Harvard Referencing

Harvard Referencing Quick Guide

What is referencing?
Referencing is a system used in the academic community to indicate where ideas, theories, quotes,
facts and any other evidence and information used to undertake an assignment, can be found.

Why do I need to reference my work?

• To avoid plagiarism, a form of academic theft.

• Referencing your work correctly ensures that you give appropriate credit to the sources and authors that you have used to complete your assignment.

• Referencing the sources that you have used for your assignment demonstrates that you have undertaken wide-ranging research in order to create your work.

• Referencing your work enables the reader to consult for themselves the same materials that you used.

What do I need to reference?
All the information that you have used in your assignment will need to be acknowledged. It is
essential to make a note of all the details of the sources that you use for your assignment as you go
along.

The basics
Harvard is known as the Author & Date system:

1. Citations in the text of your assignment should be made following the in-text guidelines given in
the examples on the following pages.
2. A complete list of all the citations used in your text will need to be provided at the end of your
assignment. This is called your reference list or bibliography and needs to be presented in
alphabetical author/originator order. 

18 Conventions of film trailers

17 The Conventions of Magazine Covers

We have covered a lot of this already but some of you need refreshing.

http://dls-media-as-1314.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/facial-expression.html

The generic conventions of magazines cover from jenmcnulty

One Main Image that takes up most of the cover

• Usually the main feature article. - Studio photographs as opposed to a paparazzi shot, 
• usually in mediumclose-up or mid shot 
• - Direct mode of address.

Masthead or Title

• Has a trademark, a unique font. - Usually consists of one or two words.
• Fills the width of the cover, or is in the top left corner. 
• Positioning statement – how the magazine positions itself in the marketplace against the competition - Price and issue sometimes near to the barcode, date near title this is often (11pt size).
• Puff
• offers something else to the magazine such as free giveaways
•  Buzz words 
•  usually with the main feature article. Used to attract attention e.g. “EXCLUSIVE, FREE, PLUS” 
• Barcode 
• This will be positioned at the bottom right, or up the right side. Along with it will sometimes be the date/month of edition, price, website and issue number
• Coverlines 
• lines of text on the front cover designed to attract the audience’s attention and make them pick the magazine up and look inside. 
• Main Coverline 
• This is the largest text on the cover after the title and it anchors the meaning of the image. Usually a sub line in smaller text giving more information about the article. Other cover lines are usually one or two words with sub lines explaining them. Some are used to intrigue the reader. These must represent the stories inside. There are only 5 or 6 and they are positioned down the sides, framing the image, so the main image is not covered. These are usually in the same font to create a distinctive design.
• Strip 
• across the top or bottom containing lists of items which feature in the magazine. This conveys the magazine is full of interesting stories and the audience is getting value for money.
•  Colour – often a limited palette is used with a simple colour scheme adding to the distinctive design.

17 Conventions of film posters

How To Analyse a Film Poster

When analysing any film poster you need to consider the following points:

Begin by identifying the film and date of its release.

• Types of poster: Identify which type of poster it is:

The Teaser poster -This poster contains basic information to whet your appetite. It often does not indicate much about the plot, but may have a picture of the stars, and the name of the film.

The main theatrical poster- This contains information about the production personnel, the stars, and the distributors.

Video/DVD release poster - This one comes out when the film is released on DVD/video and often has all of the above plus short, one line reviews from relevant publications.

Identify the Genre
eg an action film will nearly always have images of guns/weapons, a Romance will always have the 2 lovers in very close physical proximity... etc...

Character Poster – this one features the main character. Remember that the posters could be a combination of two types.

• Images of the key settings and the main characters. What is the title of the film? What can you say about the way in which the title graphics have been written? Who is starring in the film? Where are the stars’ names placed on the poster? Why? Describe the key images on your poster. Why have they been chosen? Write about the images used - stars, setting, colours, symbols, (mise-en-scene). What do they suggest/signify? What other pictures can you see? What is their purpose? What are the most important colours on your poster? Why do you think these were chosen? What do you think the film will be about? Who is the target audience?

• Narrative: What clues are there to the narrative? What can you tell about the genre of the film and the types of characters from their facial expression, body language, stance, appearance and position on the poster? What makes you say this? What impression do you get of the character/personalities from their expression, clothes, props. Is there an enigma being presented? Is the poster composed of a series of images (montage, lack of perspective) Is the key image a still from the film?

• Colours: What colours are used in the poster? Are they relevant to the genre e.g. horror posters generally use dark strong colours especially black and red to represent death and evil. Romance films tend to employ lighter pastel and warm colours such as pinks, purples and other warm shades. Are the colours on your poster important? Why? What clues do they give about the genre, and how do they attract the target audience?

• Layout: analyse how the images are laid out. Are they are blended in without any concern for real perspective or size relationships between people and setting? Why do you think they are laid out like that? Do you know what the plot, genre and/or theme of the film is? If so, how? Most posters are portrait or landscape in shape. What shape is yours? Describe and discuss the title, font, typeface and graphics on the poster. What style are they in and where are they positioned etc? has the poster been painted and printed or produced using DTP ( mention how improvements in technology have changed production values).

• Written Text: scan the poster's written text. What does film's title and its font look like and what does this connote? Is there a catch or tagline? What does it tell us about the action, genre and attitude within the film? Who do you think is the target audience for the film? How has the poster been made attractive to these people? Discuss the billing/credit block. What information does it include about credits and information? Do we get information about who is in the cast, who directed the film, which company distributes it and promotes it etc? Where is the certificate? What does it indicate about the target audience and the content of the film? Does the poster list a website? If not, why not?

•  What is the USP (the unique selling point) in each poster? What makes it different from other films? The plot, stars, themes, setting or characters?

• Don't forget GENRE

eg an Action film will nearly always have images of guns/weapons, a Romance will always have the 2 lovers in very close physical proximity... etc..

• Poster conventions in general

General colour palette/codes throughout is essential for the poster.

Pale blue backlighting and fluorescent greens here relate to sci-fi genre. Other conventions relate to thriller, action adventure.

Correct choice of font and arrangement of letters to engage the viewer.

Connotations of words used should relate to the genre.

'Their Flesh is his Fantasy'

Coming soon or release date - at the bottom of this poster:

• Icons of the film genre - Gun and Liam Neeson on a plane here:

• Have a main focal picture to relate to

• Large title like Saul Bass' design here:

• Age certification

• Tagline
• A tagline must spark a reaction out of the audience without revealing too much of the documentary. It must make them know enough to want to see it but not too much that they feel they know enough already. For example; 'Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back In The Water'

• Awards
• You want to entice the audience to go and see the film so having awards on the film poster which the film has won will help the audience to be convinced to go and see the film.

• Quotes and Reviews
• Most posters have quotes from newspapers of film magazines which again entice the audience to go and see the thing being advertised.

• Directors Name
• Often the name of the director is on the poster connoting their importance in the creation of this product. If the director is well kwon then prominence of his name will help to attract the audience.

• Task 1:
• If your coursework involves film posters then you should use Word or Powerpoint to annotate the text.
• If your coursework does not involve film posters then you should use Word or Powerpoint to annotate the poster below which is to promote the film Kick Ass

• 
  
• 
  

16 Connotations of colour

Learning Objective: To apply colour theory to texts

Key words:

Color surrounds us everyday of our lives.

Each color conveys a feeling.

The psychology of color evaluates what each color portrays.

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It's suggested that the color red creates the feeling of excitement, strength, sex, passion, speed, and danger.

RED

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While green gives more of a relaxing feeling.  Green is also suggestive of nature and freshness. The colour of new beginnings.

Symbolizes nature, calming, refreshing, growth, harmony, fertility, safety, healing, and freedom. 

Green is easy on the eyes and non-invasive. 

Darker hues of green tend to be more masculine and conservative. Dark greens are often linked to the financial world (wall street, wealth, money). Lighter hues of green (aqua, olive) are good for healing or peaceful purposes.

GREEN

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Blue suggests trust, security, reliability, belonging, and coolness.

The police are known as the boys in blue.

Holds mostly positive connotations: peaceful, calming, tranquility, loyalty, nature (sky, ocean), depth, stability, trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, spiritual, productivity, cleansing, and health. On the flip side, blue can also be representative of cold and depression.

Blue is considered a masculine color, and is more commonly preferred by men over women. It’s a good color to wear to job interviews and a wise choice for promoting high tech products, as it suggests precision and strength. Tests have shown that people in blue colored rooms tend to be more productive. Weight lifters have also been shown to be able to lift greater amounts of weight in blue colored gyms.

It’s advised to not use blue in association with anything food or cooking related, as it suppresses the appetite. Blue, when combined with warm colors like yellow or red, can create high impact and vibrant designs. Blue is often considered to be the safest global color.

Darker blues tend to more represent depth, expertise, stability, power, seriousness, and integrity. Dark blue is commonly used in the corporate world. 

Lighter hues of blue are often used for anything relating to healing, tranquility, Freshness and softness.

BLUE

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Violet is the color of dignity, spirituality, wealth, royalty, and magic.

Combines the stability of blue and the energy of red. 

Terms associated with purple include: royalty, ambition, wealth, sophistication, femininity, creativity, mystery, nobility, magic, independence, and romance. Because purple appears little in nature, it can often appear artificial. Because of this; it’s advisable to not use purple in designs trying to portray a sense of “natural”.

According to surveys, about 75% of pre-adolescent children prefer purple to all other colors. 

Lighter colored purples tend to evoke romantic and nostalgic feelings while darker purples more commonly convey gloom, sad feelings, and frustration.

PURPLE

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Black can suggest hate in some cases, but on the other hand it can suggest sophistication, elegance, seductiveness, and mystery.
Black is used commonly to advertise luxury cars.  This has to deal with the fact that black symbolizes authority, sophistication and power.  So someone who wants to feel in control of their car and important would probably lean towards a black car.It is a formal colour, worn to black tie dinners.


 The black leather jacket is a symbol of rebellion.

BLACK

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The opposite of black is white which is considered pure, virginal, clean, and youthful.

The feeling can also coincide with light and hope.

Innocence, purity, goodness, cleanliness, perfection, safety, positive, faith, cleanliness, cold, virginity, safety. A wise color choice for use with charitable organizations, hospitals, and anything trying to show safety or purity. A neutral colour.

WHITE


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Yellow, a color that obviously suggests the sunshine and the warmth the sun provides.  It's also a very happy color that conveys hope.

The exciting colour of health and happiness.

YELLOW

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Another bright color is orange which is a very playful, warm and vibrant color.  

It is a dynamic cross between red and yellow, the colour of movement.

Estate agents use orange as ado parcel delivery companies.

Also a healthy colour like... er oranges!

ORANGE

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All these colors and more are used in marketing and media because of all the different feelings they are able to convey. 

Colour symbolism summary

Red – importance – passion – love - danger

 Orange – health – movement -dynamism

 Yellow – warmth – permanence

 Green – freshness – beginning- youth– newness

 Blue – cool – sad - authority-trust

 Purple – wealth - luxury - power

 Black – evil – formality - mourning - simplicity - sophistication

 White – innocence – purity – formality - sophistication

 Neutral – urban - sophistication


Task 1:
Webdramas are short films that have to use cliches and many devices such as colour symbolism to attract a loyal audience.

Watch this episode of the webdrama Anyone but Me and note down the connotations of the colours that are used in the mise en scene.

Restaurants, car dealerships, clothing stores, commercials, television programs, etc. use color to convey a feeling to address to their audience.

Fast food restaurants are famous for using their bright colors to bring in the customers and get rid of them fast. That's why it's called fast food. Then there's also restaurants that use colors that are more welcoming that make you want to sit down and relax with friends and family. These are generally the more expensive restaurants. Below are examples of these restaurants:

some restaurants use darker colors in order to cause this cozy feeling. Another reason they may use dark rich colors is to cause an intimate setting. They also use dimmed lighting. This lighting helps increase this warm setting. Now on the other hand night clubs may use dark colors to get across this sense of sophistication. Black or white is used to create a crisp and clean cut area. Wendy's is a classic example of the use of bright colors. Both red and yellow are generally used with the Wendy's fast food chains. The red is vibrant and draws the eye to the restaurant. Then they also use yellow which is bright and happy. The two colors are fun and attract to all customers. No specific group is necessarily targeted; everyone is targeted. When it comes to marketing Wendy's has left it's mark. I don't know about everyone else, but when I think of Wendy's their main colors yellow and red pop in my head. This deals with the fact that all their marketing is in-sync. Their commercials show their red and yellow palette when their showing off their food. Then they decorate the restaurant to fit with those colors. This further more creates the restaurants image.

Although color is crucial when it comes to marketing.  There are still things you must look out for.  One in particular is your audience.  Colors have different meanings in other cultures.  

For example, in the U.S white is a color of purity.  This is why brides usually wearwhite, because it's a virginal symbol.  Now on the other hand white is the color of death in China.  

Now in the U.S black is known for symbolizing death.  This is why almost everyone wears black to a funeral.  

 The color purple symbolizes death in Brazil.  Where as in the U.S it's more a color of dignity, royalty and spirituality.

Yellow symbolizes warmth and sunshine in the U.S.  Yet, in France it symbolizes jealousy and in Greece it symbolizes sadness.

In the U.S we associate green with the color of jealousy because it's the color of money.  

Since there are all of these variations of meanings behind colors you must use the right method to target your audience.  Also you can't always generalize what colors mean to people. This is because sometimes people look at color differently.  It can symbolize different things because of someone's experience with it.

All in all color is crucial when it comes to marketing. You must target your specific audience and decide what color means to them.   

http://www.sibagraphics.com/colour.php

The role of Mediation

Representation- The role of selection, construction and anchorage in creating representations.

You will provide anchorage for given newspaper images within different texts.

Key words: Formal, direct, colloquial, hyperbole, imperative.

You will need to be familiar with the following media studies terms:

Selection: 

The idea that producers and audiences are both selective, eg: editors select the news from that day's events and audiences select what to watch and remember.

Construction: 

The idea that a media text is not a window on the world but is  a product of individuals in organisations making decisions over the selection of content. In other words; we see what they want us to see.

Anchorage: 

A way of ‘tying down meaning’, without anchorage meaning could be polysemic – open to various interpretations, eg a caption anchors meaning to a photo, music anchors mood in a media text.

The Construction and Mediation of Representations

A news photograph for example may appear to be presenting us with a factual image but before it goes to print it has been through a process of construction:

• The photographer has selected his/her position, lens, angle, exposure and framing before taking the picture.

• The picture editor will decide if the image needs to be cropped, enhanced or in any way altered before inclusion into the paper.

• An editor will choose which, of the many available photographs of the image, will be the one chosen for inclusion in the newspaper and, importantly at this stage, the images which do not meet the needs of the text will be rejected.

Even then, further mediation takes place:

• Will the photograph be large or small?  
• Will the photograph be on the front page or, less visible, on page 8?

Placement choices like this, along with cropping and framing, act to focus the attention of the reader in a certain way.

• What headline and text will be used to accompany the photograph?

• Will the photograph have a caption?

• Will it be positioned close to another photograph?

Anchorage is basically used in media to attach meaning to something through either the matching of words to images or the juxtaposition of two images which construct a meaning.

For example in advertising, an image alone is polysemic open to a range of interpretations. To clarify what the image means and so to make the image relevant to the purpose of the advert, text can be added. Thus the image serves as the 'hook' while the text anchors meaning. This can be said also for photographs attached to newspaper articles. The same photograph takes on different connotations with different accompanying texts.

Media Bias

Omitting information

  700 women said this product made their skin softer!

-but didn’t tell you 20,000 tried it!

___________________________________________________________

                                        Media Bias

Word Choice

Idiot pulls traffic stunt. 

______________________________________________________

Daredevil halts traffic

Both headlines are about the story of a man abseiling down the Forth Road Bridge

___________________________________________

Task 1: 
Open this image in Photoshop and using anchorage, give two captions that would represent the picture in different ways. Consider two different audiences the editor might target.
You will need to create a new layer and use the text tool to type with.

Selection

Whatever ends up on the screen or in the newspaper, much more will have been left out. Any news story has been selected from hundreds of others which the producers have decided were less interesting for you, any picture has been chosen from an enormous number of alternatives.

Omission is knowing about something but just refusing to focus on it or bring light to the facts.

In 2005, the New York Times knew about the Bush Administration using Telecom companies (Verizon, AT&T, etc.) to spy on Americans. The story was held back for over a year as the Times received pressure from Bush White House to kill the story. The Times didn't kill the story completely but they did wait until after the November 2006 elections before they actually reported on Bush Administration breaking the law

Mediation

Every time we encounter a media text, we are not seeing reality, but someone’s version of it. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is something that is easily forgotten when we get caught up in consuming a text. 
If you see a picture of a celebrity kissing her boyfriend, you may find it unsurprising that the picture has been altered and does not show the reality of the situation, but in fact we should bear this in mind whatever we encounter in the media. 
Media producers place us at one remove from reality: they take something that is real, a person or an event and they change its form to produce whatever text we end up with. 
This is called mediation. You should be looking for this with any media text.

What the BBC classified as ‘riots’ in London become ‘protests’ in Beitounya

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The persistence of class and its visibility or invisibility

It used to be easy to signify through physical appearance that a figure stood for wealth or poverty. C19th charity pioneers like Dr Barnado used images of thin, ragged street urchins to appeal to the conscience of the wealthier.

One of the images Dr Barnado used in his ads

Third world charities still do this and until recently, cartoonists have often used large body size and decorative dress as an indicator of wealth. The fat capitalist or the greedy lord.

It is a kind of code.

Changes to this code help us glimpse the complex ways in which class divisions are now shown - or not shown.

It is more likely now that a well toned, slim or even thin body is the result of a careful diet and affluence (enough disposable income to shop for healthy food and a gym membership) rather than food shortage.  

However, aspirations to this appearance can lead to anorexia or bulimia. Of course poverty can still lead to rickets and thin bodies.

It is also possible that expensive looking clothes, jewelry, even cars may conceal people with huge levels of debt. Sometimes people want to conceal their economic position. This makes things complicated for the media studies student who is looking for clues to social class. Unlike researching for clues to gender or ethnicity.

Obesity in some cultures is prized as evidence of having plenty to eat. In the developed world it can have connotations of cultural and material deprivation or addictions. 

Genetics or a refusal to be a slave to fashion can be the reason.

The attitude to bodies is complicated and greed is often said to be the cause of being overweight.

Ideology shifts the blame away from the very addictions which which often result from the marketing practices of many junk food brands.

The 1980's saw celebrations of extreme wealth and justifications of corporate greed - at the time it was called growth and seen as virtuous. The word Yuppie was used to describe these young urban professionals.

This kind of wealth is hardly ever represented as directly related to the labour of those who mostly produce the wealth on display - working people.

In 2005 two moral panics surfaced which clearly involved class differences. Young people known as Chavs and Hoodies were accused in the media of anti social behaviour. Much of the media attack was conducted through a fascination with dress and other codes of appearance.

The website Popbitch.com circulates many of these abusive terms.

Task 2: 

Look at media images of stars, royalty and other outwardly wealthy people. Describe how huge wealth is signified visually in terms of body size and dress. Compare the representations to the large stomached, top hatted characters of the C19th.

200 words - orange books.

Task 3 Homework:

Moving on to ideological points, how often is extreme wealth discussed in relation to inequalty? View this article and then identify and discuss three media texts which can be said to illustrate the growing class divide.

200 words - orange books or blogs

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-29641109

Marxism understands class as the antagonistic social formations created and perpetuated in the process of production, between owners of and workers within industry.