THE KILLING

OWNERSHIP

• Danish
• Speak swedish
• Created by Søren Sveistrup
• Produced by DR (Dutch) and ZDF Enterprises (German)
• DR = CEO Maria Rorbye Ronn, Public service radio and television broadcasting, founded 1925 Denmark
• ZDF Enterprises = German, founded 1993, child company to ZDF (independent non profit, public service broadcaster), THOMAS BELLUT (general director)
• First American
• APPEALS TO INTERNATIONAL AUDIENCE

• Who is the primary, secondary and tertiary audience for this product?
• What audience theories can you apply to which help you to develop a better understanding of the potential target audience?
• What organisations (rather than individuals) are involved in the production, distribution & exhibition of this product?
• DISTRIBUTED on Amazon Prime
• Female protagonist – radical
• Crime drama – stephe neale genre theory – repertoire of elements (repeated features, specific to crime drama so it’s recognisable to the audience)
• Narratology – TODOROV – beginning, middle, end, equilibrium then balances out again at the end, can happen more than once, has to be resolved to end a story
• Feminist critical thinking BELL HOOKS, VAN ZOONEN
• Audience theory – Hall – theory of preferred reading

Primary audience – Directly receive communication (Viewers of the TV show), crime drama show lovers aged 16 upwards, swedish people

Secondary audience – Indirectly receive communication (People who analyse it, critics), netflix watchers

Tertiary audience – People are familiar with someone conveying the communication, focus group (friends / family of the producers / actors)

Audience theories: Reception theory / preferred reading

Organisations involved :

Production – Søren Sveistrup (screenwrite) (has also been remade by Turkish and US TV (AMC)

Distribution – (How it’s shown to an audience) , Amazon, BBC4 and Netflix

Exhibition – TV show, moving image

NO OFFENCE

OWNERSHIP

• Anna Ferguson Simon Meyers Philip Leach
• m=Manchester

• Mainstream TV series using code and conventions of the police crime drama intertwined with aspects of social realism
• THEORY OF GRATIFICATION
• TODOROV
• STEPHE NEALE GENRE THEORY – hybrid – combination of more than one genre to create one sub genre (drama, social realism, crime)
• Negtative and positive representation of stereotypes (female police)
• RADICAL – dominance of female characters (counter-type)
• REPRESENTATION THEORIES – HALL
• Streamed on Channel4, All4 and in France – public service broadcasting DISTRIBUTION
• PRODUCTION
• Audience positioning
• Niche audience

Language and representation

• masculinity
• suggesting you have to look like the dominant signifier and you HAVE to do those things to be like that ‘blast body fat!’, page 127 ‘ways to build a stronger crore’
• strong
• determined
• ‘you’re only limit is your self belief’

For my coursework, I am going to follow NEA brief set 2. My aim is to create a radical piece which challenges the dominant ideology of the patriarchal society we live in linking to feminist critical thinking throughout to show that women aren’t inferior to men and they deserve to have hobbies which are typically thought of as ‘manly’. I intend, to encourage girls (aged 14-19) to also be confident and game if they want to and to not be scared to do so, this will help satisfy their enjoyment and social needs relating to uses and gratifications theory.  

For research, I have looked at PC GAMER magazines and other gaming magazine brands to analyse what professional products look like so I can make my magazine as convincing as possible. From this I discovered that girls are underrepresented in the gaming community and the ‘girl gamer’ magazines focus on female games characters or Nintendo DS gameplay rather than PC or console like the ‘typical male gamer uses’, which lead me to want to make a magazine in the style for typical gamers but for girls. My magazine will have an overall radical theme linked to feminist critical thinking. 

My cover will have a girl as the dominant signifier to give the connotation of an independent woman to act as a counter-type to dominant ideologies, with iconic and indexical signs within my magazine creating a paradigm which illustrates my aim. I intend to make my front cover eye catching to draw my intended audience’s attention. I Will use the rule of thirds to give my contents page a systematic layout clearly identifying each section in my magazine and make it easy to navigate for my intended audience. My double page spread will promote the game ‘HELL RESCUE: GLITH’, with an interview with the developers and the first gameplay. The description of the game will follow Todorov’s and Chatman’s narrative theories where the game will have a spike of interest and then level out to a resolution, and have every element working together so if one were taken out it changes the story entirely to create a new ending.  

I intend to create a diverse range of ADs across the 3. To do this I will focus on issues associated with gaming, (such as how gamers can maintain their health), an online character design competiton and quality gaming experience (computer cleaning tips or new internal part by GeForce).  

I recognise that people read things in different ways (Hall’s reception theory), which can be dominant, negotiated or oppostional, to combat this I will stick to my main target audience, whilst also aiming to appeal to the broader gaming community, to reinforce my aim to show people that anyone can game if they wish. 

• BOOK – fake news vs media studies – J.McDougall
• “I’ve always said you can’t understand the world without the media nor the media without the world”  professor Natalie Fenton
• “I do spend long periods of time with my gaze turned away from the media, because I’m seeking to understand what’s going on out there, and then the role of the media in that context. I’m always putting the social, the political and the economic contexts first.” 

WAR OF THE WORLDS

• HISTORICAL – power and influence of radio in its early days
• SOCIAL, CULTURAL, POLITICAL – broadcast on the eve of WW2 to reflect fears of US invasion

LETTER OT THE FREE

• soundtrack 13th amendment documentary

HIDDEN FIGURES

• potentially controversial themes of race in the US
• particular groups being ‘hidden from history’
• SOCIAL, CULTURAL – targets an audience often ignored by Hollywood (age, gender and race)

MAYBELLINE

• contemporary debates around identity and the self
• reflexive, fluid identity (many MUA)

TEEN VOGUE

• combines politics and fashion
• feminsit stance
• radical voice in US mainstream media due to reports or Trump’s presidency
• social + economic – succeeded whilst other online magazines have struggled to maintain audiences

LANGUAGE ANALYSIS

1. Mise-en-scene analysis

• everything infront of the camera, eg lighting, actors, set design

1. Production values and Aesthetics

• technical quality of methods and materials used to make a media product such as a film or advert
• aesthetics is how pleasing something is to look at

1. Semiotics: how images signify cultural meanings

• the nature and culture of an advert and sometimes hidden messages in adverts are shown through semiotics

1. How advertising conventions are socially and historically relative

• the way media products are advertised has changed over time and advertisement of different types of products (eg films vs magazines) is different
• advertisement can aim to target a specific group of people to attract a certain target audience

1. The way in which media language incorporates viewpoints and ideologies

• people’s views can be altered by what they read (suggested by Althusser, can be changed without knowing it and over time, Chomsky and Gerbner)
• hegemony (gramsci) – ideoloiges can be changed by using power eg big media conglomerates changing the way their audience thinks

Narrative

1. How does Score construct a narrative which appeals to its target audience

1. How and why audience responses to the narrative of this advert may have changed over time

• over time ideologies shift as people learn more about the world and how the media changes the way it feeds info to the public

1. How does this advert create desire for the product

1. Techniques of Persuasion

1. Students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the persuasive techniques used in the advert and issues surrounding brand values, brand message, brand personality and brand positioning should inform the analysis

Media Representations

Discussion of the Score advertisement will focus mainly on representation of gender including

1. The processes which lead media producers to make choices about how to represent social groups
2. How audience responses to interpretations of media representations reflect social, cultural and historical attitudes
3. The effect of historical contexts on representations
4. Theories of representation including Hall
5. Theories of gender performativity including Butler
6. Feminist theories including bel hooks and van Zoonen
7. Theories of identity including Gauntlett

HISTORICAL, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

• Score hair cream, 1967
• 1967 – period of slow transformation in western cultures with legislation about changing attitudes to the role or women (and men)
• year of decriminalisation of homosexuality
• colonialist values can be linked to social and cultural contexts of the ending of Empire

B.F SKINNER

• Operant conditioning
• schedule of reward
• “the fiction of free will”
• You think you’re doing one thing but you’re not
• we’re socially conditioned

PROPAGANDA VS PERSUASION

• PROPAGANDA
• expression of opinions and actions carried out deliberately to influence opinions and actions of others ending in psychological manipulation
• overtly political and manipulative
• PERSUASION
• often appears invisible at first glance
• concealed strategy manipulation
• direct

ZUBOFF

• (BOOK) the age of surveillance capitalism , the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power
• “technology has begun to develop new methods of behaviour control capable of altering an individuals actions, personality and way of thinking”

CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA

• Alexander Nix
• “the right message, to the right person, at the right moment”

LASSWELL

• Propaganda Technique in the World War
• believed all goverments ‘manipulated the mass media in order to justify its actions’ in World War 1
• 1948 – linear model of communication
• SENDER is transferring a MESSAGE, through a MEDIUM (eg Print, radio, TV, etc) that has a direct effect on the RECEIVER
• hypodermic model

• ‘keep building your business‘ – right wing (authoritarian, statement), focus on own success not treatment of employees
• who – Daily Mail
• what – advert for building your business
• channel – newspaper
• to whom – Daily Mail readers with own business (entrepreneurs)
• what effect – you now know where to go to help grow your business

TRANSMISSION MODEL OF COMMUNICATION

• lasswell’s model was later adapted by Shannon and Weaver in 1949, as the Transmission model of Communication
• including noise, error, encoding and feedback
• suggestion that sending and receiving a message is clear-cut, predictable, reliable or dependent on certain factors

TWO STEP FLOW COMMUNICATION

• Paul Lazarfeld (sociologist)
• more likely to be influenced by other people than the media
• media messages aren’t directly injected
• filtered through opinion leaders who interpret messages then relay them back to the bigger audience eg journalists
• Martin Moore
• ‘people’s political views are not, as contemporaries thought, much changed by what they read or heard in the media. Voters were far more influenced by their friends, their families and their colleagues’
• key individuals in society influence the communication process making it subject to bias, interpretation, rejection, amplification, support and change.

USES AND GRATIFICATIONS

1. information / education
2. empathy and identity
3. social interaction
4. entertainment
5. escapism

• linked to maslow’s hierarchy of needs
•  ‘only through constant self-improvement and self-understanding can an individual ever be truly happy‘.

GERBNER

• ‘television cultivates from infancy the very predispositions and preferences that used to be acquired from other primary sources‘
• cultivation theory
• seeing something repeatedly makes you remember / believe it

STUART HALL

• theory of preferred reading / reception theory
• active in the making (or rejecting) of meaning through mass communication
• dominant, (accepts)
• negotiated, (Accepts and denies)
• oppositional (denies)

CLAY SHIRKY

• the end of audience
• radical
• there is no audience only a group of individuals

In Chomksy’s book Manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass media, he talks about how the mass media is focused on making money rather than doing what’s right for the public and is largely dominated by a few large conglomerates. He also talks about how the mass media aims to control its audience through framing products and concepts in a certain way to make people believe what they believe and planting ideologies into their heads which they don’t even realise, the public believe they have a freedom of choice when in reality the media is using it’s power to manipulate the population. Forcing people to accept ideas they may not believe in at first.

The Daily Mail is a right wing newspaper meaning they support the conservative parties in politics. In the 2004 UK election 53% of the Daily Mail’s readers (52-55% of readers female) voted for the conservatives. The daily mail uses strong words such as CRUSH the opposition to sway people to vote for certain parties over others based on them being a right wing newspaper. They make the parties they support seem favourable to their readers such as saying things like A HUG FOR HIS DAUGHTER AS BLAIR WINS A SECOND TERM this tells the Daily Mail’s readers that the people they support are nicer than the opposing parties making their readers like them more than others, manipulating their thoughts on who to vote for.

This reinforces Chomsky’s theory of manufacturing consent as it shows how dominant media companies use their power to frame an ideology in a certain to make it appear to readers how the company wants them to perceive he ideology, meaning there is little freedom for thought when you are influenced by the media. You can’t understand the world without the media but when taking in the media you can’t avoid companies manipulating your thoughts and ideas to fit in with what they want you to think. The Daily Mail’s use of strong words creates a common enemy between the company and its readers, where they can then led on from this and plant ideas into their heads over time.