Media Theorists, and Creativity Revisited

My latest task was to research a particular media theorist in terms of narrative structures. I chose Roland Barthes, an influential 70s postmodernist who wrote several books, one of which was an auto-biography where he analysed himself as a text.

His most famous piece of work is probably the idea of the 'author' and the 'scriptor', otherwise known as 'The Death of the Author'. Barthes' theory is that instead of the author being the one to give meaning to a text, it is now the readers own experience and knowledge of conventions that brings meaning to a text. In conjuction with this, he also described media texts as being either 'open' or 'closed'. An open media texts could have any number of threads of meaning, all depending on the readers experience. Whereas a closed text could only have one main thread of meaning. These 'threads' of meaning were decided by Barthes as being 'narrative codes', and he categorised 5 of them:

• Action/proiarectic code & enigma code (Answers and Questions)#
• Symbols and Signs
• Points of Cultural Reference
• Simple Description/reproduction

This information I have learnt from a handy site which has all kinds of articles on different media concepts, one which I found while researching.

Conventions of a documentary

While researching the conventions that I may be influenced by in the making of my documentary, I came across a site that handily listed all the conventions they found. Most of the conventions on that page I agree with, and can certainly be found in what you may consider to be a stereotypical documentary. However, I recently watched a documentary from the BBC 'Horizons' range, presented by Alan Davis, titled 'How long is a piece of string?'. This documentary lived up to most of the conventions expressed on the earlier link, but definitely involved a few other elements that I think are becoming more apparent in recent documentaries.

The element of comedy is becoming a larger part of documentaries, certainly ones which involve a particularly large amount of science or difficult concepts. I think this is done to try and keep the viewer interested and not loose them in the understanding of the material being discussed. Certainly in the example I've given, Alan Davis - who is fairly well known as a light-hearted comedian on panel show 'QI' - brings the opinion of the everyday viewer who isn't a professor of mathematics into the program.

Unfortunatly my attempt at getting my crew together for some filming failed, most of them could make it but one of the key people had to pull out last minute, which kind of wrecked it. I am planning another one quite soon. In the meantime I am going to start the planning of the ancillary texts, most likely the double page spread of a magazine first.

Horizons: How long is a piece of string? Part 1