Theories

• The use of low-angle shots creates an intimidating effect on the audience as they see the world from the child's point of view.
• High angles shots are often used to show characters looking up towards something above them, such as a skyscraper or a mountain.
• Close Up: A shot that focuses on a specific object or person's face, emphasizing details like facial expressions and emotions.
• Point of View Shot (POV): A shot that shows what a character is seeing through their eyes.
• Tracking Shot: A camera movement where the camera follows a subject moving horizontally across the frame.
• Medium Shot: A shot that shows a character or group of people from midway between their head and feet, allowing viewers to see body language and interactions.
• Long Shot (Wide Shot): A shot that captures a larger area than medium shots, showing more context about the environment and relationships among characters.
• Crane Shot: A camera movement where the camera moves vertically up or down while following a subject.
• Passive Spectator


  Suggests that the audiences for films respond in a fixed way that has been created by the techniques of filmmakers.
• Laura Mulvey - Male Gaze


  The media is created by and for men so attractive women are used to gain Male attention.

  E.G Claire in jurassic world
• Active Spectator

  This spectators response to a film is much more individualized and influenced by personal experiences, values and social contexts
• Blumler and Katz Uses and Gratifications


  They first proposed that audiences actively select media to use for their own benefits (opposed to being passively manipulated)

  How people are judged:

  - Education/Information

  - Personal Identification

  - Social Interaction

  - Escapism/Entertainment
• Stuart Hall


  he said audience created meaning from a text in three ways

  - The creator of the texts Encodes an intended meaning

  - The reader then decodes the meaning

  - The audience then read that text in different ways
• Halls reception theory

  - Preferred reading = the one that is intended by the author

  - Negotiated reading = where the reader recognizes the intended meaning but may not believe or accept the message

  - Oppositional reading = where the viewer may deliberately reinterpret or mistake the meaning and create a new message/response from the text
• Auteur Theory


  a critical method by which a film is viewed as the product of its "auteur" or director and is judged by the quality of its expression of the director's personality or world view; usually used to relate a film to others by the same director.
• Kael

  Says auteur theory 'glorifies trash' from directors making the same film over and over. Says we should watch a film on its own merit, not because of who made it.
• Genre Theory - Steve Neale

  - the idea that genres may be dominated by repetition, but are also marked by difference, variation and change

  - the idea that genres change, develop and vary, as they borrow from and overlap with one another

  - the idea that genres exist within specific economic, institutional and industrial contexts
• representation theory - stuart hall


  -there is not a true representation of people or events in a film, but there are lots of ways these can be represented.

  -filmmakers try to 'fix' a meaning (or way of understanding) people or events in their texts.
• Todorov's narrative theory

  equilibrium, disruption, recognition, repair, new equilibrium
• Propp's Character Theory

  The theory that all characters in conventional narrative structures could be divided into just eight different character types: hero, villain, helper, donor, dispatcher, princess, anti-hero.
• Strauss - Binary Oppositions

  Levi Strauss' binary opposition theory identifies how within films, there is a binary opposite between two characters or forces.