Hello,
In this blog post I'll explain the theory of mediation and verisimilitude. Mediation is the theory that when an audience encounters a media text, they see someone's version of reality- either the director's or producer's. The creator of the text has their own view of the reality, so the audience sees it through their eyes. An audience is mostly aware that a television soap is not real, but they allow themselves to be immersed into the action: in contrast, audiences expect the news broadcast to be "the truth" and the mediation is not noticed as much as in a soap. News stories are mediated by the journalists and reporters as their opinions influence how the stories are perceived by an audience.
The Kuleshov effect is the name given to a film technique where the audience derives more meaning from two clips edited together than from just one of those clips. Lev Kuleshov was a Soviet filmmaker who made a short film which showed an actor with a neutral expression "looking at" a plate of food, a deceased child, and a woman in lingerie. Audiences in the 1920s stated that the actor's expression changed from hunger to grief to lust: in reality, the clip was the same all three times. Kuleshov's film is a demonstration of mediation theory as audiences can be manipulated to believe anything the editor wants them to. To show Kuleshov's ideas, we created our own version inspired by the original film.
Verisimilitude is the believability of a narrative, or how real a media text appears. For example, the likelihood of a zombie apocalypse film seeming real to an audience is down to it's verisimilitude: how relatable/complex the characters are, and how plausible the events. The verisimilitude of any film plays a big part in it's success: if audiences don't believe the storyline could actually happen, the film is likely to be less successful.
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