AS Media Coursework (9500210840) Week 1

Today in Media Studies, I learnt the full meaning of 'drama' and 'representation'. Drama is about recreating and re-representing what goes on in real life. It always has to be believable to the audience. Drama's contain narrative, characters, mise-en-scene, which is everything we see in the shot such as the costume and props, camera-work, dialogue, sound and music.

The characters in a drama are based around stereo-types for the audience to understand and relate to it to make the drama realistic. Drama's usually have the same/similar story lines and based around real life circumstances.They usually contain an opening theme tune such as Eastenders or Waterloo Road.

There are 6 main sub genre's and these are:

Teen Drama's: Such as 'Inbetweeners' and 'Skins'.
Costume, Period Drama.
Medical/Hospital: Such as 'Casualty' and 'Holby City'.
Police Drama: Such as 'The Bill'.
Docu-Drama: Such as 'Roots'.
Soap Opera: Such as 'Eastenders'.

Teen Drama's depend entirely on the target audience relating to the characters and age specific story-lines i.e. teenage pregnancy, drugs, sexuality, self harming and weight issues.

Soap Opera's depend on audience accepting their storyline and seeing their stereo-typical characters as realistic.

Media Catergories

In a Drama's, when we are looking at aspects of stereo-types and representation, we look at things such as:
Gender
Ethnicity
Sexuality
Class and Status
Physical Ability/Disability
Regional Identity
Age

Representation- is an image or something else. It refers to the construction in any medium of aspects of reality such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and abstract concepts. Representation may be speech or writing as well as still or moving pictures. We base our opinion of drama's on what we see them do and how it is represented.

For example, if we look at Eastenders we see a stereo-typical representation of teenagers where they are seen as party animals, heavy drinkers, concerned about their weight and naive and the older people seen as wise and knowledgeable.