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Explain how you have used media language throughout the production of one of your pieces of coursework:Within this essay I will be discussing how I used a range of media language throughout the construction of my radio drama. Media language is a variety of systems shared amongst media producers in order to convey their message clearly to the audience. The most basic of these systems is codes, which are signs that indicate meaning to the audience. We used a variety of codes such as the use of police sirens within our radio drama to indicate to our audience the various aspects of our chosen genre and narrative. With this example of a police siren our audience would understand that the denoted meaning is that the police are present at the scene, the connoted meaning is that a crime has been committed. In accordance with Saussaure’s theory our signifier is the police siren and the signified is the idea of danger or law breaking. So both together indicate to the audience that this sign means that our radio drama is a crime drama. Also Suassure discussed the idea of polysemic signs (those which have dual meanings) and we used this when the police inform our main character, Elizabeth, that she is crazy. When she starts to cry the audience could take this as an indication of relief or despair. Relief as she hasn’t killed anyone, but despair as she is going to a mental institution.These are examples of the readings our audience could take from our radio drama. Hall (1980) said that the audience can approach a media text from a number of different perspectives. By using a medical term of Dissociative Identity Disorder to describe the main character’s state of mind an audience that took a preferred reading would go along with it as it is a believable medical term. Those members of the audience who take a negotiated reading of our drama would see that we have included the condition as a plot device, but this would not detract from their enjoyment. Those members of the audience who take an oppositional reading would believe that this condition would never make someone think they’d killed someone and that the producers were clutching at straws. People take different meanings from our radio drama depending on their cultural background (Davis and Hare, 1995). For example with our police chief, Abdul Patel, a British audience would feel comfortable with his authorative position however someone in another country will not be used to someone of an Asian background being in a position of power.Our narrative structure was a little more straight forward than this. Our main struggle was between the police and the main character Elizabeth, this is an example of binary opposition (Strauss). We also followed Todorov’s approach to narrative structure by having our police station as the equilibrium. The disruption came in the form of a letter, confessing to a murder. The police then attempt to repair the equilibrium by solving the murder and we leave the drama with a new equilibrium of the main character being taking away to a mental institution. Although we stuck to Todorov’s approach we did challenge the work of Propp who looked at Russian fairytales from the 1800’s. We felt that his work was outdated and that our audience would engage more in our radio drama if we challenged his list of different character templates. For example our main character, Elizabeth, was a victim as well as a villain as it was established at the end of our drama that she had a medical condition. Neale stated that genres are dynamic systems that change over time and as we were producing a radio drama we were intent on trying to make it as original as possible. In conclusion we adopted and challenged a range of standard approaches to media language. We did this through using dialogue as standard to move the story along. We incorporated a range of sound effects such as door slams to indicate they were moving from one place to another. We used ambient sounds to make it as realistic as possible such as the washing machine to indicate to an audience that the characters were in a house. Non diagetic sound was used only as part of our introduction with a spoken narration over some music. All of these aspects helped our audience to clearly understand what was happening in our drama through a shared understanding of media language. ................
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