RESEARCH: PETE'S MEDIA BLOG

• One of your Twitter links should be to Pete's Media Blog. Post that you have looked at this resource in class and state why it is a useful resource. State one or more area of interest that you found there (be specific). 
• Pete's Twitter page here.
• State that you have looked at MediaMagazine as a useful resource with, for example, an article by David Buckingham on youth audiences.
• website = http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/      
  User Name = cfcsmediamag/      
  password = you will have to make a private note of this!

PLANNING: TOP LINE AND BIG QUESTION

When planning your treatment...

Today in class, we look at the Future Learn course. We watch a presentation about planning your treatment by Frank Ash, Creative Consultant who has taught storytelling and creativity techniques to teams across the BBC and beyond. For Frank Ash, it is important to focus on the audience: what will interest the audience? How will the narrative develop?

So, if you're aiming for your film to reach a large audience, making sure it has universal appeal will be key. Frank Ash’s points:

• Think about your favourite book or film or any 'good story' you recently watched online, could you sum up its narrative into 'on elegant sentence' to provide its 'top line'.
• What was its big story question, and how important was it to your appreciation of the text?

KEVIN MAHER ON STUDYING THE MEDIA

Flaky film degrees tell you more about life than maths

• Film students can be immersed in social history, economics or feminist theory (Getty Images)

Kevin Maher

Published at 12:01AM, August 17 2015

Oi! Education snobs! Enough already with the “flaky” insults. After last week’s A-level hysteria, the Joint Council for Qualifications has revealed that the number of pupils taking allegedly tougher, more challenging subjects such as maths has risen this year. Simultaneously, and much to the delight of education snobs everywhere, the numbers taking so-called “flaky” subjects, such as media studies, has fallen.
In short, say the observers, including the schools minister Nick Gibb, who recently praised this apparent return to “core academic subjects”, dummies are out, brainiacs are in.
Well, as someone who boasts a master’s in what must surely be one of the dumbest, flakiest subjects imaginable — film studies (I know, hilarious, isn’t it?) — I take enormous exception to the short-sighted assumptions behind this argument. In fact, I will let my film studies master’s take the Pepsi challenge with any maths degree from any university any day of the week and I’m confident the film spods will come out on top.
Under the guise of “studying film”, I was submerged, reluctantly it must be said (I was a student after all), in Italian social history (to back up the module on Italian neorealist cinema), German political history (for Weimar cinema), Marxist economics (for the term on the Paris riots of May 1968), Lacanian psychoanalysis (the Hitchcock class) and post-structuralist feminist theory (the Doris Day module).
It was ten months of non-stop brain-ache, speed-reading, essay writing, opinion-forming and tub-thumping debate, with a few movies thrown in. As a concentrated mind-expanding educational experience, it was more informative, inspiring and galvanising than anything I had done before or, to be brutally honest, since.

TITLES

THE TITLE SEQUENCE

OPENING CREDITS
The order of credits is determined by guild rules -- SAG, the DGA, WGA and other unions. the list that follows is for opening credits.

The order in which credits are billed generally follows their importance to the film, just not linearly. First is usually the motion picture company, followed by the producer, then the 'a film by' credit. Then we see the Title followed by the cast. from there we reverse gears on the whole "order of importance" guideline and work backwards to the director...


PRODUCTION COMPANY presents
a NAME LASTNAME production
a NAME LASTNAME film
"TITLE"
Lead Cast
Supporting Cast
Casting Director
Music Composer
Costume Designer
Associate Producers
Editor(s)
Production Designer
Director of Photography
Executive Producer
Producer
Writer(s)
Director


if the writer and director are the same person, or the director was also a producer, hold his earlier credit and pair it with the more prestigious one (in this case "director"). so you would place "Written and Directed by" or "Produced and Directed by" or "Edited and Directed by" where the Director's credit goes. if your Dp was also your editor, you'd have "Editor and Director of Photography..." falling in the position where the DP credit goes. et cetera.

NARRATIVE VIEWPOINTS: GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER ADVERTISING

We watch two award-winning pieces of advertising:

The Guardian's 1986 'Points of view' advert

The Guardian - Three Little Pigs "Open Journalism" Commercial (HD)

CATCH UP

1. Make posts on the remaining tasks listed on Trello, some of which we covered in today's class, such as looking at exemplar material, Pete's Media Blog, the OCR website for tutorials on camerawork and photography, and the examiner's report to centres for 2015 on the Foundation Production.
2. Create your Twitter. 
3. Post that you have done so and refer to Alan Rusbridger's reasons why he views it as a useful professional resource.
4. Six Art of the Title / film opening analyses should be completed.
5. Ongoing: your research into Audiences.

 

RESEARCH: AUDIENCES

You are familiar with much of this material on audience models of behaviour, reception theory, audience segmentation and audience research. 

Start by making a blog post with text and images for each point (will become a slide / section) in the right order. Keep each section to the point. You are not writing a novel. You are proving that you have done the research.

When the writing is done, you will present it all crisply using an appropriate presentational tool (such as infographic, Emaze, Slideshare). The aim is to demonstrate to the moderator that you know about theoretical frameworks and about how producers target audiences. 

At the same time, the exercise will help you revise for the A2 exam Section A question 1b (audience).

CONTENT.  You should cover:

1 - AUDIENCE: A KEY CONCEPT
All media texts are produced with an audience in mind - that is to say a group of people who will receive the text and make some sort of sense out of it.
Understanding audience research will help me plan my own production.
So audience is part of the media equation – a product is produced and an audience receives it. Television producers need an audience for their programmes, so they can finance those programmes and make more programmes that the audience likes. Advertisers need an audience who will see or hear their advertisements and then buy the products.
A media text is planned with a particular audience in mind. A television producer has to explain to the broadcasting institution (e.g. BBC or ITV) who is the likely audience for this particular programme.
Are they under 25 years old or older, mainly male or mainly female, what are they interested in? The television audience varies throughout the day and night, and television and radio broadcast for 24 hours, seven days a week. How do we know who is watching or listening at any one time? This is where audience research becomes important. 
A media producer has to know who is the potential audience, and as much about them as possible.
My  next task is to create / devise / design an audience profile for my own production

2 - AUDIENCE PROFILING

TYPES OF AUDIENCE RESEARCH

Audience profiling such as socioeconomics,demographics, psychographics  

A common and traditional method of audience research is known as demographics. This defines the adult population largely by the work that they do. It breaks the population down into 6 groups, and labels them by using a letter code to describe the income and status of the members of each group.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PSYCHOGRAPHICS (above) is a way of describing an audience by looking at the behaviour and personality traits of its members. Psychographics labels a particular type of person and makes an assessment about their viewing and spending habits.
The advertising agency Young and Rubican invented a successful psychographic profile known as their 4C’s Marketing Model http://www.4cs.yr.com The 4 Cs stand for Cross Cultural Consumer Characterisation. They put the audience into groups with labels that suggest their position in society

 

3 - AUDIENCES AS PASSIVE (4 items)

THE MEDIA EFFECTS MODEL

The media effects (hypodermic syringe) model

STUDIES USED TO SUPPORT THE EFFECTS MODEL 

Bobo doll (Albert Bandura, 1961); 

MORAL PANICS

What are moral panics? 

THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA IN MORAL PANICS

Read The Guardian article. What films have been implicated in producing copycat crime? 

 

4 - ADORNO AND THE CULTURE INDUSTRY

For Theodore Adorno,  advertising creates false needs. Adorno (1903-69) argued that capitalism fed people with the products of a 'culture industry' - the opposite of 'true' art - to keep them passively satisfied and politically apathetic.

Adorno suggested that culture industries churn out a debased mass of unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the more 'difficult' and critical art forms which might lead people to actually question social life.

False needs are cultivated in people by the culture industries. These are needs which can be both created and satisfied by the capitalist system, and which replace people's 'true' needs - freedom, full expression of human potential and creativity, genuine creative happiness.

Products of the culture industry may be emotional or apparently moving, but Adorno sees this as cathartic - we might seek some comfort in a sad film or song, have a bit of a cry, and then feel restored again.

5 - AUDIENCES AS ACTIVE (3 items)

MASLOW'S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

We learn about higher order needs using Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Where does popular culture sit in this debate?

 

 

 

 

WHY AUDIENCES CONSUME TEXTS: THE USES AND GRATIFICATIONS MODEL

We look at different models of audience behaviour. Mediaknowall will remind you of what we discussed.
The uses and gratifications model of audience behaviour (Blumler and Katz, 1974)

THE TWO-STEP FLOW MODEL

Katz and Lazarsfeld assumes a slightly more active audience. It suggests messages from the media move in two distinct ways.

First, individuals who are opinion leaders, receive messages from the media and pass on their own interpretations in addition to the actual media content.

The information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience, but is filtered through the opinion leaders who then pass it on to a more passive audience.
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 theory appeared to reduce the power of the media, and some researchers concluded that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpret texts. This led to the idea of active audiences.

 

6 -RECEPTION THEORY 

STUART HALL AND CULTURAL STUDIES

RECEPTION THEORY focuses on the scope in textual analysis for 'negotiation' and 'opposition' on the part of the audience. This means that a text ( a book, film, advert, poster or other creative work) is not passively accepted by the audience but that the reader / viewer interprets the meanings of the texts based on their individual cultural background and life experiences.
Stuart Hall’s encoding decoding model; dominant, negotiated and oppositional readings; why Hall says he studies culture instead of media specifically, and media hegemony. Audiences are no longer considered passive recipients.

 

 

7 - EXIT POLLS 

The BFI carries out exit polls to assess audience response at film screenings. Here is one example (name, director, date).

 

8 - THE ROLE OF THE BBFC

We look at issues such as discrimination, drugs, horror, dangerous and easily imitable behaviour, language, nudity, sex, and violence when making decisions. The theme of the work is also an important consideration. We also consider context, the tone and likely impact of a work on the potential audience.