Starting Out

Previously Posted 4/11/12 

Hi everyone, 

Before I started my Media course at the start of September 2012 all I knew about the Media was, that it was everywhere and was made up of all different types e.g. music, newspapers, television,magazines, books, the Internet etc. But since then I have found that there is more to the media than meets the eye. 

On the outside Media seems to be easy to understand, but when you delve into the details of it, there are a lot of different meanings, terminology, and new topics that are quite complex. 

So far within my Media Studies I have learnt new terms and their meanings and also different types of media.I have also learnt about stereotypes and how the media portreys them The very first things that I learnt about media , was stereotypes and genres within films and how to analyse films/media texts.

When learning about different genres I found that different film genres had different codes and conventions( which are things which the audience expects to see within a film). For example: In a horror film the you would expect to see blood, dangerous weapons, dark scenes, scared characters, creepy/spooky music etc and a romance film you would expect to see a boy meets girl love story with lots of bright cheerful colours such as red and yellow, with happy music and a happy ending. 

Learning about Narrative theory within Media and how every film has a story that follows certain theories is not very complex, I found that it is easy to get confused with all the theories. Within the Narrative Theory I found out about 4 different men who came up with different theories about films/stories. The 4 theories that I know about are: 

1) Levi- Strauss- He came up with the Binary Opposition Theory which basically means that within every film/story there are opposites e.g. night/day, good/evil 

2) Todorov- This man stated that every narrative is put together using the EQUILIBRIUM theory. This is when everything in the film/story is fine at first and everything is stable( as it should be), then a problem occurs which messes up the equilibrium.( Disequilibrium), and at the end of the film/story the setting is slightly altered but is still intact ( New Equilibrium)

3) Vladimir Propp- His theory is that every narrative has 31/32 functions and 8 different character types. The 8 character types are: The Hero, The Donor, The Villain, The Dispatcher, The Helper, The Princess, The False Hero and The Princess' Father. 

4) Barthes- He came up with Five Codes which are put into every narrative. the two most important are: The Hermeneutic Code which means there is a mystery within the film/story which keeps the audience guessing and The Proairetic Code which creates tension within a narrative.

Analysing media texts/films is easy once you know how. All you have to do is say what you see and give a reason why, but just using some media terminology such as visual codes, narrative, camera angles etc. If I can do it anybody can :) 

And that is what I have learnt within 8 weeks of my Media Studies :) 

Now to learn all about analysing and comparing film posters or two pieces of text.