Download - Media Language
Media Language
Recap the media language that create meaning in texts.
Understand how to evaluate your coursework against the media
language that you used.
Media Language
Micro elements of Media Language:
Camera, Sound, Editing, Mis-en-scene
Everything from your AS TV Drama exam!
Media Language
Media Language is used for communicating...
(to you) Audience, Genre, Narrative, Representation
Media LanguageTheorists?
All covered so far...
Media Language is about how your film communicates the other key concepts.
Use theorists on Semiotics to evaluate the Media Language and how it works.
Then, use theorists on Genre, Narrative and Audience to evaluate how the Media Language affects these
elements.
Media Language
Camera
Create a document with four screenshots from one of your Coursework texts.
Next to each screenshot, describe the Media Language and Evaluate how it communicates
one of the other Key Concepts.
Media Language
Close up of an old fashioned pocket watch on an antiquated book. Composition is focussed on the watch. Camera movement travels slowly across
the book.
Media Language
Audience – the focus on the watch and old book provide the audience with a diversion from everyday life as they
communicate a historical setting for the film. Blumler and Katz identify the concept of Diversion in their Uses and
Gratifications Theory.
Media Language
Narrative – the Close up of the watch and book, accompanied by slow camera movement help to communicate a calm and
studious atmosphere at the start of the film. This state of equilibrium was identified by Todorov as one of the four stages
of a complete narrative.
Media Language
Editing
Create a Pages Document with four sets of screenshots, representing sequences, from one
of your Coursework texts.
Next to each sequence, describe the Media Language and Evaluate how it communicates
one of the other Key Concepts.
Media Language
A sequence of short takes in a film comprised of predominantly long takes. The sequence
shows the main character moving to the blinds and includes two POV shots form his
perspective.
Media Language
Genre – this sequence communicates the suspicion and intrigue of a historical thriller. Steve Neale recognised that
genres are established by instances of difference and repetition and repetition can be identified in this sequence as
the audience is placed in the main character's shoes, experiencing the mysterious elements of the genre created by
such films as The Name of the Rose and Gosford Park.
Media Language
Representation – by combining the main character with the act of looking through the blinds, semiotics have been used to
produce a connotation fitting to the film. Ferdinand de Saussure identified two levels of meaning with semiotics,
denotation and connotation. In this instance, the connotation is created through the audience's familiarity with the idea of
peering through blinds as a sign of suspicion and paranoia.