Glossary

• Active audience: audiences who actively engage in selecting media products to consume and interpret their meanings.

• Audience Categorisation: how media producers group audiences (e.g. by age, gender,
  ethnicity) to target their products.

• Code: a system that uses signs or symbols to convey meaning. 

• Connotation:  the suggested meanings attached to a sign, e.g., the red car
  in the advert suggests speed and power.

• Convention: what the audience expects to see in a particular media text. 

• Crane: any photograph taken using a camera mounted on an automated crane that can lift the camera into the air and move it in any direction. 

• Cross-cutting:going back and forth between scenes in video editing, which frequently gives the impression that events taking place in many locations are happening simultaneously. 

• Cut:a sudden, generally unimportant change in a movie from one scene to another.

• Decode: to translate a coded communication into understandable form. 

• Denotation:aspect of the sign that has a direct relationship with something real (the referent). 

• Desensitization: audience is frequently exposed to graphic or violent material. 

• Diegetic Sounds: sound that comes from the fictional world and can be seen, for example the sound of a gun firing, the cereal being poured into the bowl in an advert, etc.

• Dissolve: a picture-to-picture editing shift that is progressive.

• Diversification: where media organisations who have specialised in producing media products in one form move into producing content across a range of forms. 

• Dolly: the camera may follow a topic while moving forward, behind it, or beside it. 

• Encode: to change a communication system to a different one. 

• Fade: a method of transition or opening shot used by film editors to gradually introduce viewers to fresh visuals rather than cutting abruptly between scenes. 

• Flashback: a literary device used to insert older events into a chronologically ordered chain of events. 

• Genre: media texts can be grouped into genres that all share similar conventions. 

• Hypodermic needle theory: communication theory that contends the recipient fully and directly receives the intended message. 

• Iris: a method used more frequently to close or open scenes in silent movies and television, but occasionally to highlight one particular feature over all others. 

• Mass Audience: traditional idea of the audience as one large, homogenous group. 

• Media Language: the specific elements of a media product that communicate meanings to audiences. 

• Mise-en-scene: all elements in the frame. 

• Negotiated Reading: the audience is aware of a text's intent and implications, yet they may also reject particular portions. 

• Non-Diegetic Sounds: sound that is out of the shot. 

• Oppositional Reading: the audience doesn't understand the text's meaning and may even not pay attention to it. 

• Pan: the camera horizontally and move it around the scene in sweeping motions. 

• Passive audience: the idea (now widely regarded as outdated) that audiences do not actively engage with media products, but consume and accept the messages that producers communicate. 

• Preferred Reading: the content is understood by the audience exactly as the author intended; perhaps they share the same ideological viewpoint. 

• Representations: the way in which key sections of society are presented by the media, e.g. gender, race, age, the family, etc. 

• Reverse Shot: a cinematic device in which two characters are recorded separately from each other from various angles while appearing in the same scene. 

• Reverse Zoom: a method used in movies to alter how far away an object is from the camera affects how it appears from that object's perspective.

• Stereotypes: an exaggerated representation of someone or something. It is also where a certain group is associated with a certain set of characteristics. 

• Tilt: a vertical movement where the camera pivots but the base of the camera stays stationary.

• Track/Tracking: any shot in which there is a physical movement of the camera through the scene, whether it is sideways, forward, or backward.

• Zoom: when a camera's focus length is changed to make the subject appear to be getting closer or farther away.