Media Language - Mrs Shipp's thoughts

Your brief for Advanced Production was to produce a short film in its entirety so, when considering the media concept of language you need to consider that of film.

If ‘language’ is defined as how we communicate, then it can be interpreted in many levels when it comes to the medium of film. We know that each language consists of learnt “words, phrases, grammar, punctuation, rules and common practices” (Wohl, Michael; The Language of Film 2008). Therefore we could transfer this understanding to the micro elements of film, camera, sound, mise-en-scene, editing etc, and/or go to a deeper level of analysis with a detailed look at choices of shot sizes, match-on-action, rules of continuity, framing and how they are pieced/edited together to create a sentence and therefore a language of communication.

Unlike the other concepts in this part of the exam, we are not so much looking at what we are communicating but how we are communicating it. All of the decisions you made in your short films about which shots, angles, costume, set design, location, lighting, character movement, etc, play a part in this discussion.

Arguably the language of film can’t be discussed separately from genre, narrative, representation and audience as your knowledge of each of these influences the decisions you made throughout production.

When constructing the plot of your short film you were led by the conventions of the short film genre i.e.depicting an underlining message and constructing the story around the development of one character. (You’ll need to use examples of your film and those you’ve studied in here.) You also want your film to be successful with its target audience and therefore the constraints of the conventions of that genre need to be acknowledged, used or diverted from, so that while audience expectations are fulfilled at the same time you are offering up a film that will be remembered for its uniqueness, ‘creativity’. You could bring in Daniel Chandler, David Broadwell, and or Steve Neale at this point.

At this point I think it would be useful if you highlighted how you’ve been conventional in your use of micro elements and how together they create the required language of communicating that genre.


To be continued……