Lyrics analysis and timing of lyrics.

Genre Theory - Thursday 16th October lesson write up

Steve Neale

Western

• Cowboy hat
• Horse
• High key lighting (sun)
• Desert
• Revolver
• shoot out

Comedy & Animation aren't genres they're styles.

Jason Mittell - 2001

Argues that genres are cultural categories that surpass the boundaries of media texts and operate within industry, audience and cultural practices as well.

Industries use genre to sell products to audiences media producers use familiar codes & conventions that very often make cultural references to their audience knowledge of society and other texts.

Genre also allows audiences to make choices about what products they want to consume through acceptance in order to fulfill a particular pleasure.

Pleasure of genre for an audience.

Rick Altman - 1999

Argues that there genre offers audiences a 'set of pleasures'

• Emotional - the emotional pleasures offered to audiences of genre films are particularly significant when they generate a strong audience response.
• Visceral - Refers to internal organs and are 'gut' responses and are defined by how the films stylistic construction has a physical effect upon its audience. this can be a feeling of revulsion, kinetic speed or a 'roller coaster ride'.

Thursday 9th/ 13th October lesson write up

Andrew Goodwin - 1992

Argues that in music videos 'Narrative relations are highly complex' and meaning can be created from the individual audio viewer's personal music taste to sophisticated intertextuality that uses multidiscursive phenomena of western culture.

Many are dominated by advertising references, film pastiche and reinforce the post-modern 're-use' tradition.

Sven Carlson - 1999

Have a performance, Narrative, Abstract

In one type of performance the performer is no longer a performer anymore he or she is a materialisation of the commercial exhibitionist.

Theoretical Evaluation of Production

David Chandler - 2001

Argues that the word genre comes from the French word for 'kin' or 'class'. The term is widely used in rhetoric, media theory to refer to a distinctive type of 'text'.

Barry Keith Grant - 1995

all genres have a sub-genre

Allows audiences to identify them specifically by their familiar and what became recognisable characteristics.

Steve Neale - 1995

Stresses that 'genres aren't systems' they are processes of systematisation - i.e. they're dynamic and evolve over time.

Artist Logo's

Tuesday 7th October lesson write up - Audience Theory

Blumler & Katz

- Uses and gratification theory

- We are an active audience we control the media

- We are an active audience

- All watch the same things but interpret in different ways

The Theory;

• the uses and gratification model represented a change in thinking as researchers began to describe the effects of the media from the point of view of audiences.
• the model looks at the motived of the people who use the media, asking why we watch the TV programmes that we do, why we bother to read newspapers', why we find ourselves so compelled to keep up to date with our favourite soap, or consume films.
• The theory makes the audience active as they choose what they want to consume, they aren't forced into consumption for e.g. you only watch they films you watch as you're in control of your choice, the media simply supply it.

The Surveillance

- The surveillance's need is based around the idea that they know what;s going on.

Personal Identity

- Personal identity need explains how being a subject of the media allows us to confirm the identity and positioning of ourselves within society.

Personal relations; two parts;

1. Relationships with the media
2. Media within relationships

Diversion

- The diversion need describes what's commonly termed as escapism,watching the TV so we can forget about our own lives and problems for a while and think about something else.

Monday 6th October lesson write up

Bartess - 1977
Suggests that narrative works with five different codes and the enigma code works to keep up setting problems or puzzles for the audience - His action code is based on our cultural and stereotypical understanding of actions that act as a shorthand to advancing the narrative.

Adrian Tilley - 1991
Used the buckling of the gun belt in the western genre as a means of signifying the preferred reading of an imminent school out, and this works in the same way as the starting of a car engine etc.

Claude Levi-Strauss - 1958
Ideas about narrative amount to the fact that he believed all stories operated to certain clear binary opposites e.g. Good V Bad, Black V White or Rich V Poor etc.
The importance of these ideas is that essentially a complicated world is reduced to a simple either or structure. Things are either right or wrong, good or bad. There is no in-between.

Michael Shore - 1984
Argues that music videos are;
Recycled styles, surface without substance, simulated experience, information overload, image and style scavengers, ambivalence, decadence, immediate gratification, vanity and the money, image assaults, adolescent ,male fantasies, the death of content, speed, power, wealth, classical story telling, motifs.

Weezer - Buddy Holly - 1994
- Happy Days - 1970's sitcom
- Set in the 1950's
- 1950's prep uni costume (Band)
- Mixing characters from 1970's show with the modern 1990's show.

"I'm Buddy Holly and you're Mary Tyler Moore"

- Get our vision of a 1950's sitcom in the1990's.
- using a format of sitcom e.g. to be continued.
- Recreated the style of footage e.g. badly chosen stunt men.

Oasis - The Importance Of Being Idle
- Beginning of a 1960's film

"Saturday night, Sunday morning"

- Beginning is a working class factory.
- Social realism shows binary opposites.
- bike & Motorbike.

Wednesday 1st October lesson write up.

Bordwell & Thompson - 1997
They offer two distinctions between story and plot which relate to the diegetic world of the narrative that the audience are positioned to accept and that which the audience actually see. They based this on Russian film theory.

Pam Cook
The standard Hollywood narrative structure should have;

• Liteanity of cause and effort within an overall traiedory of enigma resolution.
• A high degree of narrative closure.
• A fictional world that contains verisimilitude especially governed by spatial and temporal coherence.

Tzveton Torodov - 1977

Stage 1 - A point of stable equilibrium, where everything is satisfied, calm and normal.

Stage 2 - This stability is disrupted by some kind of force, which creates a state of disequilibrium.

Stage 3 - Recognition of a disruption

Stage 4 - It is only possible to re-create equilibrium through action directed against the disruption.