Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Despite decades of progress in academic thought about the social semiotic system of meaning generation in filmic texts, film making and viewing text books, written for schools and institutions in Australia, still regard the filmic medium more as a mechanical construct, in which its meaning is somehow separate from the medium itself. The aim of this paper is to propose a method of placing the inherent meaning of the filmic medium at the centre of the film education discourse. It aims to bridge the gap between the specialist understandings of filmic texts possessed by academics, and the universal understandings of mainstream consumers and creators of such texts, a move essential at a time when students’ lives are increasingly governed by image based information. This paper aims to achieve this goal by introducing a new way of talking about film making and viewing in an educational setting, called “The Template Model.” The Template Model proposes a simple shift in the focus and language of film education, in order to make it more akin to teaching a language, and less akin to teaching woodwork.