2013 Post 14- Audience Postioning

Audience reception theory

By Stuart Hall in the 1970s, he suggests that when a producer creates a media text it is encoded with meanings or messages that they wish to convey to the audience, whom will then hopefully decode it correctly to understand.

He identified three types of audience decodings:

Dominant- Audience decodes the message as producer desired and agrees

Negotiated- Audience accepts, rejects and/or considers the meaning of a text according to previously held views, often contradictory and includes their own views

Oppositional- Audience understand message but reject it due to political, cultural or ideological reasons, creating their own meaning

A film producer will use familiar codes and conventions, and audience expectations of aspects of genre and stars, to position an audience to agree with a text. This is known as ‘audience placement’ which is used to target an audience and make them believe the text is made ‘for them’. This can incorporate aspects of audience foreknowledge, stereotypes and conventions that an audience may already be familiar with, and audience identification wherein viewers are able to connect to a text if it expresses their lifestyles or attitudes.

Audience Positioning Techniques

Shot reverse shot

• Shot reverse shots are when the camera alternates between two characters to show their building relationship to the audience. This is usually during a conversation so the camera acts as a 'third character'.

• Reaction Shots reveal a character's reaction, usually in an extreme close-up, for the audience to identify an expression they can relate to.

• Point-of-View shots have the camera adopt the position of a character, showing the audience whatever that character sees through their eyes which directly involves them.