STARTER
Let's see how many of the Newspaper Technical Codes your can remember! Match the pairs and identify your score and time on your blog using the title 'Newspaper Technical Codes Revision Quiz Score'. Type your score and time in the chat.
REVIEW
Examine the feedback from your charity advert task (last week) and redraft your response, addressing all of the points I have made. This will probably take about 30 mins for most of you. Remember, I am looking for evidence of your ability to support the allocation of an A Level grade, so exploit the opportunity to redraft to represent yourself in the best possible light.
THE BIG PICTURE
Today you will be revising the print advertising products and the associated media language. Our print advertising products are the Tide advert (1950s) and the Kiss of the Vampire film poster (1963). In revising these set products, you will be preparing for the unseen text tasks (practise tasks); usually Section A in the exam. Remember, these practise tasks provide good evidence of your abilities and can be used to support final grade allocations, so complete the practise task to the very best of your ability.
EXPLAIN & MODEL
Print advertisements share common conventions with audio-visal texts but they also employ elements specific to the print advertising form (as they have less time and space to construct a narrative and persuade the audience), including;
Key Points:
- Layout & Design: Consider the construction of the advert and the paradigmatic choices that have been made to communicate meaning.
- Images: Consider the use of still images, some of which may have been manipulated to create a version of reality.
- Typography & Graphics: Consider font styles chosen to communicate messages.
- Visual Codes: These include colour, gesture, expressions and technique codes.
- Technical Codes: They include camera shots, lighting and post-production editing.
- Language and Mode of Address: How does the advert 'speak' to its audience?
- Semiotics, Roland Barthes.(denotation & connotation)
- Structuralist Theory, Levi Strauss (binary oppositions)
- Genre Theory, Steve Neale (repetition & difference)
- Character Theory, Vladimir Propp (hero, false hero, etc)
- Narratology, Todorov (disruptions, equilibriums, etc)
- The idea that texts communicate their meanings through a process of signification: As advertisements must communicate messages rapidly, they use signs and codes that signify messages to audiences. For example, the code of clothing, dressing someone in a particular way, will quickly resonate with an audience, who will have expectations of how that person relates to a product. A woman in evening wear in a perfume advert signifies a sophisticated fragrance.
- The idea that signs can function at the level of denotation, which involves the literal or common-sense meaning of the sign, and the level of connotation, which involves meaning associated with or suggested by the sign. For example, in advertisements and film posters, colours are used to communicate messages. The denotation of red is a primary colour but in an advert or film poster it may connote passion, power or danger, depending on the product, genre and context.
- The idea that constructed meanings can come to seem self-evident, achieving status of myth through a process of naturalisation (repeated use making it 'normal'): For example, the cultural myth encoded in filim posters and advertisements that wearing red has connotations of being sexually attractive or that red cars have more speed or power.
- Barthes identifies five different kings of semiotic codes that are common to all texts. These codes are Hermeneutic (enigma), Proairetic (action), Semantic, Symbolic and Cultural (referential). Enigma codes contain questions or mysteries that the reader needs answered. Action codes suggest sequential elements of action (things that implied to happen). Semantic codes refer to elements that carry additional meaning. Symbolic codes are elements that mean something else (they 'stand in for' something else). Referential codes refer to something outside of the text and presume that the audience has an outside knowledge of what is being referred to (similar to intertextuality).
- A text is like a tangled ball of threads that needs to be unravelled. Once unravelled, we encounter a wide range of potential meanings. A text many be 'closed' with just one obvious, single thread for the audience to pull on or 'open', unravelled in many different ways with many different starting and end points (no obvious beginning or end).
Key Language (General Advertising)
- Visual codes
- Central image
- Slogan
- Language of Persuasion (E.g. hyperbole)
- Soft sell (selling a lifestyle)
- Hard sell ('in your face', aggressive advertising)
- Demonstrative Action (where the product is seen to be used in the advert)
- Logos
- Mode of Address
- Intertextuality
- Product Endorsement (use of celebrities to recommend a product)
- Unique Selling Points: USP (What makes it different from competitors)
- Z-line layout
- Image to text ratio
- Visual codes (clothing, colour, gestures, etc)
- Iconography (Objects and settings widely associated with subjects, places, etc)
- Promise of Pleasure: Words or phrases telling the audience what they will experience (fear, laughter, etc).
- Star Billing: Suggesting a hierarchy of actor importance (positioning of names, etc)
- Tag Line: Memorable phrase that becomes associated with the film and used in marketing.
- Expert Criticism: Quotes from newspapers, film reviews, etc.
- Mark of Quality: The use of a director's name or logo that is associated with another product, used to persuade the audience of the quality.
PRACTISE
Print Advertising Task
Open your 'Surf' Google Assignment on Google Classroom and use the prompt questions to construct a response.
NEXT LESSON
Next week, we will start with a film poster task before moving on to the revision of representation.
