Research

 Codes and Conventions

Medium close up

A medium close up is the most used shot type in news broadcasts. It shows the subject from the elbows up. This is close enough to see their facial expression clearly and convey the atmosphere that is intended but not close enough to be overwhelming and unprofessional. It is a pretty basic shot type but works well for the type of media and content that it shows. It is mainly used when the reporter is directly addressing the camera, for example introducing a new story or giving information about a situation that is being reported on.

Raw footage

Raw footage is where the footage is filmed first hand at the scene and not recreated. News teams usually send a film crew to the scene of a situation that they are reporting. This helps give more context to the story and also make the broadcast more colourful and engaging o watch. It stops the audience getting bored of just looking at the reporter, similar to cutaways in documentary. It helps the audience feel that they can make a more informed opinion about the situation.

Interviews with experts

News channels will quite often bring experts to the studio or the location and interview them. The gives the audience relevant and correct information. this helps set the scene better, and also the audience will be more likely to trust a qualified expert than a random reporter. It also gives the audience a break from just one person talking and gives them an actual conversation to focus on. It gives credibility to a story and makes sure all facts are covered to make the broadcast unbiased and informative.

Field reporters

These are reporters that report on location. They usually accompany the crew that films or streams raw footage and give more in depth information about a scene. The studio reporter will usually give the story over to a field reporter after introducing the headline. This also gives the effect of boosting the mise en scene because the background of the shot will be relevant to the information being given and the audience will associate the background to the information being relevant and correct rather than the more professional-focused studio background.

Mode Of Address

The style in which the reporters address the audience is what determines whether the audience keeps watching the programme. There are 'rules' for the mode of address used in TV news bulletins. These 'rules' are adapted depending on the news station. The standard 'rules' are: Direct address straight at the viewers, use personal pronouns (such as "thank you for watching" etc), very clear, smooth, fluent and articulate diction, creating an understandable accent, straight on medium close up shot for news presenters, music adds importance and starting with the biggest stories.

Target Audience

Demographic guess:

1. Age: 8-12
2. Gender: both
3. Religion: Atheist
4. Race: African-American
5. Disability: None
6. Sexuality: Undetermined
7. Occupation: Student
8. Social Class: Middle class
9. Interests: Reading, games, learning stuff

Psychographic guess:

They are watching because they are interested in events but normal news shows are too complicated or "scary" because they are so young, so their parents find them news shows aimed at children with simplified and more child friendly news stories. Alternatively, their parents could want them to be aware of the world around them and find adult news shows unsuitable.

Male Gaze

Male gaze:

Mulvey states that “the gender power asymmetry is a controlling force in cinema and constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, which is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideologies and discourses.”  This basically means that film and media are consciously and unconsciously sexualising women to appeal to the straight male audience. In the history of film this was done in every piece of media, but as the world has become more progressive different things have come into play to move away from this inherently sexist practice. She says that women in older pieces of media are not there to take control of a scene, but rather to be viewed from an objectified point of view. This inequality enforces the ancient and outdated idea of “men do the looking, and women are to be looked at.” The Male Gaze theory, in a nutshell, is where women in the media are viewed from the eyes of a heterosexual man, and that these women are represented as passive objects of male desire. Audiences are forced to view women from the point of view of a heterosexual male, even if they are heterosexual women or homosexual men. From the feminist perspective, this theory can be viewed in three ways: How men look at women, how women look at themselves and finally, how women look at other women. Typical examples of the male gaze include medium close-up shots of women from over a man’s shoulder, shots that pan and fixate on a woman’s body, and scenes that frequently occur which show a man actively observing a passive woman.

Mulvey has shone a light on the old-fashioned and repetitive style of cinema we see every day, and her ideologies have helped create a more modern and truthful version of cinema as we now have more realistic portrayals of women than ever before. She allows audiences to have a refreshing look at women in strong and powerful positions without a man by their side, thus enforcing the important message that women do not have to be put in a box and objectified, they can play a variety of different, versatile roles and they can be considered through the eyes of society in a way that doesn’t patronize and sexualise them via the Male Gaze.

The Female Gaze

The female gaze is not used to objectify men, like the male gaze does for women. Instead it’s emotional and intimate. It sees people as people. It seeks to empathize rather than to objectify. The male gaze seeks to devour and control, and the female gaze is more a frame of mind, where approach to subject and material is more respectful.

Babette Mangolte, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: “In the early 1970s when I arrived in New York from Paris, there definitely was the desire to invent a female gaze. Women started to shoot films made by women and also for women. We all felt that men had shown their point of view since the beginning of the world and we now should try to find if we could invent a new language that would be different from the one of our fathers or lovers.”

Besides being up to its own devices, a female-centric gaze is also informed, moved, and provoked by the overwhelmingly male histories of gazing that have long taken up more than their fair share of space.

The Queer Gaze

Heteronormativity is the belief that heterosexuality is the default, preferred, or normal mode of sexual orientation. It is the assumption that everyone is straight and cis unless explicitly stated otherwise. It is the assumption that there are only two, opposite genders. The effect of this can also be known as "straight privilege". 

Studying this is key to understanding representation in film because for the majority of film history this has been the default for characters. In order to evolve representation in films we must first understand the past and what brought us here, and then we can change the normal and bring film into a new era.

In the past,  LGBT communities in media have been portrayed as negative, showing the cultural intolerance towards LGBT individuals. However, from the 1990s to today, there has been an increase in the showing of LGBT people, issues, and concerns within mainstream media.

Queer theory’s origin is hard to clearly define, since it came from multiple critical and cultural contexts, including feminism, post-structuralist theory, radical movements of people of colour, and the gay and lesbian movements.

Although queer theory had its beginnings in the educational sphere, the cultural events surrounding its origin also had a huge impact. In the 1980s, activist groups pushed back against the lack of representation. Gay activist groups like ACT-UP and Queer Nation took the lead to force attention to both the AIDS epidemic and the gay and lesbian community as a whole.

Queer theory is much newer than the male and female gaze theories as it was established in the 1990s. Queer theorists contention is that there is no set normal, only changing norms that people may or may not fit into, making queer theorists’ main challenge to disrupt binaries in hopes that this will destroy difference as well as inequality. 

How the Gazes relate to my piece

My piece will be mainly the queer gaze. This is because it is aimed at children and I think it's important to break stereotypes early, so children don't grow up thinking it's ok to sexualise women like in the male gaze. There will also be elements of the female gaze mixed in, to teach the kids to respect people and empathise with them. Overall I want to create a positive and nurturing atmosphere for my audience.

Examples of channels

BBC

This stands for British Broadcasting Channel. "Whatever your views on the BBC, it's a reminder that we are without question one of Britain's strongest and best-known brands, synonymous with quality and accuracy worldwide," Tony Hall, director-general of the BBC, said in a statement.

For the first time, digital platforms are the most popular means of accessing BBC News - surpassing syndicated TV and radio. India, the United States, Nigeria and Kenya are the biggest international markets.

Digital audiences hit 310 million during the initial peak of the coronavirus outbreak from January to March. Across the BBC, services are reaching more people globally than ever before - more than 468 million each week, an increase of 11% on last year. The BBC aims to be reaching 500 million people a week by 2022.

The biggest drop comes in audiences aged between 16-34 who watch BBC TV weekly, down from 60% to 56%. The same age group is also watching for a shorter period of time, down from an average of nearly three hours a week to two hours and 32 minutes. The same is said of BBC Radio where men and women over the age of 16 are listening to less radio and for shorter times, up to 30 minutes less than last year in most age groups. The BBC's online offering continue to perform well with 2% increases in usage by male and female audiences over the age of 18. There has been a 6% increase in online users from the C2DE demographic which includes working class and lower income households. It has been a bumper year for iPlayer with 3.6bn programme requests, the most popular being Bodyguard. Killing Eve's first series had 42.5 million overall requests.

When it comes to those earning above £150,000 a year, the BBC is operating at a ratio of 60/40 in favour of men. Across the board, women make up 47.9% of the BBC's workforce and 43.8% of leadership roles. According to Lord Hall, the figures represent "rapid and real change". He said the gender pay gap is 3% or less at all pay grades, adding "it's not the end of the process but the BBC is well ahead of other organisations". Speaking to media editor Amol Rajan, Lord Hall said the BBC has resolved more than 90% of 32 pay disputes.

Disney Channel

This graph shows that there are more views in the age category 30-50 watching monthly than there is 18-29. Without context, this doesn't make any sense, why would adults watch more of a childrens channel than actual children? Then I thought about it and realised that those people are most likely parents watching with/paying for their children. This showed me that context is important with statistics, and that I need to consider people to be watching that I did not think about before, for example parents watching with kids, so I need to consider marketing towards the parents so that they are interested in turning it on for their kids.

This is a graph of the viewers reached each year from 2014 to 2019. As you can see the numbers have been going down, meaning that something they are doing is losing the interest of their audiences. So I did a little digging into why this was happening and found this answer from a user named Paul Schnebelen:

"The drop in Disney Channel’s ratings is due to a combination of a general drop in TV viewership, a streak of poorly performing new series. One problem may be cyclical, but the other’s got the Company and investors concerned.

The drop in viewership is something that effects not only Disney Channel, but many broadcast and cable networks; it's a phenomenon that's been happening for a some time now. Thanks to technology, a lot of TV viewers have "cut the cord" in favor of watching video on websites or streaming services; younger folks don't even consider watching TV on a TV as an option. This problem is pervasive enough that investors are getting skittish; Disney's in the process of creating their own streaming service for their library and TV network content, so there may be a solution to it in the longer term, but hopes of a longer-term solution doesn't provide a lot of comfort now to investors.

The more cyclical issue that Disney Channel is having is that they don't have a lot of breakout hit shows right now; several of their more popular series like "Girl Meets World" have recently wrapped up their runs, but the shows that have replaced them haven't clicked with their viewers. It's not an insurmountable problem, but it takes time to develop and produce new shows , and sometimes it takes a while for a new show to find an audience. Again, investors aren't exactly known for their patience.

Invariably, you're going to a bunch of people on the Intrawebs who will insist that the reason that Disney Channel's ratings are dropping is because (a) they haven't any good shows for a long time or (b) they're making shows that don't reflect the wholesome values of Disney's past, so kids and their parents are staying away in droves. I wouldn't put a lot of stock in either of those opinions.

As far as the "everything they put out has sucked for years" excuse, there's a saying from a few years ago that says "The best things ever came out when you were 12" - in other words, that people's nostalgia for things they loved growing up doesn't match up to their interest in what's out there now. Honestly, that makes sense; the shows that Disney Channel is putting out now are still geared for kids in a certain age group, and the people who go with this trope aren't in that age group; rather than face the idea that they're not 12 anymore and their and other peoples' tastes have moved on, they'd rather grouse about it. Disney Channel was the top-rated channel for kids in their target bracket until fairly recently - if they'd lost their way a while back, why did ratings only drop now?

As far as the "Disney has lost its family values" excuse, yes, Uncle Walt is gone and Disney doesn't make shows and movies like the ones they made when he was around. But the reason Disney doesn't make them isn't because one day out of the blue the executives in Burbank decided to become "hippie liberal America-hating corrupters of our impressionable youth"; it's because they tried making the content that Walt would have made and people stayed away in droves. The tastes of the public (with the exception of the little pockets of folks who buy into this) have moved on, and Disney's content also moved on accordingly. If the demand was out there to watch silly G-rated family comedies like they did in the 70s, I'm sure Disney would be making them."

This basically means that part of the reason is that viewers of tv in general is going down as we move over to on demand streaming services such as Netflix, whatever the channel. It also says that the content Disney makes is not picking up as many viewers, they are aimed at the generation of children today and the parents look at it, and are unimpressed by how different it is to what they grew up with, therefore they don't watch it with their kids, and instead find something else. This is where I will learn from their mistakes and make sure to market some parts towards parents while also being relevant to the kids. This quote has given me an insight into the audience perspective towards childrens shows which will be invaluable to my marketing.