Semiotics, Semiology.

Today we looked into semiotics and semiology, a way of approaching a piece of media, we looked at a series of portrait images, separated into male and female, we annotated the images with any words we could think of relating to the pictures. As a group we then talked about why we thought the words were related to the images which brought us to talk about signs and signifiers, the basis of semiotics; a sign is something within a picture, film or nearly any piece of media which portrays a certain image, provokes a certain thought or emotion or has a meaning beyond its denotations. Denotations are observations about a piece of media, e.g. 'The picture contains a woman', whereas Connotations are the ideas, meanings, feelings or deeper insights into a piece of media, e.g. 'The woman looks distressed'.
Here is a very simple and basic example of connoting and denoting an image.

The type of 'signs' which would be looked for in a piece of media are; colours and the contrast of colours, characters, background, framing, use of editing and enhancing etc. Often the most obvious and striking sign is the overall colour of the piece of media, it can change and control the media and its overall feel, for example if an image is predominantly red then it signifies anger, passion, lover, romance or danger, whereas a white image symbolises purity, peace, calm, empty, clear.