Tag Archives: lectorial

Week 7 Lectorial: Teamwork?

                        Where would we be without memes?

Yep. Teamwork. Capable of striking fear deep into the hearts of the world’s university students. The su.bject matter of countless dank memes posted to student run Facebook pages – and yet – an essential skill for everyone to possess, especially those intending to have a career in the media industry.

I’m not going to focus on the negatives of teamwork, as I’m sure we’re all familiar with those. In no particular order, it is good for sharing ideas, gaining inspiration, getting support, working quickly and efficiently, enable us to tackle bigger projects by sharing the workload, and more.

The characteristics of positive collaboration include:

  1. Clear objectives
  2. Good communication
  3. Consistency
  4. Respect
  5. Support
  6. Responsibility
  7. Equitable

I must admit I was initially hesitant about tackling a group project, as I, like many, have had some bad experiences in the past. However, I do recognise that teamwork is an important part of life, not only in the workforce, but in almost every element of our lives. I’ve already, from high school and part time work, that there are always going to be people who you don’t get along with, no matter what you do, but despite this you must find a way to collaborate and work efficiently together despite your differences. This is no different to collaborative work within the media.

After today’s Lectorial, I’m determined to keep a positive outlook towards teamwork going into Project Brief 4, and the rest of my career.

Week 6 – Lectorial

Part of today’s Lectorial was about story and narrative. Story is important in constructing media texts, as it can frame our experience of the world. It is essential to how we communicate as human beings, helping us to make sense of our lives and the world around us. This point reminded me of an experiment by Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel called ‘An experimental study of Apparent Behaviour,’ conducted in 1944.  Subjects were asked to view a short video which featured a bunch of geometrical shapes moving around at varying speeds, and were then asked to interpret what had happened. Most of the subjects assigned personalities to the shapes, creating a narrative out of simple moving geometric forms. I think this relates to Brian’s point that human beings have a convulsion to make narrative sense of our lives, and how our brains are hard wired towards narrative and story.

Story telling conventions can help us to structure our own stories. Generally, all stories have a protagonist, who drives the action in the narrative, and is central to the narrative’s turning points, as well as an antagonist, who causes change and in trouble for the protagonist. Other conventions, such as the three act structure, are almost ubiquitous, particularly in Hollywood cinema. However, narrative conventions are not limited only to the cinematic medium.

Joseph Campbell’s theory on the monomyth of the ‘Hero with a Thousand faces’ (1949) is also interesting. The TED Talk by Matthew Winkler embedded above is a helpful illustration of this idea. Campbell proposes that most protagonists, or heroes, in narratives throughout history follow the same pattern of events. This mono myth exists in all human cultures, and relates back to the first point that story is essential to us as human beings, as a way of reflecting on our own lives through symbolic stories.

The Art of the Interview – Masterchef Style

In the spirit of Louise’s lecture on ‘the art of the interview,’ I decided to focus this post on the function of this ‘art’ in one of my favourite guilty pleasures – you guessed it, Masterchef.

The interviews in this show, as with most reality TV shows, are interesting because they are recorded after the action has occurred. It’s always a bit strange to see a contestant talking how much they want to win a challenge, when you already know that they already know if they won or not. It’s a prime example of interviewers asking the right questions to get the response that they want. Moreover, they have already been assured to be ‘good talent’ because the casting directors for the show have made sure that the contestants work well in front of the camera, and the other contestants.

Masterchef is the only reality TV show I can watch because of the high production quality, which also extends to the settings of the interviews. They are recorded in a controlled studio environment, where the lighting and sound is manipulated carefully, and the backdrop relates to the show (usually cooking utensils or something else relevant).

Of course, this type of interview is different from, say, interviews for a documentary, but it is still an interesting example to look at.

Week 5 Lectorial + Readings

Textual analysis was the key topic from today’s Lectorial. In order to analyse texts, as the topic suggests, we first have to realise what a text is. Texts are vehicles for the production of cultural meaning, or the evidence of the way other people make sense of the world. As Alan McKee proposes, ‘to understand the world we live in, we have to understand how people are making sense of the world,’ and it is through textual analysis that we can attempt to do so.

Therefore, textual analysis is an attempt to guess the most likely interpretations that may be made of a text by its audience. There is no ‘correct’ interpretation, just as no text is an accurate or ‘real’ representation of reality. We can use certain methodology, such as semiotics, however, to attempt to make ascertain the most likely interpretation of a text. Semiotics is the study of signs in texts, which can be visual, linguistic, aural and more. There are two parts to a sign: the signifier, and the signified. For example, the colour green is a signifier, which can signify jealousy, or nausea, or nature.

Importantly, the context in which these signifiers are place alter its meaning. Context is always needed to accurately interpret a sign. As McKee demonstrated with his example of the colour ‘brown’ not existing in Welsh, signs can mean different things to different people or groups of people. The majority of a certain society may interpret green to be related to jealousy, a different culture may more strongly associate it with something else. Similarly, placed within a different context, like a garden, it can be seen as natural and relaxing.

According to McKee there are three levels of context that can affect textual analysis:

  1. The rest of the text
  2. The genre of the text
  3. The wider public context in which a film is circulated.

These must be kept in mind when analysing a text, as they are important in interpreting the signs accurately within their context.

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Media Is EVERYWHERE

MEDIA IS EVERYWHERE

The question that was integral to today’s Lectorial was: what is media? Media has many different forms and roles within society. It can guide public opinion in the form of news stories, tell us stories about ourselves, help us communicate with each other. Perhaps most importantly, media saturates our every day lives.

We are constantly bombarded by messages from the media. To helpfully illustrate this point, we completed an audit of the media that was present in a short trip from Building 80 to the State Library to our chosen rendezvous point. Firstly, it became immediately evident how much media there was in our environment, to the point where it became an immense challenge to try and list all of it. Without further ado, here is our best attempt:

 

UP HIGH

Ads on buildings x 5

Large video ad on building

Banners advertising events x 4

ON THE GROUND

Large advertisement placed on a busy walkway

MID GROUND

Flyers and brochures handed out

People holding branded coffee cups

Signs advertising businesses

Advertisements on napkin holders

Brochures placed in an easily visible and accessible place

BACKGROUND

Advertising on trams

Posters

Branding for businesses/cafes/etc

IN YOUR HAND

Taking photos on phones + using social media more times than can be counted. Somewhat sadly, and yet hilariously, our quick break involved mainly taking photos on Snapchat.

 

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ADS EVERYWHERE

Distractions abound

Distractions abound

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ads on the ground...

Ads on the ground…

 

Seriously, who would walk on this beautiful face?

Seriously, who would walk on this beautiful face?

 

But I digress.

Our experience of the world is shaped by the media and the messages the media is sending out to us in our day to day lives. It is almost impossible to avoid coming into contact with the media, save moving to an uninhabited island, which – I must admit – does sound rather tempting after today. This would suggest that the media is rather powerful, having the ability to shape our experience of the world constantly. Media is all around us, all the time; it is an intrinsic part of our environment.