tvandmagazines


 * __TV[[image:old_television.jpg align="right"]]__**

//"Television: chewing gum for the eyes."// - Frank Lloyd Wright

Open this document and surf the internet to find out more about the history of television:

Find out how scheduling works in television:

Download the Directed Study Task below and arrange a night of TV for fans of a particular **genre**. Make sure they don't get bored!

Find out more about audience and TV by downloading this document:

You have watched countless hours of TV and you already know how a story is put together on TV. Revise that knowledge with this document:

__ Situation Comedies (Sit-coms) __ [|Robin Kelly on Sitcom Writing]

[|The Stage Guide to Sitcom Writing] [|British Council on Sitcom History]

[|Northallerton College on Gender & The History of TV Situation Comedy]

[|A List of British Sitcoms] [|Buster Tests: Sitcom Basics]

[|BBC on Britain's Best Sitcoms]

[|MGNET on Sitcoms]

[|North East Wales Institute of HE on Sitcoms]

[|ScreenOnline on Sitcoms] A Closer Look at Sitcoms & Relevant Theory [|Jack Kibble-White on The British Sitcom]

[|A BFI Commentary on the Top 20 Sitcoms]

//[|'Who Killed the British Sitcom?']// [|Blog by Rob Buckley]

//[|'Sitcoms and Absurdism']// [|by Andrew Hirschhorn]

[|UKTV Press Office:] //[|'The Sitcom Showdown']//

[|Richard Taflinger on US TV Sitcoms]

[|Channel 4 &] //[|'The IT Crowd']//

[|CultSock on British Soaps & Related Theory]

[|Aber on TV Sitcoms]

[|Aber, Semiotics & Intertextuality]


 * __Documentaries and Factual Programming__**

There are two important things you must consider before producing a documentary: //the audience and the subject.// 

//The Subject// 

Representation basically means re-presenting something, you can not present something in the real. Cinema as a medium always represents what was happening in front of the camera when it was filming. Media representation is the depiction or manner of depiction of people, places and events through the media.

There are many issues with representation- has the person been represented fairly? There are often libel cases where people sue filmmakers- look at the recent Borat film for example. (Though this can also be a marketing ploy.)

//Stereotypes// 

Stereotypes are a subset of representation. A simplified or exaggerated representation taken to categorise a person or social group. Think about your 'stereotypes', what you do think when you think of a teenager, a mother, a pensioner? Do you think they are all like that.

Some directors choose to follow a harmonious path and stay within society's stereotypes of a group, look at <span style="FONT: bold 12px Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; COLOR: #000000">Nanook of the North <span style="FONT: 12px Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; COLOR: #000000">overleaf.

Others attempt to choose a <span style="FONT: bold 12px Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; COLOR: #000000">radical <span style="FONT: 12px Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; COLOR: #000000">path and use their documentary to destroy social stereotypes. Look at Michael Moore's defensive representation of Marilyn Manson in <span style="FONT: bold 12px Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; COLOR: #000000">Bowling for Columbine <span style="FONT: 12px Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; COLOR: #000000">in contrast to the reputable Charlton Heston (or not so anymore!).

Documentary - A Definition for the Digital Age <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Documentary texts are supposedly those which aim to document reality, attempting veracity in their depiction of people, places and events. However, the process of **mediation** means that this is something of a oxymoron, it being impossible to re-present reality without constructing a narrative that may be fictional in places. Certainly, any images that are edited cannot claim to be wholly factual, they are the result of choices made by the photographer on the other end of the lens. Nonetheless, it is widely accepted that categories of media texts can be classed as **non-fiction**, that their aim is to reveal a version of reality that is less filtered and reconstructed than in a fiction text. Such texts are often constructed from a particular moral or political perspective, and cannot therefore claim to be objective. Other texts purport simply to record an event, although decisions made in post-production mean that actuality is edited, re-sequenced and artificially framed. The documentary maker generally establishes a thesis before starting the construction of their text, and the process of documentary-making can be simply the ratification of their idea. Perhaps, to misquote Eco, the objectivity of the text lies not in the origin but the destination? <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The documentary genre has a range of purposes, from the simple selection and recording of events (a snapshot or unedited holiday video) to a polemic text that attempts to persuade the audience into a specific set of opinions (//Bowling For Columbine//). Audiences must identify that purpose early on and will therefore decode documentary texts differently to fictional narratives. Modes of Documentary <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">In his 2001 book, //Introduction to Documentary// (Indiana University Press), Bill Nichols defines the following six modes of documentary <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">These roughly correspond to developmental phases in the genre, when new generations of documentary makers have challenged the forms and conventions that have gone before, and re-invented what documentary means for them. Further Reading
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The Poetic Mode ('reassembling fragments of the world', a transformation of historical material into a more abstract, lyrical form, usually associated with 1920s and modernist ideas)
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The Expository Mode ('direct address', social issues assembled into an argumentative frame, mediated by a voice-of-God narration, associated with 1920s-1930s, and some of the rhetoric and polemic surrounding WW2)
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The Observational Mode (as technology advanced by the 1960s and cameras became smaller and lighter, able to document life in a less intrusive manner, there is less control required over lighting etc, leaving the social actors free to act and the documentarists free to record without interacting with each other)
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The Participatory Mode (the encounter between film-maker and subject is recorded, as the film-maker actively engages with the situation they are documenting, asking questions of their subjects, sharing experiences with them. Heavily reliant on the honesty of witnesses)
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The Reflexive Mode (demonstrates consciousness of the process of reading documentary, and engages actively with the issues of realism and representation, acknowledging the presence of the viewer and the modality judgements they arrive at. Corresponds to critical theory of the 1980s)
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The Performative Mode (acknowledges the emotional and subjective aspects of documentary, and presents ideas as part of a context, having different meanings for different people, often autobiographical in nature)


 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">[|Towards A Definition of Documentary] - a selection of articles from Reality Film
 * [|Definition of Documentary]<span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> - from New Frontiers in American Documentary Film
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">[|What Is A Documentary?]


 * __Magazines__**

The magazine unit will teach you the conventions of magazine design, distribution, regulation and publication. In essence, this means what magazines look like, how they get to be on the shelves of supermarkets, what you can and can't put inside them and how they get published.

Meanwhile, you will be reasearching the question, ' Why do people read magazines? ' and drafting an essay on it. To help you get some ideas about what to include in the essay, you will be designing a questionnaire and surveying a minimum of 20 people to find out their views on the subject.

Once you have completed this, you will have a production phase: (i) making your own magazine front cover and (ii) making a contents page and (iii) making a suitable one-page advert for your magazine. The artefacts you have produced and printed will all need to be evaluated in detail before the end of the assignment.

You will need to show written evidence that you have analysed a range of magazine pages to demonstrate your knowledge of how and why they have been designed as they have and what conventions have been followed or broken.

This link will take you to the [|download page] which will allow you to save and print your own checklist for the magazine unit. As with any unit of work at school, if you don't understand a task your teachers will be expecting you to ask for help.

You have to start somewhere.

Check out some of these sites for magazines aimed at teenage girls and boys. Try to work out what their content tends to be (what's inside) and why this is the case. Also, have a look at the front covers of some of the magazines you read and see if there are any common patterns. For instance, if you asked a friend, 'What wouldyou expect to be on the front cover of the next J17, T3 or Shoot magazine?' what do you think they would say. It is these common patterns (known as codes and conventions in Media Studies) that make a mag recognisable and desirable to a specific target audience.

[|MediaTel on Magazine Circulations using ABC data]

//Something for the girls:// //(some of these are American but they are for teenage girls and young women)//

[|Mizz] [|Bliss] [|Sugar] [|The Face] [|Cosmo] //[|girl]// [|Chica] [|ELLE girl] [|Teen Vogue] [|Q Magazine] [|NME] [|Sidewalk] [|TMAP] The Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel: interesting site for learning about borders of regulation (what is and what is not acceptable).

//Something for the boys//

[|Shoot] [|FourFourTwo] [|90 Minutes] [|Xbox 360] [|Paintball Games International] [|DirtBike Rider] [|Rugby World] [|Sidewalk] [|NME] [|Q Magazine] [|TMAP] The Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel: interesting site for learning about borders of regulation (what is and what is not acceptable).

Click on the file below to revise the labels and terms we use when talking about magazines:

Click on the link below to download a history of magazines: