Sofia’s Media Blog

Semiotics is the study of signs, further  defined by one of its founders,  Ferdinand de Saussure , as the study of “the life of signs within society.”  The concept central to semiotics is that of the signifier and the signified, with the former being that through which something is conveyed to someone, such as an object or a symbol, and the latter comprising of precisely the information conveyed. For example, the use of cash surrounding a character in a movie can convey greed, with cash acting as the signifier and greed being the signified. According to Saussure,    the relationship between the signifier and the signified is  essentially arbitrary , defined and motivated only by social convention. Any media, such as film, is encoded with these signs whose meanings are decoded by the consumers. However  the decoded meaning isn’t created by the person decoding it, in a vacuum; instead, the meaning has already existed  as created by a certain society...

Film was initially described as being a blend of "vaudeville, music-hall, theatre, photography" and novels, and is now recogised as an art form in its own right.  The humble beginnings of film can be traced back to the 19th century when it was a visual form of storytelling solely dependent on the acting prowess of the actors, with no colour, no sound and the only editing done consisted of physically cutting and attaching strips of film together. From the start when films were merely pictures in motion, they have existed as various different types from the Silent Era of the 1920s of  films in black and white which began with the invention of the Cinématographe in 1895 by the Lumière Brothers to the “Talkies”, feature films with sound, to Technicolour films in 1932, and i nspired many a film movement like film noir, the French New Wave etc, which we can accredit the vast array and choice of films of numerous genres we have today to. The experience of watching films in the cinem...

A film opening can be defined as the first two to five minutes of a film where the main characters and setting are introduced, and the narrative is established, with all of this done in a certain manner that piques the interest of the viewer. The opening credits in which the actors and crew are introduced play throughout the film opening and the title of the film appears at the end of the film opening, a convention followed by nearly every film. Film openings vary according to genre, and the genre determines how the characters and narrative are established.

I'm studying key media concepts in my Media Studies class, at the centre of which lies the Media Continuum that institutions and audiences are a vital part of. Institutions are the giant media organisations that dominate the productions of media products, like the Big Five such as Disney, Sony, Viacom, Comcast and Warner Bros, while audiences are the groups of people that these institutions aim to target with the media they produce. In the media continuum, institutions and audiences are placed at opposite ends with institutions using media language, e.g. camera angles, composition, movements, editing, sound, and mise-en-scene, to create representations of social groups, and issues like race, gender and sexuality, in the media products, like films and television shows, they produce which are then consumed by the audience, that gives feedback to the institutions, and so the continuum continues as an endless loop of interaction between institutions and audiences.

The coursework set brief for my AS Media Studies Foundation Portfolio is a film opening of a certain genre that has to set up the premise for a full length film while simultaneously introducing an enigma and a mystery in the form of the narrative, setting or character, a Herculean task that has to be achieved in two to three minutes, the given time constraint.

My name is Sofia Sarfraz and I'm a student of Media Studies that I took in lieu of Math, which I actually decided to drop! What drove me to this subject was my interest in the burgeoning role of various media, whether they be social or entertainment, in the world and the opportunity to study it in depth, to determine if a career in print media or the film industry is something I’d want to pursue in the future.