Post Fifteen: Reflecting on Theory

Effects Model

Hypodermic Needle Theory - 1920's

• The message the producers wish to present you in their text is directly 'injected' into the audience.
• This would make the audience a passive recipient of the message.
• During the 1920's the mass media e.g. newspapers were known as a type of 'authority'.

2 - step flow - 1940's

• The 'message' of a film goes from producer via a third party to the audience - the 'third party' doesn't have to be a person e.g. word of mouth, the film itself, a film critic.
• According to this theory the audience is yet again a passive recipient.

 

Uses and gratifications - 1960's

• During this period of time the producer is trying to reflect what the audience wants/needs.
• What we actually get from the text.
• In this theory the audience is active.

Reception theory - 1980's

• Stuart Hall - Encoding: Producers make decisions that essentially create the 'meaning' Decoding: Audience breaking down the codes to find the 'message'.E.g. IF the audience reveal the intended 'message' it is preferred reading.

• Negotiated reading - This is where the audience adapt the preferred meaning to fit what they desire the 'meaning' to be.

Genre Theory
Genre theory when used with the study of films is used to in the categorisation of film, the genre of a film is dependant on several points of identifications as well as various other factors e.g. the director, audience expectations and more obvious factors such as the story line of the film - The use of genre theory is enabling the grouping of films, 'a short cut in how we are able to describe films'.

When we speak about certain genres everyone has common conceptions about them e.g. westerns - the majority of people will associate the same conventions within this collection of films. We may expect to find gun fights, horses and Indians, a cowboy. The same applies when we look at the genre horror - the majority of people would yet again expect to see the use of the same conventions. We may expect to see zombies, werewolves, vampires and will always expect several deaths. We all expect to see a certain content and a certain style of film making within certain genres. 

Audience

-Within the genre theory it is important to know details about who the intended audience is for the film, e.g. age and gender. An example would be when studying a period film e.g. a second world war film, it is important to take into account at what time the film was both made and for the audience it was intended for.

-Paired with this it is important to consider the technology that has been used within the film. The difference between technology today and that of twenty years ago is drastically different, shorter exposure times, lighting, rhythm and pacing of films and editing are all of a higher quality.
- It is also important to consider the time in which a film was shot to work out the relevance the film has to a modern day society, things such as core values change over time so values of an older film could plausibly seem unimportant to a modern day audience when watching a film.
 
Marketing

- Genre theory when applied to marketing works very successfully for both the producers of the film and the audience the film/market is being targeted at. It works particularly well with certain age groups such a the 'teen movie genre' which then contains sub-genres such as rom-coms and spoofs.
 
Problems with Genre theory

-If all films were exactly the same then genre theory would be easy to study and defining which type of film it is would be easy. Unfortunately though it is far more complicated than this. As we look and analyze various films we find that although they have similarities in other aspects they are very different. It creates the need for genre theory to continually re-define itself according to the technology, the audience, the political message among many other variables. What may have been typical of a genre at one time may evolve other time as the audience evolve in such a way that an action film from the a few years ago may be a very slow paced film by today's standards, compare for example the Western with the action film.

Narrative Theory
Narrative theory relates to the narrative of the film (the way in which the story is related). The narrative in any short film is not merely just the story line, for instance ‘boy meets girl’ but how the story relates and why that event happened.

Below is a link to a definition of what Narrative theory is. I have found ‘media-know-all a very useful site to help me understand the key concepts in my media studies..

“In media terms, narrative is the coherence/organisation given to a series of facts. The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things. We connect events and make interpretations based on those connections. In everything we seek a beginning, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experience of reality and of previous texts. Each text becomes part of the previous and the next through its relationship with the audience”.

http://www.mediaknowall.com/as_alevel/alevkeyconcepts/alevelkeycon.php?pageID=narrative
This theory is important and can be related to my media production as I will have to take into consideration and include the codes and conventions of Narrative theory which include:

Audience Theory
Audience theory is how the audience perceive and respond to the text. It is important for me to remember that my storylines dominant meaning is actually decided by the audience and how the perceive and respond to what they are viewing.

A critic that speaks on audience theory is Andrew Hart believes that audiences are vital in communication and if it wasn’t for audiences media wouldn’t exist. With this point in mind, I encouraged a significant amount of communication links between potential audiences and us as distributors/ producers. It could be argued that it is audiences who define the genre of films, and as producers we are affectively part of a variety of audiences, so we are able to elaborate upon the reasons that suggest our film is a specific genre. It is important to keep the link between audiences and distributors as eventually they will encourage the success that comes from your film. During my preproduction work, specifically my post card designs, I used a lot of my feedback received from audiences to determine which post card I should use for the advertisement of my short film. This helped me grasp an understanding of the perspective they see my film from as well as me influencing them on the images and messages we are trying to