Audience

Audience in your blog:

Audience profile – 1 post detailed, with visual illustration

Audience research – 1 post for now, updates as you produce more work in progress. Show the audience work in progress: this could include moodboards, storyboards, animatics, actor photos, costume ideas, location pictures … Give details of responses from your Facebook group, and for a high grade, at least one filmed focus group.On Facebook, ask specific questions, not ‘what do you think of this’ type questions. For example: ‘What genre of music do you think this moodboard suggests?’; ‘What one word would you use to describe this storyboard?’; ‘Would you like to be friends with this girl?’. In a focus group, your questions can be more open and you can use follow up questions if you need more information.

Later you should do regular blog posts updating on what your audience think of work in progress.

Audience theory – 1 post answering the following questions and mentioning Morley

Cultural Studies Approach to audience: according to Morley, audiences aren’t just passively affected by media texts – they take an active role in reading a text. How might audiences read the values expressed in your video and print work in a preferred, negotiated and oppositional way? What are you going to do to encourage the target audience to take a preferred reading? What kind of person might take an oppositional reading?

Reminder of cultural studies approach:


The Cultural Studies Approach Perspective on Audience:

• Developed within the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. BCCCS, principally by David Morley.

• Attempts to understand how the media might be powerful and influence audiences (effects research), but also encourages researchers to understand the active nature of certain audiences (uses and gratifications theory).


The approach tries to understand the intended effects of media texts, but also sees audiences as active, stating that different audiences adopt different standpoints in relation to the values expressed within a media text. These different standpoints are:


• Preferred (or dominant) reading (Morley) - the audience recognise the values being offered by the text and accepts them as natural and correct.

• Negotiated reading (Morley) - the audience recognisethe values in the text as legitimate and accept them in general, but adapt their reading of the text to fit in with their experiences and interest.

• Oppositional reading (Morley) - the audience understands the values in the text, but disagrees with them and rejects them.
For example, take a print advert which represents a sexually objectified women as a victim of violence.



• A preferred reading would be



• A negotiated reading might be .....



• An oppositional reading might be produced by someone concerned by violence against women who would completely reject the values offered by the advert, and would see it as degrading and offensive to women.