Media terms

Media terms

Realism/ realists and anti realists

• Realism - in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation.

Series and serials

• A series has a set number of episodes making a season of episodes, in each episode of a series you know there will be an end e.g : skins.
• A serial is an ongoing set of episodes that never usually ends or goes on for an extremely long time e.g: a soap (eastenders).

Linear - non linear

Linear - is a show that goes in chronological order , it never goes back in time it just goes on and carrys on with the ongoing time at a realistic pace. (the inbetweeners movie)

Non linear - is a show that changes its time, it might go back in time or forward intime but it has an element where the time is changed in the episode. for example: back to the future (film).

Single strand - Multi strand narratives

• single strand in film follows one character or plot and doesnt add extra stories into the film, for example the film Ironman.
• multi strand in film includes several characters which form the focus of the narrative. for example a soap opera is a multi strand narrative as it contains several stories at once.

Anchorage and anchor

anchorage is the linguistic elements in a text such as a caption can serve to anchor the preferred readings of an image. (conversely th eillustrative use of an image can "anchor" an ambigious verbal text).

Denotation - is the literal meaning of an image or sign.

Connotation - is the socio-cultural and personal associations (ideological, emotional etc.) of a sign or image.

Open narrative - Casual viewing, without the sense of an ending. For example, soaps proceed as though they could never end. Characters are not usually in a marked hierarchy but shift in and out of prominent roles and characters. Characters also shift in and out of narrative function.

Closed narrative - The audience are aware there watching a film\episode that will end in a certain amount of time e.g. : two hour's. therefore the audience are watching with the thought of the story ending in mind. Time is usually very compressed: two hours of screen time constructs events as happening over months, years, sometimes centuries.

Iconography - is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images.

• Realists - create everyday characters, situations, dilemma's, and objects, all in a "true to life" manner. they also tend to commonplace theme's.

• Anti realist's - the term anti-realism is used to describe any position involving either the denial of an objective reality of entities of a certain type or the denial that verification-transcendent statements about a type of entity are either true or false.