All posts by Joseph Clarke
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Blinded by the Light – Industries
Curran and Seaton’s power and media industries theory states that media products are owned by large conglomerates, resulting in a lack of creativity and thought. Blinded by the Light is an exception to this. It is an independent film, produced by Bend It Films, who aim to deliver “moving, inspiring and commercial” films to a global audience and “invite them to see the world from a new perspective”, especially from those “characters who are normally on the margins”. As Hesmondhalgh states, media is a risky business, and so one way in which Blinded by the Light attempts to reduce risk and maximise profit is through vertical and horizontal integration. They partnered with Levente Films, an independent motion picture company which develops, produces, and finances projects, as well as Ingenious Media which is “one of the largest independent investors in the UK’s creative sector” with an impressive record in financing critically and commercially successful films. Blinded by the Light premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, this showcased their work to critics and most importantly distributors; New Line Cinema acquired US distribution rights while the UK rights were bought by Entertainment One.
PSB
James Curran
Jean Seaton
Conglomerates
Vertical Integration
Regulation
Diversity
Interactivity
Diversity
Merger
BBC
Noam Chomsky
Metroid + Tomb Raider
opening para:
War of the Worlds + Newsbeat
…
Men’s Health + Oh Comely
opening para
Letter to the Free + Ghost Town
Intro:
Fluid identity / constructed identity – Gauntlett :
Double Consciousness – the struggle African Americans face to remain true to black culture while at the same time conforming to the dominant white society.
Frantz Fanon – Fanon perceived colonialism as a form of domination whose necessary goal for success was the reordering of the world of indigenous (“native”) peoples. He saw violence as the defining characteristic of colonialism.
Paul Gilroy – Paul Gilroy believed “unstable” and politicised identities are “always unfinished, always being remade” and ethnicity is an “infinite process of identity construction”.
Post colonialism – Postcolonial theory is a literary theory or critical approach that deals with literature produced in countries that were once, or are now, colonies of other countries.
Diaspora – the dispersion or spread of a people from their original homeland.
Score + Maybelline: Advertisements
Intro
David Gauntlett believes that identity is fluid, and representation changes over time to accommodate for this. A great example of this is Score and Maybelline. Whilst both present a eudemonia through their hyperreal (Jean Baudrillard) depictions of gender and sexuality, they are still essentially binary oppositions. Score depicts gender through the lense of old traditional binary definitions and ideals. Sexualising the women and placing them as subservient to the man (Jean Kilbourne). Through Stuart Hall’s reception theory we can see Score is encoding messages which are exclusively designed to be decoded by heterosexual men, and more specifically, white heterosexual men. Its lack of racial representation (it only includes white characters) is an example of Paul Gilroy’s post-colonial theory, as it fails to provide equal representation for black individuals. Maybelline on the other hand, puts an emphasis on inclusivity, representing multiple races, sexualities, and genders. Maybelline uses opinion leaders such as Manny MUA, a gay makeup artist / influencer, and Shayla Mitchell, a black makeup artist / influencer to gain access to a wider audience.
CSP Metroid & Tomb Raider & Sims
Metroid
Genre
Metroid is an example of a hybrid genre… it mixes together First person shooter, Action and Adventure, Sci-Fi, Horror,
Interplay of codes
The animations and textures are inspired by science fiction futurism and the dark aesthetics of gothic horror.
Steve Neale argued we could classify films according to the “specific variations” of the “interplay of codes” the producers used to construct meaning
Metroid is hard to classify as it draws from many different genres.
Narrative
“Metroid Prime 2: Echoes” is an adventure narrative
the hero, Samus Aran, is on a search and recuse mission – “locate federation troopers and render assistance”. She travels to the coordinates of their last transmission, a rogue planet called Aether, but she soon discovers the soldiers were brutally murdered by evil creatures from a parallel dimension.
Samus encounters U-Mos, who begins to describe to her the evil darkness that has befallen Aether. She agrees to retrieve the “Light of Aether” and the save the planet, and the entire galaxy, from certain doom.
The threat posed is the disequilibrium of Todorov’s narrative theory. Your role is to travel across the three regions, collect the light and return it to the Luminoth temples. This repair will create a new equilibrium of peace and stability to Aether.
There is a simple binary conflict between the light and dark worlds. In terms of Propp’s character types and spheres of action, you are the hero.
Destroy the baddies in each level. Return the light to the temple. Save the universe. Simple.
Representation
original marketing material for “Metroid” did not identify the protagonist’s gender. For example, the first edition of “Club Nintendo” magazine referred to Samus Aran as a “highly trained and infamous space hunter” and avoided any gender specific pronouns:
Samus Aran is a feminist icon because she is not reduced to a passive stereotype, such as the princess who needs rescued, but is represented instead as the determined and brave hero in the narrative, keeping the galaxy safe from Space Pirates and other wicked villains.
she subverted the traditional gender roles found in many other computer games and her character could be considered a breakthrough moment for the representation of women in an industry that was dominated by men.
Young girls could now imagine themselves as their heroine going on incredible missions and battling evil forces rather than having to construct their identity according to representations of masculinity.
While Samus Aran is one of the most prominent female characters in computer games, her representation remains problematic because plenty of critics argue she is still being objectified for the male gaze.
The denouement was determined by how long it took you to complete the game. If you defeated the main boss in under an hour, Samus Aran would strip out of her exoskeleton and wave to the player in nothing more than a bikini. In fact, if you entered “justin bailey” (or a few other more obscure codes) as the password, you could play the entire game in a pink leotard and pink boots.
Judith Butler argued representations of gender that transgressed the traditional binary definitions would cause gender trouble. Since the producers knew they were subverting expectations, did they feel the need to offer this half-naked depiction of the character in a guilty attempt to emphasise her femininity?
Target Audience
If you were to scan through the videogame magazines or the marketing materials for major releases, you would assume young boys were the primary audience because they feature so much in those media texts.
The game also appealed to young girls, statista estimated 45% of video gamers in 2021 were female. This figure has been fairly steady since 2008.
TV CSP
Witnesses S1 E1
episode 1
Summary: In northern France, graves are desecrated, and dead bodies have been dug up and left in show homes. Around the bodies are family photos, one of Paul Maisonneuve, a legend of the northern France police force, who will be forced to return to duty.
French Public Service Broadcaster: France 2
Distributed in the US, Australia, and Europe
UK viewing figures: 1.01 million
Director: Hervé Hadmar
The Missing S2 E1
"Come Home"Summary: In 2003 Alice Webster is abducted in Germany, where her father is stationed on a British Army base. In 2014, just before Christmas, a barefoot and traumatised Alice re-appears in the same town, suffering from acute appendicitis. She claims that she was held captive with a French girl, Sophie Giroux, who went missing around the same time. Retired French detective Julien Baptiste, an expert on the Giroux case, investigates. He suspects that she may not be Alice.
UK viewing figures: 9.20
Director: Ben Chanan
On Rotten Tomatoes, the second series has earned a “Certified Fresh” score of 100%, with an average rating of 8.55/10 out of 15 reviews.
Language
Media form – TV
Moving Image
Genre / Type – Crime Drama
Steve Neale ‘Corpus’ ‘repertoire’ + elements
Similarities + differences
Levi – Strauss
‘Enigma’ – Bartes
Todorov / Freytag pyramid
Audiences
Exposition
End – cliff hanger
Propp
- Victim
- Princess
- Hero
Production
David Hesmondhalgh states that media is a ‘risky business, so to reduce risk The Missing and Witnesses use well-known plot devices and tropes which appeal to a wide audience.
Media Revision
Theory of Semiotics
Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, C S Pierce (1916)
study of signs and symbols
Semiotics in the media doesn’t necessarily require an obvious sign. For example, it could be a camera angle, colour, background or print type. It is anything that can initiate a call to action.
They carefully select what they put in their messages — objects, images, words, sounds, even color — while taking into account the signifying value of each.