Binary Opposites.

For my homework I watched a clip from the Disney film 'Sleeping Beauty'.  From this I found some Binary opposites:

·         Female-Male

·         Wealth-Poor

·         Good-Evil

·         Life-Death

·         Magic-Real

·         Prince-Princess

·         Young-Old

·         Pretty-Ugly

These binary opposites stand for ideologies on goodness, beauty and class. This has taught me that because of society certain words like ‘Good’ depend on their opposite ‘Evil’ to help us understand the true meaning. The meaning of a word is dependent on its meaning.

For example:

Good/Evil is shown when the evil witch Maleficent makes Princess Aurora touch the spindle of a spinning wheel.

From this I learnt that Binary Opposites help understand the meanings of words. For example we know hot is hot because of cold.

Semiotics

 In media we have been learning about semiotics.
Semiotics helps understand the genre of something and also the study of signs and their uses.

Signifier: any material thing that signifies for example words on a page, facial expression, an image.

Signified: The Concept that a signifier refers to.
Semiotics came from a French Theorist called Ferinand de Saussure.  He believed that all the ways that humans communicate can be interpreted as languages. For example the word dog means nothing to someone however as soon as the dog starts barking you automatically think danger. The barking is a symbol.  

We also learnt about 3 types of signs. Iconic, Indexical and Symbolic.

Iconic : signs where the signifier resembles the signified. For example a picture or photograph.

Indexical sign: signs where the signifier is caused by the signified. For example ‘Smoke’ signifies ‘Fire’.

Symbolic signs: are arbitrary sign, where the relation between signifier and signified is purely conventional and culturally specific.

We also learnt the definitions of:

Denotation: the most basic and literal meaning of signs, E.g. the word ‘rose’ signifies a particular kind of flower.

Connotation: the secondary, cultural meanings of signs or ‘signifying signs’ that are used as signifiers for a secondary meaning. For example the word ‘rose’ signifies passion.

Main Task

 For our main task we have to make the titles and opening of a new fiction film. It must last a maximum of two minutes. All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), however we can use music or audio effects from a copyright-free source

Genre's

Today in Media we learnt about Sub Genre's, Hybrid Genre's and the Genre Cycle.

'Sub Genre' is when there are other genres within a genre. For example 'Science-Fiction' can be broken down into: Action, Time Travel, Alien ect.

'Hybrid Genre' is basically all genres together; most films are 'Hybrid Genre'. For example 'The Hunger Games' is 'Action' as well as 'Love'.

The Genre Cycle is when the genre uses new twists to make the genre itself more entertaining/less predictable for the target audience so they keep them going to the cinema. For example superhero films are popular at the moment such as 'Spiderman' so they are being re-made to make them more entertaining for the target audience. To keep the audience comfortable, writers will keep the story line similar to the original however they will use new twist to keep the audience entertained.

I have learnt that genre slowly loses its purpose because of how openly used it is. Also if the film was just one genre nothing else it would be very boring and dull for the target audience.