Media Language Question

1b. Explain how meaning is constructed by the use of media language in ONE of your coursework productions.

For my AS production, my group and I created an opening sequence for a thriller film called ‘Fixation’, where a woman tried to comes her son’s death by preaching on a younger boy his age. As a film opening, we needed to make sure it draws in the audience to make them want to continue watching the film till the end, showing and introducing the main themes, genres and settings that we are going to include throughout the film. The opening sequence of a film is one of the most crucial aspects, as it gives almost a rough cut of what you can expect to see in the film and what the storyline is going to be about. We created an effective opening through media language by the way we (the producers) send messages to the audience through mise-en-scene, camera work, editing and sound. As our film was a thriller, we needed to ensure we use conventions of existing thriller movies to ensure our target audience are aware of the genre of our movie. From watching previous thriller films such as SE7EN, we noticed Rick Altman’s semantic elements such as the use of eerie music. We wanted to recreate this typical convention, so through thorough research on YouTube we were able to find the appropriate sound to create a scary feeling to the audience. As we have two main scene’s going on in our opening sequence, we had the decision on whether to use the same music throughout, or to change depending on what scene was showing on screen. We finally come to the conclusion that we would keep the same song throughout, to hint to the audience that the ‘party scene’ is not as normal as it seems and that there is something bad about to happen. We feel as though we successfully portrayed this meaning to the audience just by our use of sound alone. To continue the thriller/eerie feel, we created our titles around Rick Altman’s’ syntactic elements with the theme being stalking and obsession. We created a board which signified ‘Eileen’ our villain from Propp’s theory, taking down details about our protagonist ‘James’. With the use of mise-en-scene and music combined, we have told the audience that the film is going to be about an obsession due to all of the information that is written on the board. Out titles are within this shot, as we pan over the board and see ‘directed by…’ and all of the roles most films include within this camera work. We also used technology to enhance the effect that this had on the audience, by using the software Adobe Premiere in post-production to make our production more effective. We used the ‘ghosting’ effect to make the layers the board go over each other so it looked like this was a point of view camera angle and the information was being looked at over and over again by Eileen. To emphasise the use of technology today by how much it has an impact on people’s lives, we included a social networking site ‘twitter’ to express to our target audience the information that can be gained from social networking sites and how you need to be cautious of your safety online. We constantly used over the shoulder shots when the camera was on Eileen, and this was purposely done. From previous experience with most horror and thriller films, the villain is usually remained very mysterious and the producers try to leave it all to the audience’s imagination. We also see long shots of the villain Eileen walking towards a house, which we see the party scenes happening where our protagonist James is. This then leaves the audience asking enigma codes like ‘Why has she chose him? What does she want from him?’ and this follows Barthes codes theory, where media language is used which provokes the audience to ask questions. These questions that each viewer has, are not revealed until the main film is starting. We done this intentionally, so the audience don’t receive any answers in the opening sequence which means the plot is then much more mysterious which supports typical conventions of a thriller movie. We can also see how Levi Strauss’ binary opposition theory is applied throughout the opening sequence, as each character is shown in complete different lime lights to each other. James is shown in a bright environment, surrounded by lots of people, in colourful clothing and is very young. However, Eileen is shown all alone, in dark lighting in dark clothes which instantly signifies the difference between the good and evil characters. From reviewing all of our camera, editing, sound and mise-en-scene decisions, it is clear to see how media language is used to convey a message to the audience. This follows Stuart Hall’s theory of decoding/encoding – how producers decode a message and want the audiences to encode it. I believe that every decision we made as a group we conveyed meaning well, and this was supported by the audience feedback that we received when we pitched our final production. The majority of our audience feedback understood what was happening in our opening sequence, with the use of Barthes action and symbolic codes and media language.