Well since dear old Alan gave us the seminar on semiotics before we had the lecture, our group kind of had a leg up...
Signs, Signification, Signified, Iconic, Arbitrary, Paradigm, Syntagm and on and on and on. So many words with definition which you have to remember.
Thinking about semiotics and the meanings of iconic and arbitrary, no matter how realistic you make something to be iconic, as a human you will always know that it is not the real thing, but usually something pretty close to it. Looking at something that is arbitrary, as shown in the lecture, something as simple as a circle with two dots and a line can be interpreted as a face. But because of the lack of detail there, the two dots and a line becomes symbolic. It becomes the very basic sign for a face.
Like when the Police have ‘training’ days for fake catastrophes and they use fake bodies with injuries and others for actors. These must be iconic to some degree other wise it will take away from the reality of the practice. Same within horror films like Saw and Hostel for example. The gruesome scenes need to be iconic otherwise it will not be believable! And it would look like the film would have a very cheap budget. Just even comparing the Saw images above to something like Starship troopers for example (I love Starship troopers by the way), the Saw effects and models of the injuries blood and guts are a lot more believable. The lionk below is a link to a part of the film, about 6mins in is where a guy gets his leg chopped off.
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