Year 9 Media Studies

Do you believe these characters are real? A writer's job is tricky, especially with science fiction genre TV Drama programmes. They must engage the audience and make them invest in the characters in order to deliver a satisfying narrative resolution.  Class is made for BBC 3, a channel that caters for young people. So you can expect the characters to seem realistic because the target audience need to believe they are seeing themselves presented as real people. Task: Watch the trailer again and jot down any elements of the characters that make them seem like realistic teenage characters. In media lessons, you will be finding out how teenagers are represented in TV Drama and thinking about whether they are fairly and accurately portrayed by writers or whether they are heavily stereotyped. Do you think teenagers are presented using traditional stereotypes or do they seem more realistic in the programmes that you enjoy watching? It is usual for teen characters to be oversimplifi

Stereotype (brief definition): 'a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing'. Are teenagers represented in a fair way in the media? Find a variety of images representing the typical teenager. Is it easy to find positive images or are most of them negative? What are the reasons for this? Research Task: Collect a range of images (at least 10) of teenagers, both positive and negative. Make a mood board or poster using these images. ( use Photoshop ). Print out and stick in your book. Find three news articles which involve teenage stars. Copy and paste the headline and relevant text from these. Print out and stick in your book. Using these images and articles as your evidence, answer the following questions: What you think the key stereotypes are that teenagers have to cope with?  Do you think these are fair or not?  In your opinion are teenagers represented accurately in the media? Give reasons fo

Representation Understanding representation is all about understanding the choices that are made when it comes to portraying something or someone in a mass media text. It's impossible to portray every aspect of an individual in a photograph, or even in a feature film, so certain features of their personality and appearance get highlighted, and are often enhanced, when it comes to constructing the representation that the audience will see. When representing a person, media texts often focus on their:   Age Gender Race/Ethnicity Financial Status Job Culture/nationality Signs and symbols are used as a kind of visual shorthand to represent these attributes. When we decode these signs we make assumptions about who the character is (usually by comparing them to similar characters we have encountered before), and this allows us to put them in a category and "read" them in context. For instance, when constructing characters for a TV or movie scene the producers

REPRESENTATIONS – COMMON STEREOTYPES by DB3@IGS on Scribd