Redundancy and Entropy

Throughout the year we will be looking at theories and linking them in with our own coursework. Today we looked at Redundancy and Entropy.
I believe Redundancy is something which is very predictable and makes effective communication with the audience like a picture of a dog. I believe Entropy is the opposite to Redundancy and is unpredictable. It is something you wouldn't expect and might not make sense like a picture of humans with cat heads.

Linking these theories in with our own coursework I can see that we use elements of both Redundancy and Entropy.
Our idea has Redundancy as it is set in a school and is about school life which relates to the target audience who are also in education. Therefore the whole idea of a school is predictable and will be expected by the target audience.
However our idea also has elements of Entropy as we are involving Lego. Lego itself has Redundancy but we have mixed it in with real life and we are making a Lego character turn into a human boy which is very unpredictable and not expected. On a scale of 1-10 we think our idea is bang on 5 as we involve a lot of simple ideas like school and twisted ideas like Lego turning to human in our plot.

The concept of genre:
Looking at our idea I can see that the genre has elements of Redundancy more than Entropy. As we are doing a Children's TV Drama we went for the most obvious genre "Drama" because after doing some target research we saw that "Dramas" are the most common and viewed genre. We wanted to attract the widest audience within our target audience so we "played it safe" by going for the most common genre. Because "Drama" is the most common Children's TV genre it has Redundancy as it is expected and predictable.

The concept of creativity:
We also looked at how creative our idea was and whether our creativity had elements of Redundancy or Entropy. I think our idea has certain elements of creativity that is redundancy such as like I've said above with the school being related to the target audience. This has elements of redundancy as it is predictable that a Children's TV Drama based on a school is aimed at children who go to school. However we really wanted to involve elements of entropy within our creativity which I think we have achieved as we have mixed Lego with humans. It is very unpredictable that a world of crime fighting Lego jumps to a boy at his first day in high school.

The concept of using conventions from real media texts:
Finally we looked at how our idea uses conventions from real media texts and whether these ideas are have elements of Redundancy or Entropy. We used conventions from real media texts such as "Life on Mars" and "My parents are aliens". These two TV programmes have a large proportion of Entropy in them as they mix different ideas together like the present and the past and aliens and humans to make a brand new idea, so you could say our idea is mainly Entropy as we've taken conventions from these programmes. However as we are using some the same conventions from these programmes you could say our idea has elements of Redundancy as we are reusing ideas and therefore it is predictable and expected.

Overall we want our Children's TV Drama to have elements of both Redundancy and Entropy as we want to give the target audience something they can relate to but also be different with certain twists giving them the chance to see something new.