ACADEMIC THEORY – Semiotic Theory

What is semiology:

”Semiotics, also called semiology, the study of signs and sign-using behaviour. It was defined by one of its founders, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, as the study of “the life of signs within society.” Although the word was used in this sense in the 17th century by the English philosopher John Locke, the idea of semiotics as an interdisciplinary mode for examining phenomena in different fields emerged only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the independent work of Saussure and of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.”

Here’s how they said it works:

Peirce’s seminal work in the field was anchored in pragmatism and logic. He defined a sign as “something which stands to somebody for something,” and one of his major contributions to semiotics was the categorization of signs into three main types: an icon, which resembles its referent (such as a road sign for falling rocks); an index, which is associated with its referent (as smoke is a sign of fire); and a symbol, which is related to its referent only by convention (as with words or traffic signals). Peirce also demonstrated that a sign can never have a definite meaning, for the meaning must be continuously qualified.

Connotation and Denotation

Connotation and Denotation are two principal methods of describing the meanings of words. Connotation refers to the wide array of positive and negative associations that most words naturally carry with them, whereas denotation is the precise, literal definition of a word that might be found in a dictionary.

Here’s what I learned:

Semiotics is about what symbols you or the audience sees in the film that have an impact to the story. For example if a man is having a normal day and something bad needs to happen to change the whole story completely, the producers could have him come home from a day at work and he can see smoke or black cars out side his house. The smoke symbioses that there is a fire in the house and the cars around the house means that there are bad people in the house and they could have done something to the family. Semiotics tells/shows the audience an emotion or make you wonder if anything bad or good is going to happen, without telling them a word or having a character showing an emoting. This will work really well with the shocked expression on the interviewers face when the interviewee tells him that he has killed someone.

Applying to my short film:

I am going to take this into my short film by having the colours grey and dark, also having the walls and furniture modern or have an opening shot of a clock ticking in the corner of the room. This tells us the audience that this is an office and that the interview is going to go poorly or not turn out the way we had hoped.

The costumes will also be a great way to show the audience that the character is a student and want a job at the company.

I am also going to have a clock in the background symbolizing that when the time travel happens it tell the audience that the story has go back in time and we are back to the passed. This makes the audience wonder if the imagination sequences have actually happened or if he was just making them up.

Audio is going to be a key part in my short film as this can symbolizes time travel also. Having a warping bass sound with the following transition shows the audience that the character has gone back in time.

Also a young man holding a pizza boy will tell the audience that he is a pizza deliver boy. Which is also going to be tolled by the interviewer.

Further more, i am also going to be having a small document in the interviewees had showing that he doesn’t want to be there and wants to get things over and done with quickly.

I now need to take a look at Contextual analysis to get some better ideas on how i can make my final effect look better. Also to help me look into the visual effects, as a whole, that are used in films to gather ideas and ways to shoot so that i can do the visual effects.

Ref:

• aesthetics
  • In aesthetics: Symbolism in art
• communication of information
  • In information processing: Basic concepts
• linguistic analysis
  • In positivism: Developments in linguistic analysis and their offshoots
• metalogic
  • In metalogic: Semiotic
• Peirce’s contribution
  • In Charles Sanders Peirce: Work in logic.
• propaganda techniques
  • In propaganda: Signs, symbols, and media used in contemporary propaganda
• semantics
  • In semantics
• thought processes
  • In thought: Elements of thought
• writing systems
  • In writing: Writing as a system of signs