Tuesday, 16 November 2010

How is sexuality presented in a short clip of Skins?

The clip begins with an extreme close up of the characters face. As the diegetic sound of the first ring of church bell is heard the character immediatley opens their eyes. It becomes obvious that the charcacter has had little sleep and has been up all night. The camera then slowly zooms out from the view of the chracters face, the camera seems to move slowly almost in time with the church bells. This beginning clip is calm and very little is happening hence why the camera is moving so slowly. When the camera has finished zooming out we notice that the character is lying in the middle of his bed, his quilt covers have the image of a naked man and woman and he is lying inbetween these images. This suggests a number of things to an audience. Firstly the fact he is lying inbetween these two images could suggest this character is confused about his sexuality. This could perhaps be an explanation why the character seems awake already (because he has been up all night worried and confused about his sexuality) Having this type of quilt also suggests a self confident character and a person with pretty layed back parents seeing as most parents would be slightly uncomfortable with the fact their son/daughter has naked people displayed in their room.  Another thing we can see is the way the light is shining on the face of this character, it gives a shadow which seems to shine on each side of his head; this could show two sides to this character. Already in this short clip we can pick up on a fair few narrative codes. For example the church bells are a cultural code to a person living in England. It is well known to people in this country church bells are rang for a Sunday church service. There is also what is known as the enigma code, there are many elements of this short clip that are left unexplained leaving the audience wanting answers to their questions. This makes the audience want to carry on watching to discover the answers to the unexplained events. Examples of the enigma code in this clip include things such as; why is this character awake before his alarm went off and where is the character going once he has woken up.

1 comment:

  1. Lucyann. All this is lacking is Barthes codes. Look back through your work and try and work out where you could mention enigma codes, action codes etc.

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