Preliminary Excercise

Current Favourite Song

This is a song my amateur singer Charlee Drew who broadcasts all of his music through video sharing website 'Youtube'

The song i have chosen was writen by Charlee and is my favourite song at the moment for many reasons but mainly for the unique voice that charlee has, the uplifting melody and the heartfelt lyrics. I eally like this song because its real feel-good music which one of the main reasons that i enjoy listening to the song so much.

Richard Dyer- The Matter of Images

Dyer said: 'How we are seen determines how we are treated, how we see them.' How we see them comes from representation.

I used this theory to help my analyse a programme.

The programme that I have chosen to analyse is 'Skins' which is an energetic drama based on the lives of a group pf 6 rowdy teenagers and is shown on channel 4. Stereotypes are very prominent throughout the series and teenagers are shown mainly in a bad light and scenes of unprotected sex, drug taking and a bad attitude towards education are shown frequently. After studying Rayner's theory of representation I have been able to further discover the decisions that the director/producer has made to display the way in which the 17 years olds have been represented.

All of the scenes shown at the school feature, truancy, complete disregard or utter lack of interest in learning, disrespect to the teachers and an overall bad attitude, the view of the teenagers that is represented within the programme is farcely stereotypical and shows a very narrow minded and one sided point of view.

Another theorist, Richard Dyer argues the importance of images and the way in which people treat people because of the way they look, what they are wearing and there overall appearance, in the programme I analysed.

The Constructionist Approach

-the representation is constructed with a set of ideas and values (producers intent/ intended meaning)

-the context of the representaion is part of the representation (media language choices, anchorage, media form, placement/location, genre expectations)

-the audience reacts to this representation and this depends on their own personal interpretational context: age, gender, political/religous beliefs, nationality etc. (negotiated meaning).

Gatekeeping

A theorist called White (1961) spoke to the (gatekeepers)- that is the people who are part of the decision making process in the construction of the media texts.

Who are gatekeepers?
-BBC commisioners
-Law makers
-Director
-Producer
-Editor
-Audience (recent phenomenom, test screening)

Representation

Rayner, a theorist came up with the theory of representation in the media. He explained representation as 'the process my which the media represent the 'real world'

He believed that this was done using a selection process, he though that the selection process was as follows:
-the decision over what is chosen to be represented and what is rejected.
-the choices made when organising the representation.
-the options taken the focus the audience in a certain way.

When thinking about representation within the media you have to consider the following:
-Who or what is being represented?
-How is the representation created? This could be through Mise en Scene.
-Why is the representation created in that way? What is the intention?
-What is the effect of the representation?

Binary Opposites

Levi Straus believed that the world was split into a series of 'binary opposites.' Essentially one thing can only be defined in relation to something it isn't, for example, there's only fat because there's thin.

Bianary opposites are also used to help to define the symbolic code.