Sound, Doctor Who

During the first two minutes of this scene, sound plays a key aspect in helping the audience derive meanings and decode the scene. The scene starts with a woman entering and some non-diegetic sound being played, the music sounds like something from a western/cowboy film perhaps parodying a stand-off. This is followed by a male character speaking, perhaps identifying his superiority in the scene, he commands the female character who obeys, the sound is clearly heard as she unstraps a device, chucks it to the male character and he catches it. He then once again commands her to kneel, this truely shows his ultimate control over the her. He continues to announce his plans to the room, showing his arrogance and certainty of his plan. He turns round and futuristic beeping and voices communicate with him. This shows he is technologically advanced, he turns a ticking clock on which causes the audience to be aware of time, he continues to talk and something that is noticeable is that he is the only person to talk for the whole scene, this singles him out as the only important person. However she interrupts him by laughing, he is shocked and he suddenly seems weaker, the woman is suddenly in a higher position of power, although she is in such a vulnerable position. He begins to worry and his voice is a lot less firm re-establishing power in the scene. This shows how important the sound and dialogue is, purely by talking the whole scene is directed upon him and as soon as someone else joins in he does not seem powerful.

Analyse How Gender is Represented in this Extract of Prime Suspect.

Analysis of the first 5 minutes.


In this extract there is a strong connotation that being male is somewhat of an advantage in this workplace, or at least that the men in the extract believe this. However the main character is female and she is shown as very important, the camera regularly tracks and pans following the main character. However the male characters seem to consider themselves superior to the main character. This is shown in the first scene and throughout the rest of the extract, the camera first shows the male character starting the dialogue. He refers to the female character in an angry, condescending tone, dismissing her rights by saying that "now is not the time" to discuss them. As the audience we are led to believe that to fit in the character, who is female attempts to make herself more masculine, this is shown immediately as she has short hair and little make-up, she is smoking as is the man perhaps trying to create a connection between her and the "boss".

The following scene is of two male characters, they speak to each other as friends and equals despite the difference in rank. Their tones are helpful they are anxious to contradict each other. Once again another reference to the female character attempting to be male as referring to her one of the characters says "She's got balls". Hellen Mirren (the main character) is then shown walking out of the Commanders office, shown together with a plaque on the door it tells the audience that she is important appearing in the same shot as the words "Commander". She has got a smile on her face and has obviously just received news of promotion.

The following scene shows the rest of the office, the whole room is filled completely with men, many of them complaining about a woman being placed in charge. The boss character from the first scene associates himself with them, this creates a seperation between all men in the office and Mirren as earlier on this very character dissociated himself with Mirren.

During the next scene close-ups of both pictures and Mirren showing a connection between the character and victim, she shows empathy with a sad expression on her face you can see that she has a passion for her job whether other characters believe she is capable or not. She speaks quickly but respectively to people of a less superior rank than hers, she knows what she is doing and what she wants.

Preliminary Task - First Video.

The embedded video is our first attempt at our preliminary task, overall I was really pleased with how the video turned out the music worked well and we had a wide range of shots and managed to include all three requirements (180 degree rule, Match on action, Reverse shot/Shot). However if I were to do the task again I would make sure that it had constant continuity. In many of the scenes the main character is wearing different clothes to previous scenes, some "morning shots" were shot at night. We did re-shoot some scenes to attempt to fix this with the most obvious examples, however due to a lack of time a lot of the shots were kept. Another thing that I feel we could have improved on was that the ending could be slightly confusing. What is meant to happen is that the character is thrown against the wall falling through the wall before waking up in his bed, although I feel that it worked out however I am aware of what is going on and it is possible that the audience may find this confusing. Once again due to a lack of time we did not have the opportunity to re shoot this scene but I do not think that it would have made much difference. Finally the last point that I think could have been improved is that it drags on, I think there are too many days and it gets repetitive and boring, for the final shoot however we have reduced the film to just 3 days as opposed to 2 and I think this has fixed the problem.

Preliminary Task.

We have started filming and editing our preliminary task, we have decided to make the film a short loop of an average day, this day continues to repeat itself before the main scene of the short film. This is where the main character is robbed which allows us to fulfill the requirement of a shot/reverse shot with dialogue. The following scene is the start of the loop again.