Week Four - Moving Images and Semiotics

 In today's digital media seminar we discussed semiotics within the moving image. We first started by looking at an image of a sheriff's badge to evaluate what we had learnt about signified meanings. For example my group contributed that the physical signs of the badge were simple, however the physiological signs reflected signs about the wild west, law enforcement and police. I learnt this is called a metonymic meaning, a figure of speech where the name of an object closely reflects its meaning. 

“We belong to a visual culture adept at the transmission and reception of visual information”  Edgar Hunt 2010

When talking about this it was pointed out that there are very few ‘accidents’ seen on screen and nearly all filmmaking use carefully selected images chosen to tell a particular story. This was something that stuck with me as although it is obvious careful consideration is put into the visual story in films, when you think the iconography of something as small as a badge holds so much meaning it puts it into perspective. It reflects who the sheriff is, the values they hold and often in films there narrative story as the hero.

“The relationship of part to whole is also very important for film. The technical term for this is synecdoche” Edgar Hunt 2010

Stuart Hall - Encoding and Decoding 

Hall’s theories offer a theoretical approach of how media messages are produced, dismantled and interpreted. As a theorist I've found him more interesting than most as the subliminal messages you can discover within texts when decoding them lead you down a rabbit hole of secret messages. It allows me to better understand the texts I am learning about and challenge my understanding of what I perceive. His model claims that media audiences are presented with messages that are decoded, or interpreted in different ways depending on the individual's background. I think this is shown well in class as when decoding texts in groups as everyone brings their own ideas and opinions to the texts, surface levels one may be similar but finding out the deeper meaning’s everyone tends to differ. Hall stated that audience members can play an active role in decoding messages as they rely on their own social contexts, and might be capable of changing messages themselves through collective action.

The next task was decoding film clips, identifying as many signs as possible and looking into their psychological meanings.

The first clip we looked at was a scene from Grease, where Sandy and Danny are reunited after their day on the beach. Although the interaction starts positive Danny quickly reverts to his macho persona to impress his friend group. Their unity is symbolised by the matching costumes, the T-Bird jackets, and how they’re all looking at Danny waiting to see how he reacts. The staging in the shot reflects perfectly the pressure he’s under to perform, standing at the front of the group but constantly turning around for reassurance. Sandy however is viewed as an outsider, despite standing in front of the other girls none of them are looking at her. Her costume differs from her apparent friends and while the code of colour of pink is worn by the rest of her group her costume is white and pink, connoting she has not yet become like the others and still holds on to some innocence. This innocence is also shown through her makeup and hair. While the rest of the girls have fairly heavy makeup and down hair, Sandy wears little to no makeup with her hair tied up with a ribbon signifying her youth and naivety as this is traditionally worn by children.

After this we then were tasked with rewriting a traditional fairy-tale using the Pixar prompt. I chose to switch the narrative in the classic story of Hansel and Gretal, making the active accomplices in the ‘witches’ plan rather than the victims. This was a fun task as subverting the traditional stereotypes used in story’s like this, such as the witch having to be an ugly, old woman, was refreshing as capturing a more modern narrative while still using elements of the old story was a good challenge.

Overall I enjoyed this lesson as we looked further into theorists I am interested in and how to further decode media texts.