Media Language

Media Language - The way you construct the meaning 

Meaning - what you did when you made your video, you did it to make it say something, you did things so that the audience would have a sense of what you wanted to say, of what you wanted to communicate. how did you do that? by using a series of signs and symbols, such as colour, clothing, camera shots and angles, mise-en-scéne

Preferred reading - the audience gets the idea that the producer intended them to, for example someone sees a knife and assumes that something bad has happened and this was involved in violence 

Semiotics - this is the study of signs and symbols. there is a sign, an object that is called a signifier. The meaning that is given to that is called the signified, this is not fixed and can change with time or the society or culture that is viewed in. And here we have denotation and connotation.

Denotation - what you see
Connotation - the meaning that you give to what you see 

Codes and Convention - there is so much that happens at an unconscious level, or even conscious level that you are already aware of in your work such as genre conventions, narrative conventions, codes about camera angles, dark lighting etc. It is not just about you going through those and saying how you used them, when you denoted (the signifier) to create meaning, the connotation that you hope your audience will attribute to them.

Theorists -

Fiske (1982) - 'denotation is hwat is filmed, connotation is how its filmed'
Saussure (1983) - Audience can look at a media text from a syntactic point of view, just describing what they see, or from a representational or symbolic point of view where they attribute meaning to what they see.
Barthes (1967) - an audiences' understanding of media texts come from their understanding and knowledge of frequently told myths or stories. He argues that the organisation of signs encodes particular messages and ideologies
Chandler (2005) - says that semiotics is important because it helps us not take 'reality' for granted as something that can exist without human interpretation
Stuart Hall - argued that meaning is not fixed by the producer, and the audience is not passive, gave us different readings, the preferred reading is where the audience reads it the way that you wanted them to

Answer plan 

The media language you use is trying to construct a meaning that you wish the audience to read, and if you are talking about this years work, the language should be consistent across all three products so there to be a sense of branding and one campaign.

Using the four micro elements, miss-en-scéne, camerawork, editing and sound, pick three examples for each where this helps you create meaning and construct the whole representation thing.

You can also talk about the micro elements, genre, narrative, representation and use them as a source of theorists, as they are all relevant