Using conventions from real media texts

The wording…

• You need to be a little careful with the way in which this has been worded.

• Why not use influences? What might be meant by the concept of conventions of real media texts? Brainstorm the concept in small groups.

Conventions (1)

• Looking for what is normal and established within existing media products- do not simply base discussion on 1 example and focus more on technical aspects- i.e. less on representation of characters or narrative- this is examined in the other question.

• However, this is not to suggest that you should not discuss real examples.

Conventions (2)

• Identify the conventions from following scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VP5jEAP3K4

Alfred Hitchcock, then the most celebrated director in the world, took the opportunity to push all manner of shocking vulgarities before an ultimately grateful public. The violence and the cross-dressing marked an obvious shift from the more deeply buried Freudian tropes of recent Hitchcock classics such as Vertigo and North by Northwest . The film was also more explicit in the area of sex: the very first shot finds Janet Leigh and John Gavin lounging sweatily in a Phoenix bedroom. It even broke new ground in its depiction of bathroom behaviour: many film historians claim that, when Norman Bates flushed the toilet, it was the first time such an operation ever appeared in a respectable American picture. Yes, there had been many murders on film before, but nobody had dared pull that metal thing attached to the cistern. What would the good people of Peoria think?All these outrages had already appeared in low-grade B-movies and shockers intended for the drive-in market. What was remarkable was that a major director – a regular collaborator with royalty such as Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant – had decided to bring the rudiments of exploitation to reputable movie theatres. By shooting the picture in black and white for a miserly $1 million, Hitchcock further emphasised the project’s spidery connections with cinema’s squalid nether regions. It is hardly surprising that Paramount was so reluctant to finance the film. Hitchcock ended up producing Psycho himself, and when it became a smash he chortled all the way to his local credit union.The sheer oddness of the film is heightened by the juxtaposition of schlock paraphernalia – Argh! Mother is a scary skeleton – with a cinematic sensibility so rarefied that it bleeds into art-house territory. Think about it. The opening half-hour of the film, in which Leigh’s office worker steals $40,000 from her employer, trades in her car and drives deep into the desert, features long dialogue-free sequences in which the only sound is the jarring chords of Bernard Hermann’s all-string score. It was, in 1960, not often that mass audiences paid to watch silent movies accompanied by shrieking variations on Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring .

Conventions (3)

• How can one develop skills in using conventions from real media texts?

• Examples may include-

Accuracy & Detail

• You can follow conventions more accurately (e.g. order of credits)

• Provide more detail (have more credits)

• Improved technical skills mean you may well pursue more technically ambitious examples of conventions

Further Research

• You possibly watched more examples as well as looking at a bigger variety (i.e. from different genres) in order to find more interesting and creative approaches to heeding conventions.

Defying Conventions

• When defying conventions you may have done this more subtly rather than attempting to re-invent the concept of an opening sequence/ trailer/ poster/ magazine cover.

Writing About Conventions

• Spend 10 minutes writing about your skills development in using conventions from real media texts

Conventions problems

“Teachers should also get their candidates to feel that the question can be challenged if they have a more complex argument which will really engage with it”

- OCR Examiner- For what assignments were conventions more

demanding? More constrictive

Final Notes on Conventions

• This is somewhat different from your coursework evaluation when you’ve examined influences in more of a ‘micro’ (mise-en-scene) and ‘macro’ (genre) fashion- try to reflect more on the types of texts you’ve been asked to make.