Dominant Reading

Here's our blog of my team's dominant reading for our film opening scene project

This is just a quick catch up session that we did as a group. We thought it would be a good idea to check what our intended dominant readings are for the different things being represented in our film opening. We have recently learned about Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory with Dominant, Oppositional, and Negotiated readings. For our media text to be successful, we want to make sure the message is clear and able to reach the correct audience. Below we will discuss our intended readings, and compare them to the intended readings we made in our Statement of Intent earlier on in the project. It will be interesting to see if our ideas have evolved.

 

	List	Our intended  Dominant Reading	How we will achieve this with technical elements
Individuals	Greg, Kenneth, Max	Kenneth = a paranoid  teenager  Greg = Kenneth's good friend, mindful of his surroundings  Max = careless, ignorant teenager	Kenneth  Mise en scene: The actor constantly looks at his surroundings and whatever's around him.  Camera: There is a close up of his concerned expression. There are also medium shots of his concerned body language. The camera pans from Kenneth to what he is looking at.  Editing: Multiple cuts of different camera angles. There is also an eyeline match of kenneth looking to his surroundings  Sound: Diegetic sounds of rustling leaves and footsteps of the stalker.  Greg  Mise en scene: The actor performance contained looking for his friend (kenneth) when he disappeared  Camera: There is a tracking shot of him trying to follow Kenneth's tracks. Medium shots of his body language turning around to find Kenneth.  Editing: Multiple cuts of different camera angles. There is also a reaction shot  of his worried face and Kenneth's “blood”.  Sound: Diegetic sounds of the actor’s dialogue contained words that worried about Kenneth after he disappeared.  Max Mise en scene: The actress carries headphones and has her emotionless expression when the camera focuses on her.  Camera: There are close up shots of her expressions that show that she doesn’t really care.
Social group	Teenagers	Teenagers should not be left alone without adult supervision.	There are multiple camera angles / close up shots of the paranoia of the teenagers. There is a tracking shot scene where Kenneth gets killed. The body language of both Greg and Kenneth are shaky and scared.
Places	Forest	Forests are a bad place to hangout.	There will be low key lighting that’s used to present the place. Many bushes and leaves will be used that hides hidden cameras that makes the scene unsafe for the characters and the audience.  Discordant non diegetic sounds will be used.
Events	Murder	Murder is bad / traumatic.	There is a medium shot of Greg worried for kenneth. A close up shot where he is shocked at the blood splatter. There is blood in some scenes and the color red on blood is a semantic code for death, anger, etc.
Overall Message	Teenagers shouldn’t be left alone in the forest because tragedies may happen as a result of murder.

How similar is it to the statement of intent ?

I think this is almost 90% similar to our statement of intent. Some of the similarities are,

• The name of the characters. Each character is either named greg, max or kenneth just like what our group discussed in the statement of intent.

• We represented places using low key lighting and a monochrome color palette which is what we said in our statement of intent which appeals to our horror audiences as well. 

•   In both the dominant reading and the statement of intent we have murder as one of the main action and a message that it is traumatic and bad. 

However, 

• We changed the storyline from a bunch of detective to a bunch of reckless teenagers who are left alone in the forest hanging out which changes the overall message / the dominant reading to the social group.

• The dominant reading or main message has also changed from "Always go home early, never go out at night alone. " to " Teenagers shouldn’t be left alone in the forest because tragedies may happen as a result of murder."

Self Reflection: 

I think this dominant reading make us reflect on the main meaning of our movie and what we want our audience to feel and think about when they watch our movie introduction. We also realize we changed some things from our statement of intent which is normal since we change the characters and some of the storyline of our original draft. Overall, hopefully our audience would get the same messages.