Key Media Concepts

 We when watching a movie to do its analysis or even making one always focus on this simple set of ideas. When doing an analysis or constructing a text related to the film  we have to demonstrate good knowledge circling these concepts. These concepts are as follows:

1) Audience: Whenever making a film or any media text we always have someone in media or someone we target as an audience, e.g. making an informational documentary so the targeted audience will be young adults. Every media text has a different target audience. Audiences can be divided by age, race, ethnicities, religions, genders, social class etc.

2)Media form: It is the type of media we are studying. Is it a film? An advertisement? A magazine?. The media language we use will vary with different media forms like if we analyze a film we will talk about camera movements, editing, mise-en-scene, sound etc. But if we talk about a magazine we will talk about the color, Font style and size etc.

3)Genre: Different media forms can be further divided into different genres. For Example a film can be divided into the following genres: Horror, Comedy, Thriller, Action etc. A TV drama can be divided into reality tv show, documentary, Soap Opera etc. Different genre have different code conventions like a horror film will have a spooky music as its soundtrack, may have a lot of jump scares, a supernatural entity etc. However in a science fiction we will not see these things, we might see spaceships, aliens, researches and technologies. These help us identify the genre of the film.

4)Media Institutions: In Media it is also important to keep in mind who produced these pieces that we watch. Different media institution or companies make different media texts with different aims and  for different audiences or may compete for the same audience. Media Institutions may be big and own a lot of media works like Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney, The Times Newspaper etc.

5)Media Representations: Everything we see in Media is Re-presentation of the reality or stereotypes, whether it being a positive or negative representation. For Example, Men will always be the one shown more physically aggressive in media, Now this may also be the case in reality. However not everything being represented is true, Men are also more likely to be  shown as cheaters even though in reality this does not depend on gender. This is a stereotype created because of the constant wrong representation in media.