. 
This is typically done in the use of antithesis, where new meaning arises out of opposing and conflict ideas.

The Cultural Code (REF)
This code refers to anything that is founded on some kind of canonical works that cannot be challenged and is assumed to be a foundation for truth.
Typically this involves either science or religion, although other canons such as magical truths may be used in fantasy stories. The Gnomic Code is a cultural code that particularly refers to sayings, proverbs, clichés and other common meaning-giving word sets.

How to Answer Question B

You will notice that each of these questions is quite short and fits a common formula. You can be assured that the same thing will apply this summer. You will be asked to apply ONE concept to one of your productions. This is a quite different task from question 1a, where you write about all of your work and your skills, as this one involves some reference to theory and only the one piece of work, as well as asking you to step back from it and think about it almost as if someone else had made it- what is known as ‘critical distance’.

There are five possible concepts which can come up
Representation
Genre
Narrative
Audience
Media Language

If you look through those questions above, you will see that the first three have all already come up, but don’t be fooled into thinking that means that it must be one of the other two this time- exams don’t always work that predictably! It would be far too risky just to bank on that happening and not prepare for the others! In any case, preparing for them all will help you understand things better and there are areas of overlap which you can use across the concepts.
So, how do you get started preparing and revising this stuff? First of all, you need to decide which project you would be most confident analysing in the exam. I believe that any of the five can be applied to moving image work, so if you did a film opening at AS, a music video, short film or trailer at A2, that would be the safest choice. Print work is more tricky to write about in relation to narrative, but the other four areas would all work well for it, so it is up to you, but to be honest, I’d prepare in advance of the exam as you don’t want to be deciding what to use during your precious half hour! What you certainly need is a copy of the project itself to look at as part of your revision, to remind yourself in detail of how it works.

Representation
If you take a video you have made for your coursework, you will almost certainly have people in it. If the topic is representation, then your task is to look at how those representations work in your video. You could apply some of the ideas used in the AS TV Drama exam here- how does your video construct a representation of gender, ethnicity or age for example? You need also to refer to some critics who have written about representation or theories of media representation and attempt to apply those (or argue with them). So who could you use? Interesting writers on representation and identity include Richard Dyer, Angela McRobbie and David Gauntlett. See what they say...

Genre
If you’ve made a music magazine at AS level, an analysis of the magazine would need to set it in relation to the forms and conventions shown in such magazines, particularly for specific types of music. But it would not simply comprise a list of those conventions. There are a whole host of theories of genre and writers with different approaches. Some of it could be used to inform your writing about your production piece. Some you could try are: Altman, Grant and Neale- all are cited in the wikipedia page here

Narrative
A film opening or trailer will be ideal for this, as they both depend upon ideas about narrative in order to function. An opening must set up some of the issues that the rest of the film’s narrative will deal with, but must not give too much away, since it is only an opening and you would want the audience to carry on watching! Likewise a trailer must draw upon some elements of the film’s imaginary complete narrative in order to entice the viewer to watch it, again without giving too much away. If you made a short film, you will have been capturing a complete narrative, which gives you something complete to analyse. If you did a music video, the chances are that it was more performance based, maybe interspersed with some fragments of narrative. In all these cases, there is enough about narrative in the product to make it worth analysis. The chances are you have been introduced to a number of theories about narrative, but just in case, here’s a link to a PDF by Andrea Joyce, which summarises four of them, including Propp and Todorov. 

Audience
Every media product has to have an audience, otherwise in both a business sense and probably an artistic sense too it would be judged a failure. In your projects, you will undoubtedly have been looking at the idea of a target audience- who you are aiming it at and why; you should also have taken feedback from a real audience in some way at the end of the project for your digital evaluation, which involves finding out how the audience really ‘read’ what you had made. You were also asked at AS to consider how your product addressed your audience- what was it about it that particularly worked to ‘speak’ to them? All this is effectively linked to audience theory which you then need to reference and apply. 

Media Language
A lot of people have assumed this is going to be the most difficult concept to apply, but I don’t think it need be. If you think back to the AS TV Drama exam, when you had to look at the technical codes and how they operate, that was an exercise in applying media language analysis, so for the A2 exam if this one comes up, I’d see it as pretty similar. For moving image, the language of film and television is defined by how camera, editing, sound and mise-en-scene create meaning. Likewise an analysis of print work would involve looking at how fonts, layout, combinations of text and image as well as the actual words chosen creates meaning. Useful theory here might be Roland Barthes on semiotics- denotation and connotation and for moving image work Bordwelland Thompson 

So what do you do in the exam?
You need to state which project you are using and briefly describe itYou then need to analyse it using whichever concept appears in the question, making reference to relevant theory throughoutKeep being specific in your use of examples from the project

Audience Theory

This is from Pete Fraser: Every media product has to have an audience, otherwise in both a business sense and probably an artistic sense too it would be a judged a failure. In your projects, you will undoubtedly have been looking at the idea of a target audience - who you are aiming it at and why; you should also have taken feedback from a real audience in some way at the end of the project for your digital evaluation, which involves finding out how the audience really 'read' what you had made. You were also asked at AS to consider how your product addressed your audience - what was it about it that particularly worked to 'speak' to them? All this is effectively linked to audience theory which you then need to reference and apply.

Media Language

Lang-Moving Image

1A and 1B Tips

OCR A2 Media studies Exam Questions 1a and 1b tips from Mr Smith

Leos Carax Explains Holy Motors

Honor Roll 2012: Leos Carax Explains his Beloved 'Holy Motors', Indiewire's Top Film of 2012.

1A Exam Question

Describe the ways in which your production work was informed by research into real media texts and how your ability to use such research for production developed over time. [25]

Holy Motors (Let My Baby Ride)

Edith Scob in Eyes Without a Face and Holy Motors

Holy Motors: A Critical Perspective

Article about Holy Motors on Biblioklept.

Criticisms of Postmodernism (James Rosenau)

Rosenau (1993) identifies seven contradictions in Postmodernism:

1. Its anti-theoretical position is essentially a theoretical stand.
2. While postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments of reason are freely employed to advance its perspective. 
3. The postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal itself an evaluative emphasis of precisely the sort that it otherwise attacks.
4. Postmodernism stress intertextuality but often treats text in isolation. 
5. By adamantly rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, Postmodernists cannot argue that there are no valid criteria for judgment.
6. Postmodernism criticises the inconsistency of modernism, but refuses to be held to norms of consistency itself. 
7. Postmodernists contradict themselves by relinquishing truth claims in their own writings.

Postmodern Audiences

How do postmodern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation? In what ways do media audiences and industries operate differently in a postmodern world?

• Have audiences become accustomed to the stimulation and excitement of spectacular films/games and a sense of spectacle has become something that (young?) audiences increasingly demand from cultural experiences?
• has narrative coherence become less important for audiences?
• In terms of ideas, has cultural material become more simplistic and superficial, and audiences are no longer so concerned with the process of understanding a text. 
• Has the attention span of audiences reduced as they become increasingly accustomed to the spectacle-driven and episodic nature of postmodern texts. 
• In its 'waning of affect', has postmodernism contributed to audiences become emotionally detached from what they see. They are desensitised and unable to respond 'properly' to suffering and joy. 
• Has postmodernism contributed to a feeling among audiences that arts and culture does not really have anything to tell us about our own lives and instead simply provides us with somewhere we can escape or retreat to. 

Postmodernism and Audience Theory

Alain J.-J. Cohen has identified a new phenomenon in the history of film, the 'hyper-spectator'. "Such spectator, who may have a deep knowledge of cinema, can recognise both the films themselves and filmic fragments into new and novel forms of both cinema and spectatorship, making use of the vastly expanded access to films arrived at through modern communications equipment and media. The hyper-spectator is, at least potentially, the material (which here means virtual) creator of his or her hyper-cinematic experience" (157)

"VCRs and laserdisc-players or newer DVDs have produced, and are still producing, a Gutenberg-type of revolution in relation to the moving image."

Anne Friedberg has argued that because we now have much control of how we watch a film (through video/DVD), and we increasingly watch film in personal spaces (the home) rather than exclusively in public places, "cinema and television become readable as symptoms of a 'postmodern condition', but as contributing causes." In other words, we don't just have films that are about postmodernism or reflect postmodern thinking. Films have helped contribute to the postmodern quality of life by manipulating and playing around with our conventional understanding of time and space. "One can literally rent another space and time when one borrows a videotape to watch on a VCR... the VCR allows man to organise a time which is not his own... a time which is somewhere else - and to capture it."

Anne Friedberg: "The cinema spectator and the armchair equivalent - the-video viewer, who commands fast forward, fast reverse, and many speeds of slow motion, who can easily switch between channels and tape; who is always to repeat, replay, and return, is a spectator lost in but also in control of time. The cultural apparatuses of television and the cinema have gradually become causes for what is not... described as the postmodern condition."

Postmodern and Media Industries

Whereas modernism was generally associated with the early phase of the industrial revolution, postmodernism is more commonly associated with many of the changes that have taken place after the industrial revolution. A post-industrial (sometimes known as a post-Fordist) economy is one in which an economic transition has taken place from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. This society is typified by the rise of new information technologies, the globalisation of financial markets, the growth of the service and the white-collar worker and the decline of heavy industry. 

Postmodernism and the Film Industry

It has been argued that Hollywood has undergone a transition from 'Fordist' mass production (the studio system) to the more 'flexible' forms of independent production characteristic of postmodern economy. 

The incorporation of Hollywood into media conglomerates with multiple entertainment interests has been seen to exemplify a 'postmodern' blurring of boundaries between industrial practices, technologies, and cultural forms. 

G325 Exam

Question 1A
Include both AS and A2.

Question 1B
Choose to write about either AS or A2.

1A Exam Question

Describe how you developed your skills in the use of digital technology for media production and evaluate how these skills contributed to your creative decision making, Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time. [25 marks]

Tips for Question 1A

There are five possible areas that can come up;
Digital technology
Research and planning
Conventions of real media
Post-production
Creativity
The question is likely to mix and match the five.

What production activities have you done?
This should include both the main task and preliminary task from AS and the main and ancillaries at A2 plus any non-assessed activities you have done as practice, and additionally anything you have done outside the course which you might want to refer to, such as films made for other courses or skateboard videos made with your mates if you think you can make them relevant to your answer.

What digital technology have you used?
This should not be too hard - include hardware (cameras, phones for pictures/audio, computers and anything else you used) software (on your computer) and online programmes such as blogger, youtube, etc.

In what ways can the work you have done be described as creative?
This is a difficult question and one that does not have a correct answer as such, but ought to give you food for thought.

What different forms of research did you do?
Again you will need to include a variety of examples - institutional research (such as how titles work in film openings), audience research (before you made your products and after you finished for feedback), research into conventions of media texts (layout, fonts, camera shots, soundtracks, everything!) and finally, logistical research - shots of your locations, research into costumer, actors, etc.

What conventions of real media did you need to know about?
For this, it is worth making a list for each project you have worked on and categorising them by medium so that you don't repeat yourself.

What do you understand by 'post-production' in your work?
For the purpose of this exam, it is defined as everything after planning and shooting or live recording. In other words, the stage of your work where you manipulated your raw material on the computer, maybe using photoshop, a video editing programme, or desktop publishing.

For each of these lists, the next stage is to produce a set of examples
so that when you make the point in the exam, you can then back it up with a concrete example, You need to be able to talk about specific things you did in post-production and why they were significant, just as you need yo do more than just say 'I looked on youtube' for conventions of real media, but actually name specific videos you looked at, what you gained from them and how they influenced you work.

This question will be very much about looking at your skills development over time, the process which brought about the progress
most, if not all, the projects you have worked on from that list above, and about reflection on how you as a media student have developed. Unusually, this is an exam which reward you for talking about yourself and the work you have done!

Final tips: You need some practice - this is ver hard to do without it. Have a crack at trying to write an essay on each of the areas, or at the very least doing a detailed plan with lots of examples. The fact that it is a 30 minute essay makes it very unusual, so you need to tailor your writing to that length.

Exam Board Advice Question 1A

Question 1A is always about how your skills have developed.

Paragraph 1 should be an introduction which explains which projects you did. It can be quite short.
Paragraph 2 should pick up the skill area and perhaps suggest something about your starting point with it - what skills did you have already and how were these illustrated? Use an example.
Paragraph 3 should talk through your use of that skill in early projects and what you learned and developed through these. Again there should be examples to support all that you say.
Paragraph 4 should go on to demonstrate how the skill developed in later projects, again backed by examples, and reflecting back on how this represents moves forward for you from your early position.
Paragraph 5 short conclusion.

G325 Exam Board Advice

G325 exam from petefrasers