Media Theories

 

Theory	Theorist	Description (100 words)	Example (100 words)
Media ownership / regulation		Media ownership and regulation is how media is owned by companies and regulated. There are three stages that can be owned by a media company, they are production, distribution, and exhibition. The ownership of more than one of those stages by a company is called vertical integration. Media ownership has consequences on the audience and company. By owninng more than one stages, companies could save money and avoid the possibility of media censorship by the distributor and exhibitor. More flexibility and options are available. Companies Media is regulated by many governing bodies in each countries. It is requiered to ensure that the media consumed by the people are aligned with the government's ideology .	Disney owns more than one
Synergy		Synergy is when a company collaborate with a media company to produce a product togather. There are many reasons to why synergy is done. It introduces a company to whole new audience, which would attract new fans and increase sales and earn more money than working alone. Collaboration could also boost one's popularity.	In 2019, Blackpink and Samsung synergised to produce products such as smart phones, smartwatches, wireless earbuds, and more. This synergy benefited both parties as fans of Blackpink were interested in buying Samsung products, and Samsung fans were exposed to Blackpink music.
Cross Media Convergence		Cross media convergence is the act of presenting advertisements in different platforms
New Media
Two Step Flow
Technological Convergence		Technological convergence is the combination of different technologies into one device. Technological convergence is significant in media because it influences how audiences consume media.
Genre Theory		Genre theory states that media products must conform to a ganre by being similar but unique. Conforming to a genre is required to give audiences expectaions on what the media product would be, however, by being unique, audiences would be more attracted to it .
Desensitisation		Desensitisation is when audiences are exposed to violence that they have gotten used to it and dont view it as something strange and scary.
Reception Theory	Levi Strauss	Reception theory states that in every media product, there are three different ways that the audience could view it. The first way is preffered reading, which is when audiences understand something the way the producers had intended them to do so. The second is negotiated reading. In this reading, the audience will agree with some of what the producer is trying to tell us, however disagrees with others. The third one is oppositional reading. Audience completely rejects the meaning that the producers are trying to convey.
Cultivation Theory	George Gerbner
5 Narrative Codes	Roland Barthes	The 5 narrative codes are hermeneutic, proairetic, cultural, semantic, and symbolic. Hermeneutic code is when procuders intentionally leave out things from the movie to make mystery. By doing so, audiences would be more captivated and interested. Proairetic codes are actions that implies further action in the story, or plot points. Cultural code are . Semantic codes are . Symbolis codes are .
Binary Opposites	Levi Strauss
Globalisation
Social Learning	Albert Bandura	People imitate actions that they see on television.
Uses & Gratification	Bulmer n Katz	Uses and gratification tells us different reasons why people consume media. There are four reasons why, they are

Comp 1 - Final Piece

Google Drive link    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jUf_AejWH2SthgArqCjoWyVD1VNXJukT/view?usp=sharing

Comp 1 - Critical Self Relfection

Brief

Create the titles and opening of a new fiction film (to last a maximum of two minutes). Titles should follow the institutional conventions of commercial cinema. The task may be undertaken individually or as a group. There should be a maximum of four members to a group. In our group of four students, we decided to make a movie about drug trade in school.

How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

Our movie is a comedic movie about students doing drugs, and the conventions of that particular topic are dark skinned tattooed men, lots of money, lots of drugs, and cartel culture. Our group however, decided to subvert those conventions by doing the opposite. Instead of big guys with menacing tattoos, we have high school boys doing the drug trade. Our decision to do this is supported by the genre theory by Steve Neale, which states that media texts should follow the conventions of a certain genre, but should also be unique. We conformed to the genre by having narcotics traded, drug traders dressed untidily. This is done to attract audience attention by giving them expectations but also be different. The social groups represented are high school boys and teachers. They are represented by having people from the respective groups present in the film. Social issues discussed are issues relating to drug trade, specifically in school. Our film both conforms and subverts stereotypes. For example, the students were dressed up very messily and looked tough (unbuttoned clothes, black hoodie), which conforms with the stereotype that drug dealers are broken and messed up people who do not take care of themselves. We also subvert stereotypes by not having dark skinned hispanic people doing the drug trades, which is one stereotype of hispanic people. Instead, we use high school boys of multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds, such as Chinese, Balinese, etc. The preferred reading of the film is that four highschool drug traders are covertly selling drugs at school.

How does your product engage with the audience and how would it be distributed as a real media text?

Our target audience are young male adults aged 16 - 23 yo of any racial, ethnic background who shares a common interest in drugs and find immature humour funny. They are targeted in multiple ways. Firstly, the main characters, the four boys, are all high school boys within the same age range of the target audience. By having people of the same gender and age as them, they might feel some type of connection as mentioned in the Uses and Gratification theory by Bulmer and Katz regarding personal identity. Secondly, all of the boys are of different racial and ethnic background. This is important because the majority of drug trades are stereotypically portrayed by hispanic, dark skinned, South/Central Americans, so by having a Chinese student work with a Balinese and Austrian could attract multiracial audiences. My group has decided that the movie will be marketed through trailers and online advertisements. This makes sense because our younger audience are more media literate and are more exposed to and will notice digital advertisements more than they are to physical advertisements. Thus marketing our movie digitally online makes the most sense. It will be released during summer, because that is when kids are having their holidays, giving them plenty of time to watch the movie. We’ve also decided that it makes most sense for us to make the movie streamable instead of having it in the cinemas, again, due to the fact that our target audience use technology more. As for which streaming platform, Netflix would be the best option due its large number of users and its flexibility, because other options such as Disney would require us to conform to their ideology, which is family-friendly content, completely incompatible with out drug movie.

How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

This project, in comparison to previous projects, placed a great emphasis on cinematography, which is something that I am very oblivious and ignorant of. I was able to learn the basics of how to use different camera angles and different technologies such as drones. In addition to cameras, I also expanded my knowledge in editing by utilising applications that I have not touched previously, like Adobe After Effects. We developed our skills in other areas of media studies. By working together with new people who are more experienced and knowledgeable in some areas, we are able to learn from them in said area. I learnt how to operate cameras and utilise different props and natural lighting to our advantage. Certainly our new learnt skills will not only benefit us in the media studies subject, but also in other aspects of life. The numerous obstacles and problems we encountered would never have been resolved if we did not have great teamwork and communication skills. Because each of us have our own schedules that overlap with each other, we always have to make changes in plans when shooting the movie, which helped us master time management skills, which is crucial in pretty much everything. The collaboration of different people in our movie enhanced our capabilities in working with new people and

How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware, and online – in this project?

Technology has a great impact on our group and has expanded our possibilities. Its effect can be felt in all five stages of production, which is research & planning, production, post production, evaluation & feedback, and presentation.  We used websites like YouTube and Wikipedia to gather information about other movies that is within our genre (drugs, high school). YouTube allowed us to analyse other movie openings to give us ideas that we can use for our own movie, while Wikipedia's extensive catalogue of different movies provided detailed information of the movies. We utilised different cameras using different accessories to ensure that our production happens quickly while still looking neat. Our main concern was the stability of the camera, because our hands can get shaky while recording, which would make our movie look amateur. However, with the help of a gimbal stabiliser, it solved the issue. Softwares like Premiere Pro, After Effects, Sound Trap, and DaVinci were the backbone of post production. Those softwares complement each other, and without them, our movie would have looked incomplete. Saving the video and presenting it was a major concern as there is always a possibility of platforms rejecting the upload of the movie due to its large size. But fortunately Google Drive allowed the movie to be uploaded there and there is where we will be storing the movie for everyone to see.

Comp 1 - Post Production

Created by Gemintang

Our friend Gus Yudha does most of the camera work since it's his camera and he is the only one that knows how to operate the ronin mechanical tripod well. Some scenes really look professional and smooth due to the tripod. The camera was only used for the main shots, not the drafts or practice. The picture under is Gus.

We could have planned the schedule for the filming better, it took a while which limited the editing time. We did a lot of improvises along the way. (Like the alleyway after the car scene).

We did some drafts for clean drug transactions that look good on camera. We planned to make at least 3 different drug trades in different locations:

Our first rough draft:

• Too short
• Too simple
• Only 2 people

Behind the scenes

The second draft is roughly what's going to happen for the real drug and brownie trade, only need to edit the jump cuts to make it feel fast-paced as this is an action movie. I really like how the camera switches point-of-view to inside the locker as Jason tries to get the drugs. We added that undershot of baron to replicate a feeling to the audience that the teachers are the ones the dealers are afraid of but learn not all of them are bad. When we implement this for our film, we can't have more than 2 drug trades with different locations, due to the limited 2-minute duration cap. 

We used WhatsApp as our main communication method, it also has a feature to use voice messages and our friend Elang recorded the roar. We had the idea of changing the distributor credit opening in a more funny way, we spoofed it since we need a more comedic part, our movie is Action/Comedy. Also recorded the ambient noises of the school canteen to fill off space at the beginning.

The footage we recorded was all in big sizes, instead of using hard drives or USBs, we thought it will be better to take advantage of our special school gmail's google drive that has infinite storage. Everyone can also access it instantly. This probably saved a lot of production time.

I used premiere pro for editing, I'm more familiar with this software and if I'm confused in some parts since premier is so popular, I always get what I'm looking for most on Youtube. I'm in charge of every editing and Jason did the transitions between the clips with his software Adobe After Effects.

Special animations are better done with After Effects

Greenscreen alleyway clip

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Jason used the roto brush feature on After effects to create some sort of green screen for another way to transition. To remove the greenscreen, I added the clip I want to transition above the green alleyway clip and used a tool from premiere which is the Ultrakey.

A simple drag and drop, then change the ultra key color to green to remove it.

Alot of the scenes uses jump-cuts. Thankfully it's very simple as I just have to cut clips and some scenes according to the beat of the song (Living La Vida Loca).

Raw footage, no jumpcuts

After editing

I realized while editing, the camera work is the most important part of the whole movie making in my opinion. Without it, it's really hard to edit and put them all together. If done well, editing gets much easier as I just place one scene and another together without further touches.

Jason owns a drone at home so I had a great idea to fly down the drone with its built-in camera to transition to the first drug scene. It's a great way to elevate the opening's action feeling. Stuff like this enhance quality without intense editing. But of course, the drone or a professional movie boom arm were needed.

2nd drone shot

Establishing shot

Following typical high-school starter openings we added an establishing shot of the whole school with the drone also.

The next thing I did was edit our main antagonist, our teacher Mr. Benjamin roleplayed as the movie's school principal. He is meant to look intense, scary, and menacing on screen, we also added an easter egg where he mentions 'maggots' referring to the students because he is a military veteran. We chose him because his appearance looks like a stereotypical strict principal. 

We added a decent amount of different types of shots to show his character and appearance. We didn't show his face because it keeps the mystery to keep the audience interested. Jason did the camerawork.

Arranging the clips was easy but the hardest part was putting everything in sync with the audio. It's hard because the speech must follow his lips to make it synced. It took a while but trial and error did the trick. I used the website Soundtrap to edit the principal's voice with a reverb sound effect to make him sound like he is actually talking with the P.A mic. A good touch to enhance the quality of the footage. 

Principal scene

Mr. Benjamin's audio on Soundtrap