Semiotics Theory Lesson

Semiotics = study of signs.

Paradigm

• Ideal example of something. A list of something that all have something in common. 
• For example, cowboys/ranch/horse/guns = paradigm of a Western film
• E.g alphabet/math symbols/type of hat/music note 
• E.g in film; cuts and dissolve changes the meaning 
• 3 types of signs = 
• Symbols - only understand because you've learnt it 
• Indexes - Direct connection with something 
• Icons - Looks like something 

Syntagm 

• Combination of signs you put together.
• E.g Cat changes to Hat when one sign is changed - changes meaning 
• E.g an equation - 1 + 1 = 2 or 1 x 1 = 1

Substitution (The Communication Test)

• Changing a sign for another sign, which changes the meaning from the paradigm. 

Radio Trailer Statistics

I know the effect that film posters and TV advertisements have in terms of publicising films to the world and so i wanted to see whether radio trailers are just as successful. In order to do this, I conducted research to see how many listeners tune in and hear each film radio trailer. The results were staggering and I was shocked to see that BBC radio 2 had around 15.5 million listeners per week. Radio 1 and 2 also have an incredible amount of listeners with around 10 million each per week. These statistics show just how effective radio trailers are and will be for our film in terms of advertising.

Filming Problems

There were several problems that occurred when we were filming the footage for our film. One of the main problems was due to our actor not being able to film on the days that we needed to. This meant that the footage that we had already filmed had to be discarded and we had to find another actor. This took a lengthy period of time and meant that we had to film all of our footage at the last minute. This caused us a small amount of stress and didn't make things easy as a whole. If we were to do the filming again we would definitely consult the actor first and make sure that they are both reliable and free on the occasions we needed them to film.

Rough Poster.

Problems With Filming.

   In the past week, we found that there were a few issues with completing our original film. because of issues with our actor not wanting to complete the filming with us, it meant we had to re-film the entire film again, giving us much more work to do and setting us back quite a bit. However, this has helped us in a way as we have treated the original as a sort of 'trial run' meaning that because we had already filmed the whole thing once, we knew exactly what we had to do this time round making the overall process much quicker.
We were extremely disappointed that the original actor would not complete the film as we had already had issues which meant we weren't as far on with things as we would have liked. This included the computer we had originally started editing on breaking, and loosing our footage. We feel much more confident about the process this time round because we have reliable actors and understand the shots that were missing/need replacing.
Hopefully, we will have completed our rough edit this week, meaning that if there ends up being anything we have forgot to include, we can get on with it straight away with no problems.