Semiotic analysis updated

Semiotic Analysis- one music video

The music video that I am analysing is called “The Ashes” by Tai Mahmud. A music video helps put a name card out to the audience about the artist. The image of an artist is mainly defined and put into place by the quality of their work. The mise-en-scene in this music video is quite normal to any other music video. The location that it is set in is partly an alley way, for a few seconds the location is a studio where the artist is saying the lyrics as you would do for a practice run. Another thing that i noticed in this music video which is different because not many other music videos include are images or few second shots from a different video and include it in theirs.
The effect is different and it explains the words through the images in a different kind of way. So instead of leaving the hidden meaning for the audience to figure out it is shown through the pictures through secondary data. In my judgement because in the video the main location is the alley way to me it symbolises that feelings and thoughts are narrowed and small not heard kind of thing. In the diegetic world when your in an alley way your alone whether your walking through it or just stood there, only your thoughts are seen as begin important to you no one else matters at that point. The character who’s in this music video is the producer of the work. The costume is casual wear like a hoody i don’t think the costume was meant to be of a high class and i hardly think it was the important thing to think about when it came to organising the video shoot.
The main prop is the mic that is placed in the music studio.The lighting and colour are normal and have to fit into the diegetic world to maintain verisimilitude because bearing in mind the shots are taken in an alley way. Other bits of the video the colour and lighting are of a very high quality. The lighting in the alley way is also a lot realistic to a normal everyday day outside etc. If the lighting was changed to dull boring colours like black and white then the audience will automatically know that the colour doesn’t look right and because of this won’t attract their attention much.Moving to the next stage which is camera shots , angles and movement etc, most of the shots were more or less the same. There are medium shots that closely show the artist singing the words.

The connotation that is here is that the words are important and have great meaning behind them that maybe the reason why a medium shot of the artist is done.On a general note the movement is that the camera stays in one place and doesn’t move, but throughout the video the character walks facing his back to the camera and for a few steps the camera picks up the steps and changes it’s movement. I noticed that quite a bit of editing has been done in the video too. This maybe so the other snap shots that have been included will have to be included at the right time and space in time to the video instead of just being misplaced somewhere in no order. If this was done it would clearly show to the audience that full work hasn’t been put towards the video.
Roland Barthes used these two words connotation and denotation to analyse images that can be then be applied to music videos as well as other visual texts.Semiotic Analysis- one short video (Left 4 Dead)

Short fim is an international academic term used to mean a contemporary non- commercial motion picture that is shorter than the average commercial feature film.

They last less than 45minutes long and they can be any genre. The main feature of a short film is that it will emphasise mood over narrative structure. A wide range of students will make short films for their courses they are doing. Making a short film for them is a calling card to the film industry so they can see what skills they have. John Hardwick who is a director of short films pop videos and adverts says that “short films are more comparable to poetry than to plays. In the same way that poetry can bend language and suggest meaning, short films are able to explore the vocabulary”.

I analysed a channel 5 short film called Left 4 Dead.

The beginning of the short film there is a still medium shot of a news presenter reading the daily news. The medium shot is done to show the audience the location and so the dialogue he’s speaking fits in with the rest of the storyline. After this scene there are other shots done of real life situations to show the audience that this is really happening today. These clips build tension that’s why the person who edited the film only made these few clips last a few seconds in total. After these shots the camera pauses on a metal gate from a low angle, this makes the audience think what the next shot is going to be or who’s going to appear. A young girl appears and jumps over the gate at this point her body language shows the audience she’s up to something awkward.

Then she slowly moves across while she’s creeping across her facial expressions tell the audience she’s in search of something and what she’s doing she wants it to be kept quiet and I can tell this because of the type of footsteps she takes. A location shot is done it shows a bit of a rough field with lots of unwanted items, this will give the audience a bit of a rough idea of what the rest of the short film is about. The next character that appears is the same age range as the first person who was filmed this matches my point earlier when I said that students tend to make short films more to help them with their courses etc. A close up of the gun that the female character is holding this connotates that it’s an important item that’s the reason for it to be a close up view and at this point when the prop is viewed the atmosphere changes around the audience they start to think what type of a film it is.

A tracking shot is done when she starts running along the pavement this clearly states that she’s hiding from the people around that area for what ever reason. The pace builds up when a third male character is shown in the film. The lighting and colour are all real for the diegises because you have to have an appropriate location for such a powerful short film that has a lot of meaning behind it.

One Documentary- Walking with Dinosaurs

Documentaries often seek to persuade and inform the audience about any set topic. The key concept is representation mainly because it has two ways to mediate a piece of media text. They also use real production techniques that are used on a day to day basis. A very quick start into the kind of location that the documentary is set in. Walking with dinosaurs is a science/natural history documentary. The reason why I know it’s this type of documentary is because the key features included are some kind of wildlife and it goes into detail about this particular theme. It also features a narrator who does all the speech for the documentary to give an outline of what is happening and on some cases to give his/her opinion. Because the documentary starts of quickly into the location it therefore is showing the audience the actual anchoring commentary in other words this is the place we are in. It starts off with a medium close up of a dinosaur and after a few seconds the narrator starts speaking and describing a little more about the dinosaur that is on screen. When he starts talking abut his large plates on his back the camera straight away increases the zoom.

This clearly illustrates that the plates are the important part of the dinosaurs body because that’s what part is being explained in detail. Non diegetic music is used to show verisimilitude and so the audience know that it’s a real. In the middle of the documentary a high angle location shot is made, this is to show the audience what type of place the dinosaur lives in. Throughout the documentary the camera work continues to maintain the structure of the close up medium shots. The movement of the dinosaur is shown at zoomed level this is to make it more real, exciting and dramatic for the audience so thy emphasise with what is being said by the narrator. Mike Edwards (2003) suggests that we make modality judgements about how realistic or how shocking a media text is.