Modern Audience perspectives on The Shawshank Redemption

Over time, the preferred reading of a media text may not be blindly accepted by an audience as they are bringing a different perspective to the text than an earlier audience would.

If you use the YouGov “profiles” setting and look up The Shawshank Redemption, the sample of 2803 people shared the following characteristics:

Demographics:
The typical person who said they liked TSR was female, in the 40-59 age group and ABC1. Politically they are slightly left of centre and work in Education, Entertainment or Healthcare or Medicine.

Their hobbies and interests were said to be Movies, UK News and Worldwide News.

They described their own personality positive characteristics as being funny, reliable and open but negative traits were being lazy, selfish and disorganised.

They were most likely to drive a Porche, Mazda, Rover or MG.
Their other favourite movies were Silence of the Lambs, Forrest Gump, The Green Mile, Schindler’s List and Gladiator.

They spend their online time on IMDB and Movie sites or play online games. Their favourite magazine is Total Film and they spend 50 hours a week online and 35 hours watching TV.

Try the link yourself:

https://yougov.co.uk/profiler#/

Try it out for The Untouchables and The Godfather.

Think, how might the fact you live in a different time and country and are of a different age group affect your personal interaction with the film? What differential decoding are you going to have as a result? What are you bringing to the film that makes you read it differently?

Christmas Ads – Sainsburys

Tone?

Camera angles and movements?

Lighting?

Special effects?

A sense of time?

Diegetic and non-diegetic sound?

Role of media – purpose of ad? How do you know it is really a commercial for a supermarket?

Preferred reading?

Differential decoding?

Can you read the text? Are you a media know-it-all yet?

How to get marks at Higher?

1) Make a point
2) back it up with two relevant pieces of evidence from your media text

= 1 mark

For example look at this advert:

The Irn Bru Snoman advert uses cultural codes to connect with a Scottish target audience. At 8 seconds into the advertisement, we see the Falkirk Wheel which was the most popular new tourist attraction when the Snowman advert first appeared on screen in 2006. Falkirk is the birthplace of Irn Bru and the Leith Agency who made the advert are making a connection in the mind of the audience that Irn Bru has both modern and nostalgic connotations for a Scottish audience. This is emphasised by the imagery of the Forth Road Bridge at 16 seconds in. Irn Bru used to have the tag line “Made in Scotland from girders”. The strong use of orange-red in the advert also connotes the colour Scots associate with Irn Bru and imagery associated with the drink in the past.

Essays

The SQA training event today was really valuable for me and will be for you. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.

Remind me to give you a sheet to help you write up your response to Shawshank and The Untouchables. I think it will help you to meet the standard for Higher more easily.

National 5 – Advert

Chritsmas Ads

How are they structured? What media techniques are being used?

What is the tone of each one?

What is the preferred reading?

What might a differential decoding be?

What role of media is shown here?

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