Definitions of words.

TV Drama

• A series of episodes (ranging from 30min to 90mins normally) that link together to create a set constant storyline that was designed for television.

• Examples of this include: Being human, Breaking bad, Game of thrones and the walking dead

representation

• The way in which something is depicted in a certain fashion.

• This could be something like a gender in a television program, or a sexuality.

Mediation

• The media’s way of altering reality for the benefit of public interest, whether this is good interest or bad.

• This could be changing a celebrity photo for a magazine or only showing one side of a war as positives.

stereotype

• In regular terms, to stereotype is to represent a certain group of people with one blanket image, and sometimes this is used in media to help further character development.

• An example of this would be teenage thugs all wearing hoodies and ganging up on people in the streets.

Hegemonic norm

• The idea that to a certain group of people, this is the normal attitude or religious ideal.

• In media, this could be creating a scenario that people can relate to and not being to extreme.

• A good example of this is heterosexuals in society

Ideology

• The conscious or unconscious reasons why a character will do the things that they do.

• In a TV drama this will affect the storyline massively as characters cannot do something that would not be in their ideology.

semiotics

• Semiotics is the study of sign processes (semiosis), signs and

• symbols, or signification and communication. It is usually• divided into the three following branches:• • Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to• which they refer• • Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures• • Pragmatics: Relation between signs and their effects on• the people who use them

Connotation

• When we connote something, we are giving meaning to a word further than what it might actually mean

• An example of this could be someone wearing black- connoting death, hiding and darkness.

Signifies

• Meaning to indicate something, for instance viewing a person in a dark setting constantly signifies that they themselves are dark.

Signifier

• Something that is placed in the scene by the director in order to help further develop the scene, whether this is to provoke a character emotions or just to reflect them in their surroundings.

• An example is found in How I Met your mother, where Barney has fallen in love, and a way of showing that he no longer has interest for single women the director fills the scene with single women to show that he is not going for them.

Types of signifier – iconic, indexical, symbolic (find an example of each and explain)

• Iconic signifier: A mode in which the signifier is perceived as resembling or imitating the signified (recognizably looking, sounding, feeling, tasting or smelling like it) - being similar in possessing some of its qualities (e.g. a portrait, a diagram, a scale-model, onomatopoeia, metaphors, 'realistic' sounds in music, sound effects in radio drama, a dubbed film soundtrack, imitative gestures) (Peirce).

• A mode in which the signifier is not purely arbitrary but is directly connected in some way (physically or causally) to the signified - this link can be observed or inferred (e.g. smoke, weathercock, thermometer, clock, spirit-level, footprint, fingerprint, knock on door, pulse rate, rashes, pain)

• A mode in which the signifier does not resemble the signified but which is arbitrary or purely conventional - so that the relationship must be learnt

Binary opposites

• Two things that are complete opposites. This could be two roommates who are different, or characters in a team who are opposites.

Mode of address

• It basically means how the text speaks to the audience. Or the way you title something.

This exampled in TV Drama could be a characters title on screen.

Anchoring

• The first piece of information given to the audience that they will then take everything from.

• For instance this could be a plot unfolding where we see a man in a hood over a body, anchoring the idea that it was a man.

Conventions

• The normal mode in which something occurs, in which an example would be: boy meets girl, girl breaks it off. Girl realises she was wrong and later takes him back.

List the conventions of television Drama

• Boy meets girl and they get together in the end with complications.

• The villain nearly kills the good guy, who then wins in the end.

• Guy faces challenge which he can only overcome through changing.