Theory: Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall is a narrative theorist who proposed the encoding/decoding theory, which is split into a four-stage model outlining his views:

He stated that the producer cannot be certain that his product will be perceived by the target audience in the way he had intended because the message is never fixed or determined. The audience members will not view it passively and so he proposed his four-stage model.

Production - This is the encoding part of the process. The producer is creating a message that relies on societies views and ideologies. Societies opinion is very important to this stage as it often determines your target audience.
Circulation - This stage determines how people perceive the products. Hall believes that how something is circulated, strongly influences how the audience members will receive the message and thus apply it.
Use - This is the decoding part of the process. The audience will interpret a message in an active way and thus attempt to understand it.
Reproduction - This takes place after the audience have interpreted the meaning of the particular message in their own way based on what they have experienced. The success of the message is found here.

Stuart Hall stated that all texts have preferred meanings, but the decoder will not always read them as they are originally intended by the producer as everyone has a different social and/or cultural background. Texts or films that are meant to communicate hegemony will be encoded so that they are easily interpreted and understood by the mass audiences who attempt to interpret them. The hegemonic position is where the consumer decodes the text/film in the exact way it was encoded, meaning they understood what the director/writer was trying to achieve. However, if in the case of films, the preferred meanings are blurred and the information handed to the audience is not enough for the piece to be decoded then the ratings of particular films can become tricky if not impossible to predict. This is something, which is important to us when thinking about the narrative and most importantly, our audience. The preferred meaning is important to think about when we are encoding the narrative as we would like to restrict our audience to 15 and over. For us to do this, we must ensure that their is no doubt over the preferred meanings themselves and that we follow the BFI guidelines.

MT