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Exam Questions Prezi

Exam Questions on Prezi

This is the prezi that I featured in the video below, which covers questions 1a and b from the exam

Analysis of Justice Video

Justice’s music video for ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ begins with black-and-white footage of a man sat on a desk, head just out of shot, adjusting an old-fashioned radio. Although this is live action, there are elements of animation played over it, such as the wavelengths coming from the radio; however then the narrative takes a different turn and the entire video becomes animated. The virtual camera tracks forward through different animations, including beneath the open legs of animated women wearing short skirts and small underwear, which conforms to the idea of voyeurism and the act of looking – as outlined in Goodwin’s theory on music videos. From a feminist perspective, it could be said that this encourages the objectification of women by inviting the viewer to take pleasure in watching the female body parts. The last image in this animated sequence before the video cuts back to live action is a sign reading, “as seen on TV”, arguably making the video postmodern as it is a pop culture reference. The remaining narrative is relentlessly linear, as two (again headless) men – one of them being the man with the radio from the beginning – walk down various corridors and through doors, the only real change being in the colourful animation on their t-shirts, where many more pop cultural references are made. This endless sequence, which rejects the structure of traditional narratives, reflects the repetitive nature of the dance music. The video then ends by tracking backwards through the original animated sequence, with the female legs, and finishes on the opening radio, resulting in a circular narrative where the two headless protagonists never reached a destination.

Key Media Concept: Narrative

Narrative on Prezi

Definitions

Some definitions (from http://www.mediaknowall.com/) ...

A text is classified in a genre through the identification of key elements which occur in that text and in others of the same genre. These elements may be referred to as paradigms, and range from costume to music to plot points to font (depending on the medium). Audiences recognise these paradigms, and bring a set of expectations to their reading of the text accordingly: the criminal will be brought to justice at the end of the police thriller. These paradigms may be grouped into those relating to iconography (ie the main signs and symbols that you see/hear), structure (the way a text is put together and the shape it takes) and theme (the issues and ideas it deals with).

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.

By definition, all media texts are re-presentations of reality. This means that they are intentionally composed, lit, written, framed, cropped, captioned, branded, targeted and censored by their producers, and that they are entirely artificial versions of the reality we perceive around us. When studying the media it is vital to remember this - every media form, from a home video to a glossy magazine, is a representation of someone's concept of existence, codified into a series of signs and symbols which can be read by an audience. However, it is important to note that without the media, our perception of reality would be very limited, and that we, as an audience, need these artificial texts to mediate our view of the world, in other words we need the media to make sense of reality. Therefore representation is a fluid, two-way process: producers position a text somewhere in relation to reality and audiences assess a text on its relationship to reality.

Audience is a very important concept throughout media studies. All media texts are made with an audience in mind, ie a group of people who will receive it and make some sort of sense out of it. And generally, but not always, the producers make some money out of that audience. Therefore it is important to understand what happens when an audience "meets" a media text.

I know they're fairly long, especially the representation one, but they're the best-explained definitions I found.