Dominant Reading

Last week we learnt about dominant reading, here is a blog where me and my groups discuss our dominant reading. We did this as a group.

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	Panji: Sagara: Alex: Bamz: Lamiya:	Panji: A young delinquent with a troubled upbringing, leader of his own gang. Others: Followers of Panji, also young people.	Panji: We displayed this through mise-en-scene, the character was wearing a puffer jacket, white t-shirt, baggy jeans, and hip shoes. The clothing displays the characters youth, still willing to keep up with today's clothing trends, the choice of it though symbolizes his carelessness and unwillingness to conform to clothing etiquette as they aren’t formal or proper. His performance also conveys a message to the audience that he is lazy, unserious. Others: Symbolized as followers as they were often displayed behind the main character, follows similar clothing styles to the main character, symbolizing Panji as the leading figure.
Social group	Male, Young teens, rebellious.	People who enjoy crime movies. Teenagers who see themselves as rebellious and anti-establishment, viewing this movie would enforce their self proclaimed identity.	Our film opening consists entirely of young teenage actors, thus allowing them to relate and place themselves in the shoes of the characters within the opening. Only including male characters would also make our film opening resonate better or maybe even exclusively with male teenage audiences. The setting they’re in may also reflect this, the delinquents are hanging out in an abandoned area, showing their desire to be disconnected from the rest of society.
Places	Abandoned theme park. (Taman Bali Festival) Restaurant. (Cosmic Diner)	People who likes unique and chaotic sceneries	We will include unique sceneries in our background.
Events	Vandalism (not a serious crime), teenage gang	People who are into art and loves to spray paint on walls	We displayed this by showing a lot of graffiti on walls, and taman bali festival is an abandoned place, so every corner there's graffiti, In one of our scenes it shows some of the characters
Overall Message	Gangs are bad.. But maybe they’re cool??

How are these similar or different from your Statement of Intent?

   The similarities are that our film opening still is entirely made up male teenage actors, this also means that our intended demographic and psychographic stills stays the same as our statement of intent. The characters in the movie are still portrayed as rebellious delinquents, who act in a gang though it pretty much is entirely a social group gang, they still act and are portrayed as delinquents and somewhat negatively, though things like their faces, hair and outfit probably don’t reflect it all too well. The film opening will also still contain an inner monologue as we stated previously, and will pretty much serve as the main source of characters speaking. We also still used the same location (taman bali festival and cosmic diner) as it still fits best with our desired genre and vibe.

   Aside from that, the film's opening is almost entirely different. The activity that the gang and the members are doing is different, in the statement of intent we stated that they’d rob adults and unsuspecting people and hang around in alleyways, in our actual shooting the actors are pretty much just hanging around as a group, vandalizing an abandoned place which may not be considered a crime, and carrying a singular knife. The general synopsis of our film opening has also changed, originally it was meant to be placed in a civilized town with action and actual serious crimes being committed, but the film opening we shot does not include any of that, the opening also doesn’t really show any sorts of reflection or regret, rather that the character is embracing it, and seeing it simply as a social friend group. We did not include an adult. The dominant reading we originally had which originally was supposed to deter kids from join gangs, if anything the film opening we had might encourage them as they look cool and chill, though the setting they’re in might still make them have second guesses.

Self Reflection:

Our film went through so much revisions and reshoots, after multiple feedbacks and criticism, we created something else entirely different so much so that the dominant reading changed entirely, however even with that happening, the dominant reading gave us some reassurance and a solid idea on what to make to match it as close as possible to the old dominant reading.