Understanding More About Codes.
Have you ever seen any movie without climax and ending? Of course no, but have you ever wonder when the time of the ending of the movie? Or when will the climax begin? People will be automatically understand when the ending will appear, when the climax will begin and when the fighting scene over by listening to the background music. The background music is one of the codes in the film. How it affect the whole film? Well we will do more research on those, and how codes actually works, so the audience will probably understand when the scene is, what the director want the audience do.
Codes in term of dictionary mean a system letter or symbol which information can be represented for reason secrecy, brevity, etc.[1] the term of codes is giving signals to other person. Whether the signal could be interpreted as moving signal or gesture signal. I will state more codes in movie rather than any other media since movie is easier to be described and it has lots of codes on it.
Codes in movie could be divided into some particular codes including technical codes, verbal codes, symbolic codes, structure, characters, and narrative conflicts.[2] Codes created because the director of film maker want to tell the audience whether it’s time for climax or time for ending scene. So in order to do that there will be some codes shown before the scene appear. As an example in the horror movie, whenever the ghost wants to appear, the first thing is you will hear the creepy background music, the place will be darker and creepier, and some flashlight will appear. Then within a minute, the ghost appears! That what we called as codes. As the more details will be explain in the next paragraph.
First is the technical code. This is relating with anything that could support the process. From lightning, view of angle, camera position, smoke, sound effect and including effect of the movie. All of those will determine the movie, whether it will be comedy movie, horror, thrilling, or science fiction. The most genre that use lots of codes is horror and thrilling movie. Why? Because in comedy movie, we don’t used lighting a lot, we don’t use smoke or either property a lot. Contradiction with horror movie, there will be lots of lighting effect, smoke, and giving lots of camera positions. So the audience will sense the horror part of the movie better. This is what we called as the power of lighting.
The second part is verbal code. In the word explanation, verbal codes mean, telling people of how the next scene is, but rather telling them it is better to show them. The ‘’show’’ part could be by doing sign signals, gesture signals or eye signals. By doing so, the audience could guess what will happen next and it will make the audience more curious rather than telling them what will happen the next chapter, the ‘’tell’ mean the character will speak like this (for example) ‘’oh god, I can’t take it anymore, I will die, run Elizabeth! I will buy you the time, so run!’’ the next thing that will happen is, of course Elizabeth will run. But in the ‘’show’’ the characters will move and do action like protecting Elizabeth, so Elizabeth could run. See, 2 different actions and it is completely will give different meaning of stories.
The third one is characters. In the movie or story, any narrative, there will be always 2 main characters, the protagonist (hero/heroin) and the antagonist (villain). How to determine which one is villain and which one is the hero? Easy, the hero will be always nice, kind, and being in the story mostly than the other characters, while the villain is mean, evil, and always have the opposite mind with the hero. See, this is what we called as codes of characters. You will determine what role the character is by viewing how much they involved in the story. Sometimes, you could determine the main characters from the title, example: Harry Potter and the chamber of secret, without second thought you will directly said that Harry Potter is the main character.
Narrative codes mean the narrator or perhaps the character will stated the next scene. This is will mostly occur in some comedy movie, which the narrator speaks about the next scene. But most movies won’t use this method, it is quite horrible since the narrator speaks and it will ruin the fun of guessing the next scene. So the director nowadays never uses this kind of method anymore. And you will barely see any like this again.
So, at the end codes provides us many opportunities to understand more about the massage written in the movie. You can see how the directors giving their codes so you could understand how the movie is. By doing so, there will be communication between us and the director. That is code! The purpose of the codes! At the last, codes will always in any art, they provide the media of understanding art, and without it you will never understand what the art is and what the one who create the art want. That is the last part of my essay, I hope I will be much better for the next assignment.
[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/code?s=t
[2] http://www.mediaknowall.com/gcse/keyconceptsgcse/keycon.php?pageID=narrative
http://www.slideshare.net/ElaineHumpleby/media-narrative-codes
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