The document discusses several theorists relevant to documentary filmmaking: - GLARN focuses on genre, language, audience, representation, and narrative. The document applies these areas to the production process. - Stuart Hall discusses how meaning is mediated through perspective and decoded depending on audience. Meaning can be preferred, negotiated, or oppositional. - Ferdinand de Saussure founded semiotics, the study of signs and symbols. He argued that texts are saturated with signifiers implying how content should be interpreted. Signifiers represent signified concepts.

1. THEORISTS

2. • Theory is important when trying to plan the production of my documentary so I have researched
into GLARN.
• •Genre-following generic patterns of repetition and difference
• •Language-For example signs and symbols that represent a subculture
• •Audience-using the dialect of your target audience
• •Representation-how have you represented your subjects
• •Narrative- Developing a narrative arc in your production.
• I have then tried to apply these areas to my production process, in order to make my product as
successful as possible.

3. STUART HALL
• The informational value is mediated through the perspective of the person making it,
and it is presented as a mixture of emotion and information. The language is decoded
by audiences depending on their cultural ability and background/interests/socio
economic influences. •Their reading can be;
• •Preferred- when the audience interpret the text in the way the author intends them to.
• •Negotiated- when the audience mostly accept the preferred reading but sometimes it
changes slightly due to personal interests, opinions and experiences.
• •Oppositional- where the audience completely rejects the preferred reading due to
their personal beliefs and experiences.
•
Hall would state that meaning is not simply fixed and determined by the sender and in
fact it can be interpreted differently by the audience as the audience is not passive and
the message is not transparent. Hall believes that the message can change a lot
between the time of producing the message, which is encoding and then the time of
the message being received by the audience which is decoding of the message.
By using codes and conventions of documentary language the producer is able to then
create a preferred reading that they would like for the audience to have.

4. FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE
• Saussure was the founder of semiotics. which is the study of signs and
symbols and their meanings. Its how we create meanings from text
rather than just what we see or read. He would argue that all texts are
completely saturated with signifiers and signs implying to the audience
opf how the content should be interpreted.
• A 'signifier' (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes; and
• the 'signified' (signifié) - the concept it represents.