Hello and welcome to my blog, where you will find a record of the background research and planning of my slasher film opening, High Royds. Here you will also find my colleagues work as well as i worked with several others over the past six months. The film which inspired our film opening is Madhouse (2004, William Butler).

Wednesday 28 November 2012

Leprechaun

(Mark Jones, 1993)

Budget
$900,000 (estimated)
Opening Weekend
$2,493,020 (USA) (10 January 1993) (620 Screens)
Gross
$8,556,940 (USA)
Filming Dates
28 October 1991 - 3 December 1991

An evil, sadistic Leprechaun goes on a killing rampage in search of his beloved pot of gold. Here is the trailer.

In this Franchise we had to talk about the opening scene to film. We will cover many points in the video. There was 7 films made in the franchise and here is a grid showing all of them in detail.

Film

1. Leprechaun

2. Leprechaun 2

3. Leprechaun 3

4. Leprechaun 4: In Space

5. Leprechaun: In the Hood

6. Leprechaun: Back 2 the Hood

7. Leprechaun: Origins


Overview

In the original Leprechaun (1993), Daniel O'Grady (Shay Duffin) captures the Leprechaun (Warwick Davis) while in Ireland, takes his gold and smuggles it back to his home in North Dakota, unaware the Leprechaun has followed him. Confronting O'Grady and demanding his gold the Leprechaun is injured by O'Grady and sealed in a crate with a four-leaf clover, though before O'Grady can kill the creature he suffers a stroke. Ten years later the Leprechaun is accidentally released by Tory Redding (a then-unknown Jennifer Aniston) and her new friends, and goes on a killing spree in search of his gold, which Alex Murphy (Robert Gorman) and Ozzie (Mark Holton) had discovered. After the Leprechaun reclaims the bulk of his gold he is defeated when Alex shoots a four-leaf clover down his throat with a slingshot and Alex's older brother Nathan (Ken Olandt) blows up the well the Leprechaun falls into.
In Leprechaun 2 (1994) the Leprechaun seeks out a new bride in modern day Los Angeles, one thousand years after an earlier attempt to claim a bride was foiled. Claiming a fussy teenage girl named Bridget (Shevonne Durkin), the descendent of his original choice of a wife, the Leprechaun holds her captive in his lair and terrorizes her boyfriend Cody (Charlie Heath), who had taken one of his gold coins. In the end Cody saves Bridget and defeats the Leprechaun by impaling him with a spike made of wrought iron, one of the few substances that can harm a Leprechaun.
Leprechaun 3 (1995) begins with the Leprechaun, having been changed into a statue by a magical medallion, being sold to a Las Vegas pawn shop. Assuming his original form when the clerk removes the medallion, the Leprechaun kills him and goes on a rampage through Las Vegas in search of one of his wish granting coins, which is passed from hand to hand. The Leprechaun is ultimately defeated by college student Scott McCoy (John Gatins) and Scott's new girlfriend Tammy Larsen (Lee Armstrong), who blast his gold with a flamethrower, causing it to vanish and the Leprechaun to burst into flames.
Taking place in the future, Leprechaun 4: In Space (1997) has the Leprechaun abduct and begin courting snobbish alien princess Zarina (Rebekah Carlton), seducing her with promises of wealth. After being blown up by a group of marines who rescue Zarina, the Leprechaun is reborn on the marines' ship via exploding out of the groin of one of an unfortunate man, Kowalski. He then goes off in search of his stolen bride and gold, killing all those who get in his way. After being turned into a giant via an enlargement ray, the Leprechaun is ejected into space by the survivors of the massacre, Tina Reeves (Jessica Collins), Books Malloy (Brent Jasmer) and Sticks (Miguel A. Núñez, Jr.
Set in Compton, CaliforniaLeprechaun: In the Hood (2000) has the Leprechaun being turned to stone once more, this time by pimp Mack Daddy O'Nassas (Ice-T), who uses the Leprechaun's mind-controlling magic flute to become a successful music producer. Years later, the Leprechaun is unknowingly changed back to flesh and blood by a trio of wannabe rappers led by Postmaster P. (Anthony Montgomery) who rob Mack Daddy, taking the Leprechaun's gold and the flute from him with the intent of using the objects to become successful. Hunted by both Mack Daddy and the Leprechaun, Postmaster P., after his friends and Mack Daddy are killed, is brainwashed into becoming a servant of the Leprechaun.
Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood (2003) begins with the Leprechaun stalking Father Jacob (Willie C. Carpenter) trying to get his gold back, only to be dragged into the ground by demonic hands when the priest uses four-leaf clover laced holy water against him before dying from a heart attack. One year later the Leprechaun's gold is discovered by eighteen-year-old Emily Woodrow (Tangi Miller) and her friends, who use the gold to fulfill their wildest fantasies, unintentionally releasing the Leprechaun, who goes after Emily and the others to get his gold back, killing everyone who gets in his way. On the rooftop of the abandoned community centre Father Jacob had been building using the Leprechaun's gold Emily and her boyfriend Rory Jackson (Laz Alonso) defeat the Leprechaun by knocking him and his gold off the roof and into a pool of wet cement below, where the Leprechaun sinks and becomes trapped.

Leprechaun: Origins is coming late 2013, all we know is that the producers are WWE and Lionsgate

There is no final girl in leprechaun (1993).


Monday 26 November 2012

Final Girl

Laurie Strode
Laurie Strode (Halloween 1,2,3)

She represents the final girl archetype in the film Halloween.  She is very intelligent which is a signifier that she is the final girl. she forgot her biology book at home and got worried about it. her friends laughed the 'scream queens'. she wears not very glamorous clothes long cardigan and white thick tights. usually the final girl is brunette. the scream queen is usually blonde and busty. Usually the final girl is a virgin, however the scream queen usually have and can get a girlfriend unlike the final girl. the final girl is usually responsible unlike the typical scream queen. the binary opposition is smoking and non  smoking between the c=scream queens and the final girl. Her chemistry book is a real big deal for her leaving it.



Sydney Prescott



Sydney Prescott (Scream 1996)


She is signified as the final girl by denoting her night dress is long, old fashioned and quite childish. We can also denote when we first see her she is doing her homework. Her room is very neat and tidy showing she is a responsible moral character being signified  She has the conventional brunette dark brown hair.

There is a false scare at the begging of her boyfriend  he comes in a talks about their lack of sex, insinuating shes a virgin. "I wouldn't dream of breaking your underwear rule".









Men, Women and Chainsaws: The Final Girl 

The final girl is a thriller and horror film (particularly slasher) trope that specifically refers to the last woman or girl alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story. The term was coined by Carol J. Clover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover suggests that in these films, the viewer begins by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experiences a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film. The final girl has been observed in dozens of films, including Halloween, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Hellraiser, Alien and Scream.

Examples of final girls

Before the release of Alien 3, Clover identified Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise as a final girl. Elizabeth Ezra continues this analysis for Alien Resurrection, arguing that by definition both Ripley and Annalee Call must be final girls, and that Call is the "next generation of Clover's Final Girl". Call, in Ezra's view, exhibits traits that fit Clover's definition of a final girl, namely that she is boyish, having a short masculine-style haircut, and that she is characterized by (in Clover's words) "smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance" being a ship's mechanic who rejects the sexual advances made by male characters on the ship. Ezra notes, however, that this identification of Call as a final girl is marred by the fact that she is not a human being, but an android.

Christine Cornea disputes the idea that Ripley is a final girl, contrasting Clover's analysis of the character with that of Barbara Creed, who presents Ripley as "the reassuring face of womanhood". Cornea does not accept either Clover's or Creed's views on Ripley. Whilst she accepts Clover's general thesis of the final girl convention, she argues that Ripley does not follow the conventions of the slasher film, as Alien follows the different conventions of the science fiction film genre. In particular, there is not the foregrounding in Alien, as there is in the slasher film genre, of the character's sexual purity and abstinence relative to the other characters (who would be, in accordance with the final girl convention, killed by the film's monster "because" of this). The science fiction genre that Alien inhabits, according to Cornea, simply lacks this kind of sexual theme in the first place, it not having a place in such "traditional" science fiction formats. 

Laurie Strode (from Halloween I, II, and H20) is another example of a final girl. Tony Williams notes that Clover's image of supposedly progressive final girls are never entirely victorious at the culmination of a film nor do they manage to eschew the male order of things as Clover argues. He holds up Strode as an example of this. She is rescued by a male character, Dr. Samuel Loomis, at the end of Halloween. He holds up Lila Crane, from Psycho, as another example of a final girl who is saved by a male (also named Sam Loomis) at the end of the film. On this basis he argues that whilst 1980s horror film heroines were more progressive than those of earlier decades, the gender change is done conservatively, and the final girl convention cannot be regarded as a progressive one "without more thorough investigation".

Williams also gives several examples of final girls from the Friday the 13th franchise: Alice from Friday the 13th, and the heroines from Part II and Part III. (He observes that Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter does not have a final girl.) He notes that they do not conclude the films wholly victorious, however. The heroines from Parts 2 and 3 are catatonic at the ends of the respective films, and Alice survives the monster in the first film only to fall victim to "him" in the second. The final girl in Part 2 is carried away on a stretcher, calling out for her boyfriend (which Williams argues again undermines the notion of final girls always being victorious). Moreover, Ginny's adoption of the monster's own strategy, in Part II, brings into question whether the final girl image is in fact a wholly positive one. 

Kearney observes that in the middle 1990s the trope of the final girl in horror films was "resurrected, reshaped, and mainstreamed". She points to Sidney Prescott (in Scream I, II, and III) and Julie James (in I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer) as examples of this.

Other characters identified as final girls include Sally Hardesty of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Nancy Thompson of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.

History

According to Clover, the final girl is typically sexually unavailable or virginal, avoiding the vices of the victims (sex, narcotic usage, etc.). She sometimes has a unisex name (e.g., Teddy, Billie, Georgie, Sidney). Occasionally the Final Girl will have a shared history with the killer. The final girl is the "investigating consciousness" of the film, moving the narrative forward and as such, she exhibits intelligence, curiosity, and vigilance.

One of the basic premises of Clover’s theory is that audience identification is unstable and fluid across gender lines, particularly in the case of the slasher film. During the final girl’s confrontation with the killer, Clover argues, she becomes masculinised through "phallic appropriation" by taking up a weapon, such as a knife or chainsaw, against the killer. Conversely, Clover points out that the villain of slasher films is often a male whose masculinity, and sexuality more generally, are in crisis. Examples would include Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Clover points to this gender fluidity as demonstrating the impact of feminism in popular culture.

The phenomenon of the male audience having to identify with a young female character in an ostensibly male-oriented genre, usually associated with sadistic voyeurism, raises interesting questions about the nature of slasher films and their relationship with feminism. Clover argues that for a film to be successful, although the Final Girl is masculinised, it is necessary for this surviving character to be female, because she must experience abject terror, and many viewers would reject a film that showed abject terror on the part of a male. The terror has a purpose, in that the female is 'purged' if she survives, of undesirable characteristics, such as relentless pursuit of pleasure in her own right. An interesting feature of the genre is the 'punishment' of beauty and sexual availability (Leading to the idea that "Sex = Death" in Horror Movies)

How Laurie Strode defines the final girl archetype


she is very intelligent which is a signifier that she is the final girl. she forgot her biology book at home and got worried about it. her friends laughed the 'scream queens'. she wears not very glamorous clothes long cardigan and white thick tights. usually the final girl is brunette. the scream queen is usually blonde and busty. Usually the final girl is a virgin, however the scream queen usually have and can get a girlfriend unlike the final girl. the final girl is usually responsible unlike the typical scream queen. the binary opposition is smoking and non  smoking between the c=scream queens and the final girl. Her chemistry book is a real big deal for her leaving it.



Idents - My Idea

We are making idents for our videos and films. This is to go at the start of them to show the audience what production company has made the film. Station identification (idents or channel ID) is the practice of radio or television stations or networks identifying themselves on air, typically by means of a call sign or brand name (sometimes known, particularly in the United States, as a "sounder" or "stinger", more generally as a station or network ID). 

This may be to satisfy requirements of licensing authorities, a form of branding or a combination of both. As such it is closely related to production logos used in television and cinema, alike.


Station identification used to be done regularly by an announcer at the halfway point during the presentation of a television program, or in between programs. 


Here is some famous Idents which you will be very familiar of.




Some Idents may be altered to suit the movie, for example here this was from the movie Pink Panther (Shawn Levy 2006).




What Idents should include:



  • Company Titles
  • Audio/sound
  • Animation
  • Company Logo








 For my idents I came up with the company "Twitch Productions". For this i will have the word TWITCH fade in, it will be white with a black background.







The word twitch with then animate with things growing on it.














Finally the word Productions with fade in underneath, then suddenly the whole screen will "twitch" away.









For an example of what twitching is, here is a clip showing an Ident with the twitch effect. However i would make my titles Twitch more.




Here is my final Idents which i used After Effects and Livetype to make them. 

Tuesday 20 November 2012

Slasher Opening Sequence

Nearly all Slasher films have a vary of the following.
  • Non diegetic music.
  • Fade to black
  • Dutch angle
  • Credits
  • Idents
  • Narrative Enigma
  • False Scare
  • Intertextuality
  • Post Modernism
  • Exposition
  • Anchorage
  • Polysemy (withold info)
  • Audio bridge
  • Chase scene
  • Slice n Dice
  • Stalk n slash
  • Scream Queen
  • Genre Signifiers (Easily recognisable)
  • Binary Opposites (Blonde Busty Fit girl dies first... Brunette Ugly Geek dies last.)
  • Serif font in the titles (Usually Red)
  • Fast pace editing.
  • Short takes (Violence usually)
  • Establishing shot.

Box Office

Budget:$806,947 (estimated)

Gross:$50,000,000 (Worldwide)

In the film is was shot in black and white because of the blood censorship, they could get away with having it as X rating. At the time this was one of the highest ratings for a film however is equvalent to a 12A/PG now.

Also this film brought a great argument to film as it was the first film to ever show a flushing toilet because usually it is seen as disgusting in 1960.

Saul Bass was the creator of the famous title sequence in the 50's and 60's in Alfred HItchcock's film Phycho. The titles where created very cleaverly and have an animation of being "slashed" through by a knife which works well with the film. You can also see in on the film poster how the title has been slashed. Throughout the title sequence the main cast was in large font and the less known was smaller. Janet Leigh as Marion Crane was the highlighted cast as she was the most famous actor in the film at the time in 1960. Alfred Hitchcock was mentioned twice in the titles to identify the director with the film Auteur.

Opening Scene

In the opening shot it almost lasts 2 minutes long to establish the setting. It includes the following.

  • Extreme Long Shot as the Establishing shot.
  • Signifies the city setting.
  • Panning/birds eye shot.
  • Cross dissolve transition.
  • Titles on screen provide exposition.
  • Four panning shots
  • Extreme long shot.
  • Cuts off.
  • Hand of fate.

Monday 19 November 2012

Microdrama: Finished Film + Reflection

Here is the final microdrama "Lads on Tour" which is a horror/slasher film. After finalaly editing all of the 300+ clips in Final Cut Express, and adding sound effects and music we got this.

Microdrama: Editing

Final Cut Pro

We edited the film so that the slasher/killer character was portrayed via narrative enigma where by we didn't show himself to the camera until the end of the film.

When editing the Microdrama we used Final Cut Pro which helped us greatly in touching up and linking the shots together to create one whole film rather than short snippets of film which would have made no sense at all to the viewing audience.

We added extra sound effects to add more tention and exageration to the killing scenes or "fake scare". This made the microdrama look better and was more scary. We also added extra background music to give it a more film feel and made it scarier.

For the editing we split our filming group in two and both had turns at editing the film this was so that we could so which was a better edit and so that we could cover all angles of which the film could be interpreted, we added transitions and effects which enhanced the scariness and tension in the film.

Things i would change if we were to do it again would be more blood and gore when the actual killing takes place and more screaming for help when the 'lads' are trapped by the killer. Also i would probably add more lighting effect to the night time scenes.

Microdrama: The Shoot




This is the only shot we took
outside due to the weather.

We shot the Microdrama at Ben Brearleys house because we thought that it had the best effects with the natural lighting and the specific rooms. We all gathered to shoot the microdrama on what was a wet and rainy day so we coudln't film hardly any shots outside due to ruining the camera.





Here the lighting was very poor and
not what we hoped it to be.
Some of the lighting in the house wasnt as light as we had hoped it had been so we had to improvise and use a phone torch to make it lighter and to capture those vital expressions. But the worst problem we had was the interuptions by various members of the group making noises and putting of the acting crew so we had to shoot longer than we should have in the end.




This was long shot we took of which could
have been shot wi
Things i would have done differantly to improve the prefered reading of the text would be to add in more rapid shots to create a scence of tension and bulid up to a big scare. Also i would have used not as many long takes, because they get boring to watch and are less scary. I should have filmed mroe close ups using match-on action shots to create more tention.


Shooting this microdrama helped us use vital and key shots and angles by doing this we gained more expeience of what we need to do for the coarse and what actual filming and shootign of shots looks and feels like.


We came across many problems during the shooting of the microdrama such as the rain and the wind, however with the help of my shotgun microphone and dead cat we could get enough of the dialogue as we possibly could. The Traffic in the opening scene also became a problem due to the inconsistant amount of filming time we had between red and green lights at the traffic lights.











Film Festival Masterclass

On Friday 9th we went on a media trip to the ASFF short film festival in York. We went to two master classes, a talk from Danny Cohen the successful cinematographer, and a talk from the head of production at Warp films Barry Ryan.


Warp Films


Barry Ryan talked about the latest in film productions and a lot about Warp films and its achievements as this year it is celebrating its 10th year. He talked a lot about how to get ahead in the business and all about budgets and how much you truly make off box office intakes once all your financers and people who put money into the project have been paid.He went into a lot of detail about how warp films have advertised and presented cover art for their films and how you need to get the attention of your target audience by showing them what they want.


Danny Cohen
This master class was set up like a relaxed conversation between Danny Cohen and Mariayah Kaderbhai where she'd ask him interview styled questions. He started by talking about how he got into the industry and how initially he did a social science degree and then became a photographic technician which gradually led into him being the cinematographer he is today. Throughout the master class Danny was asked on how he made numerous scenes and these scene would be shown to us and then he'd explain how he put them together, for example one of these was a scene from This is England (Shane Meadows, 2006) and he explained how it was difficult to find an area where everything was like how it should be set out in 1983 so he had to make make changes to the area, like changing the satellites on the houses, and the cars all had to be from the 1980's time period and he told us how some cars were used more than once in the scene as they were on a low budget and couldn't afford any more, he also gave useful tips to the camera angles he used during this film and why he used them.

He went into a lot of detail about how warp films have advertised and presented cover art for their films and how you need to get the attention of your target audience by showing them what they want.





Sunday 18 November 2012

Microdrama: Planning

Our Plan

The theme of our micro-drama will be horror, involving 6 characters - 5 innocent people going on tour and a murderer. Because there are 5 people in our group, we will assign the camera job to the killer until the first person dies. From then on he will record the whole film.


The film will be set in a house, we are choosing Ben Brearleys . The opening scene will be all of us walking to the house with suitcases, so the viewing interprets we are on "tour".

 We will then all disperse into the house exploring it. We will have a false scare at the beginning to get the audience ready and aware, this is a good effect to keep the audience occupied. Then we all start drinking and throughout the night certain mishaps and events keep occurring  Each person dies one by one. However there is one survivor who gets away. The killer isn't reveled until the end. We plan to finish the film with the survivor running away from the killer. 

It will be ideal for us to film in the afternoon when its light till the evening when it is dark so it looks like we have spent a day there. This will create more of a sense of terror and mystery, and also because major horror films tend to be set at night.

We have made a story board including the different shot types and angles, which will benefit us when shooting the footage as we will have pre-made decisions, which will speed up the filming process.

FINAL CUT PRO X: 1ST IMPRESSIONS

Final Cut Pro X


The bottom is the video/audio timeline.




The First Impressions of final cut pro x was it was very easy to get used to. 






On the left is where you choose your media footage




It has a similar layout to video editing software i have used before. 






On the right side is the preview window





After around 5 minutes everything was very straight forward and simple. 



Vodcast Conventions


The task was to create a short film which consisted of 3 camera shots which were, match on action, the 180 degree rule and the shot reverse shot. The video itself was shot in school. In this vodcast we highlight the conventions of Idents, Mis-en-Scene, Audio and Editing throughout the 8 films.

Here is our video.



The 8 films we talked about were:

28 Days Later

Reqium For A Dream

Kes

Harry Brown

Past Coursework Assessment

Idents:

L.C.E Productions

Here is the Ident

This film opening features a person late for work which as an audience we get the impression that this is a frequent thing in his everyday life hence 'Just Another Day'



This is the clock




Opening shot: A CU is used here of his alarm clock to signify to the audience that something to do with time might be of importance in this opening. We then realise in the next establishing shot that, time is what the opening is all about.




Here is the closing shot

Closing shot:
The closing shot is a still frame which is use to introduce the film title which would then lead on to the movie there is no transition used but because there is the movie credit we assume that this is the end of the opening.

Key Narrative Theories

Barthes' concept of narrative enigma:
Roland Barthes

A puzzle created within a narrative; a random women comes into the scene, who is she? where did she come from? These are narrative enigmas. Trying to figure out these puzzles is part of the pleasure of watching fictional texts.
When the US drama Dallas ended a season with the main antagonist getting shot, watched by 25 million UK viewers way back in 1980, the nation was gripped, and speculation raged for months as to the identity of the killer. The tapes containing the episode revealing the killer had to be imported under armed guard, and the outcome was reported as a lead news story in the paper and on TV news.

Todorov's 5-part narrative formula:
Todorov is associated with the theory that every narrative can be broken down into three basic stages: situation, conflict, resolution (or equilibrium, dis-equilibrium, new equilibrium). Crucially, your protagonist is not the same as at the outset, but has been changed in some way from events.
1. A state of equilibrium at the outset.
2. A disruption of the equilibrium by some action.
3. A recognition that there has been a disruption.
4. An attempt to repair the disruption.
5. A reinstatement of the equilibrium.

Levi-Strauss binary opposites & dramatic conflict:

Levi-Strauss

When we consider the use of stereotypes, it is often evident how a binary opposition is at play: how we describe a stereotypical poor or working class person, for example, is normally the opposite of how we'd describe a middle or upper class person.

Scenes within dramas often reflect a use of this idea, with clashing pairs (male/female; rural,urban; rich,poor; heterosexual  homosexual; good,bad; dominant,submissive) of opposites, in other words binary opposites, sparking conflict or tension.

There is a philosophical argument underpinning this idea: when the world around us (so, not just fictional texts) is organised and categorized through pairs of binary opposites, there is generally a powerful, or 'good', side:
Men are powerful, women submissive; the poor unintelligent, the wealthy intellectual. In other words, the very existence of these binary opposites contains a value judgement in itself, with one side of the equation being negatively cast as the other, or simply wrong/lacking in some way.


Propp's 8 recurring character types:
Vladimere


1. The villain - struggles against the hero.
2. The donor - prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object.
3. The (magical) helper - helps the hero in the quest.
4. The princess or prize - the hero deserves her throughout the story but is unable to marry her because of an unfair evil, usually because of the villain. The hero's journey is often ended when he marries the princess, thereby beating the villain.
5. The princess and her father - gives the task to the hero, identifies the false hero, marries the hero, often sought for during the narrative. Propp noted that functionally , the princess and the father can not be clearly distinguished.
6. The dispatcher - character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off.
7. The hero or victim - reacts to the donor, weds the princess.
8. False hero/anti-hero/usurper - takes credit for the hero's actions or tries to marry the princess.

These roles could sometimes be distributed among various characters, as the hero kills the villain dragon, and the dragon's sisters take on the villainous role of chasing him. Conversely, one character could engage in acts as more than one role, as a father could send his son on the quest and give him a sword, acting as both dispatcher and donor.

Semiotics

Intertextual: Meaning of one text is tied to another, earlier text, e.g. to fully understand Scary Movie you'd need to have seen Scream, which it spoofs. This can cause contested readings.

Binary Opposition: The juxtaposition of the refined parson high up on horseback, and the lowly D'Urbeville character, at the very beginning of the Tess mini-series is an example of binary opposition: any mutually exclusive pair form a binary opposition (male/female, rich/poor, rural/urban). Binary opposites are a key device for generating conflict and thus drama. When placed together, we can talk of binary opposites being juxtaposed- paired together to emphasis the contrast; their difference.

Denote/Connote: Denotation is the description of what we see or hear. Connotation is the symbolic meaning of these factual details: When we can denote a male having stubble and dark hair this often connotes villainy; this may be anchored through use of menacing, non-diegetic music.

Polysemy/ Anchorage: Every media text is essentially polysemic: it has many possible meanings. Our interpretation will be influenced by our knowledge of other texts, genre, our values, cultural background, age, gender, etc. Signifiers are embedded within texts to point us towards a particular, preferred, interpretation. The mise-en-scene will generally give us clues as to the geographical and time setting, but we often require on-screen graphics or dialogue to precisely anchor the period/location.


Signifier & Signified: A signifier is a single we pick out which we think has symbolic meaning ( the signified ): A low angle shot ( signifier ) often signifies power or strength; with a high angled shot the signified is often weakness or vulnerability.

Commutation Test: Always consider what we didn't see; the choices the producers have rejected.

Preferred/Contested/Oppositional Reading: We may be mainly considering what we consider to be the preferred reading (the interpretation the producers wish us to follow) but as texts are all polysemic, they are open to contested or even Oppositional readings. its useful to highlight any sequences you think invite contested/Oppositional readings through being poorly constructed.

Narrative Enigma: Mysterious elements within a text form a narrative enigma, needed in any drama.