23rd April is the final deadline for everything

Obviously it would be better to get things uploaded before then so I can have a look at it and advise you on any changes required, and you will have exam prep to do.

The evaluation questions

These need to be answered in different formats. You should be planning to answer these as you finish your products.

In the evaluation the following four questions must be addressed:

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real

media products? 

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Film competition

Upload your completed films here

Reminder of brief and auxiliary products.

Remember, you have no set homework for critical perspectives at the moment. We are studying this in class as prep for the mocks. After the mocks you will be completing your evaluation.

 You are expected to use your own time (approx 5 hours a week) to be completing your films and the auxiliary products. Don't forget, you need to do some generic research into the forms and conventions of the aux products you have chosen to do.
These must be completed before the mocks! I will be looking at your blogs.

1. A promotion package for a new film, to include a trailer, together with two of the following three options:

a website homepage for the film;

a film magazine front cover, featuring the film; 

a poster for the film.

2. An extract from an original documentary TV programme, lasting approximately five minutes, together with two of the following three options:

a radio trailer for the documentary;

a double-page spread from a listings magazine focused on the documentary;

a newspaper advertisement for the documentary.

3. The first two pages of an original local newspaper  together with two of the following three options:

a billboard poster for the newspaper; 

a radio advertisement for the newspaper; 

two hyperlinked pages from the paper’s website.

4.A short film in its entirety, lasting approximately five minutes, which may be live action or animated or a combination of both, together with two of the following three options:

a poster for the film; 

a radio trailer for the film;

 a film magazine review page featuring the film.

Deadlines

Your films should be completed and uploaded to your blogs via you tube now.
On our return in January there will be no more lesson time on these. You will be preparing for your mock exams in February. Some of this exam will be analysing aspects of the film you have made (so, another reason to get it done).

You will be focusing on We Media with Miss Midwinter and Critical Perspectives with me.

After the mocks you will start work on the evaluation for the practical and this needs to be completed by February half term.

Clarification on music that can be used in documentary from OCR

For any option other than the music video candidates can only use 'found' material in a limited way. So if it is snippets that will only be used in a limited fashion in their piece then that is okay but if the found material is making up the majority of their soundtrack then that is really against the spirit of the specification.

The move away from 'found' material is to stop students just finding their favourite music track and putting over their video without any thought, editing or remixing to make it appropriate for their piece of work.

Kind Regards

Lisa
Media Support Team

Points to consider

1. Screen shot of how imovie looks at the moment
Comment on:
2. What has gone well, what have you been pleased with?
3. Have you discovered any useful tools? Screen shot them.
4. What has caused you problems? Techniques that have been tricky? How have you got round this?
5. ANy useful plug ins or sites that you've used?
6. WHat do you need to do by next lesson? Any more footage? Any more research?
7. How is your narrative/character/representation developing?

work in progress

Editing is going nicely for most of you. Don't forget to keep doing screen shots of where you are at in the editing process to add to your blog. You should be adding a diary type entry a few times a week about how your editing is going. What technology you are using and how the narrative is taking shape. It's likely that some of your ideas will be changing as you work and its a good idea to track these developments in terms of language, genre, character, narrative and representation as you will have to write about these elements in your critical perspectives exam.

Those of you who haven't filmed yet, the situation is getting very serious. If you haven't got any footage by next week then measures will be taken!!

Good place to download music for your videos from

Click here for link

Thanks Joe!

Wednesday 19th October

You need to be uploading an update after every lesson, not all of you are.

You must must must get your footage filmed over half term, see Ben if you need to borrow any equipment.
Use the handouts I gave you to ensure that you have enough research material, you should be coming towards the end of those activities now and when we return after half term you need to be editing your footage and thinking about your auxiliary products (poster, review etc).

You must start filming your footage this weekend!!

Here are extracts from the mark scheme. How are you going to ensure that you have covered most of these point?

Film/Television/Video
Level 3 24-31 marks
The candidate is expected to demonstrate proficiency in the creative use of most of the following technical skills:

holding a shot steady, where appropriate;

framing a shot, including and excluding elements as appropriate;

using a variety of shot distances as appropriate;

shooting material appropriate to the task set;

selecting mise-en-scène including colour, figure, lighting, objects and setting;

editing so that meaning is apparent to the viewer;

using varied shot transitions, captions and other effects selectively and appropriately for the task set;

using sound with images and editing appropriately for the task set.

Where a candidate has worked in a group, a proficient contribution to construction is evident.

Level 4 32-40 marks
The candidate is expected to demonstrate excellence in the creative use of most of the following technical skills:

holding a shot steady, where appropriate;

framing a shot, including and excluding elements as appropriate;

using a variety of shot distances as appropriate;

shooting material appropriate to the task set;

selecting mise-en-scène including colour, figure, lighting, objects and setting;

editing so that meaning is apparent to the viewer;

using varied shot transitions, captions and other effects selectively and appropriately;

using sound with images and editing appropriately for the task

Print
Level 3 24-31 marks 7-8 for subsid
The candidate is expected to demonstrate proficiency in the creative use of most of the following technical skills:

use IT appropriately for the task set;

show understanding of conventions of layout and page design;

show awareness of the need for variety in fonts and text size;

accurate use of language and register;

appropriately integrating illustration and text;

framing a shot, including and excluding elements as appropriate;

using a variety of shot distances as appropriate;

shooting material appropriate to the task set;

selecting mise-en-scène including colour, figure, lighting, objects and setting;

manipulating photographs as appropriate to the context for presentation, including within text, within particular IT programmes, cropping and resizing.

Where a candidate has worked in a group, a proficient contribution to construction is evident.

Level 4 32-40 marks 9-10 for subsid
The candidate is expected to demonstrate excellence in the creative use of most of the following technical skills:

using IT appropriately for the task set;

showing understanding of conventions of layout and page design;

showing awareness of the need for variety in fonts and text size;

accurate use of language and register;

appropriately integrating illustration and text;

framing a shot, including and excluding elements as appropriate;

Shot List and Concepts

http://www.scribd.com/full/67892270?access_key=key-1ifa02le2xsmqgqq2g9o

Where are you going with this?

Remember that not only are you creating this project for your coursework but you will also have to write about it in your exam.



Here are some example questionsAnalyse media representation in one of your coursework productions.



Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to genre

Apply theories of narrative to one of your coursework productions.

You will notice that each of these questions is quite short and fits a common formula.
You can be assured that the same thing will apply this summer. You will be asked to apply ONE concept to one of your productions. This is a quite different task from question 1a, where you write about all of your work and your skills, as this one involves some reference to theory and only the one piece of work, as well as asking you to step back from it and think about it almost as if someone else had made it- what is known as ‘critical distance’.


There are five possible concepts which can come up


Representation

Genre

Narrative

Audience

Media Language


If you look through those questions above, you will see that the first three have all already come up, but don’t be fooled into thinking that means that it must be one of the other two this time- exams don’t always work that predictably! It would be far too risky just to bank on that happening and not prepare for the others! In any case, preparing for them all will help you understand things better and there are areas of overlap which you can use across the concepts.


So, how do you get started preparing and revising this stuff? First of all, you need to decide which project you would be most confident analysing in the exam. I believe that any of the five can be applied to moving image work, so if you did a film opening at AS, a music video, short film or trailer at A2, that would be the safest choice. Print work is more tricky to write about in relation to narrative, but the other four areas would all work well for it, so it is up to you, but to be honest, I’d prepare in advance of the exam as you don’t want to be deciding what to use during your precious half hour! What you certainly need is a copy of the project itself to look at as part of your revision, to remind yourself in detail of how it works.


Representation


If you take a video you have made for your coursework, you will almost certainly have people in it. If the topic is representation, then your task is to look at how those representations work in your video. You could apply some of the ideas used in the AS TV Drama exam here- how does your video construct a representation of gender, ethnicity or age for example? You need also to refer to some critics who have written about representation or theories of media representation and attempt to apply those (or argue with them). So who could you use? Interesting writers on representation and identity include Richard Dyer, Angela McRobbie and David Gauntlett. See what they say...


Genre


If you’ve made a music magazine at AS level, an analysis of the magazine would need to set it in relation to the forms and conventions shown in such magazines, particularly for specific types of music. But it would not simply comprise a list of those conventions. There are a whole host of theories of genre and writers with different approaches. Some of it could be used to inform your writing about your production piece. Some you could try are: Altman, Grant and Neale- all are cited in the wikipedia page here


Narrative


A film opening or trailer will be ideal for this, as they both depend upon ideas about narrative in order to function. An opening must set up some of the issues that the rest of the film’s narrative will deal with, but must not give too much away, since it is only an opening and you would want the audience to carry on watching! Likewise a trailer must draw upon some elements of the film’s imaginary complete narrative in order to entice the viewer to watch it, again without giving too much away. If you made a short film, you will have been capturing a complete narrative, which gives you something complete to analyse. If you did a music video, the chances are that it was more performance based, maybe interspersed with some fragments of narrative. In all these cases, there is enough about narrative in the product to make it worth analysis. The chances are you have been introduced to a number of theories about narrative, but just in case, here’s a link to a PDF by Andrea Joyce, which summarises four of them, including Propp and Todorov.


Audience


Every media product has to have an audience, otherwise in both a business sense and probably an artistic sense too it would be judged a failure. In your projects, you will undoubtedly have been looking at the idea of a target audience- who you are aiming it at and why; you should also have taken feedback from a real audience in some way at the end of the project for your digital evaluation, which involves finding out how the audience really ‘read’ what you had made. You were also asked at AS to consider how your product addressed your audience- what was it about it that particularly worked to ‘speak’ to them? All this is effectively linked to audience theory which you then need to reference and apply.


Media Language


A lot of people have assumed this is going to be the most difficult concept to apply, but I don’t think it need be. If you think back to the AS TV Drama exam, when you had to look at the technical codes and how they operate, that was an exercise in applying media language analysis, so for the A2 exam if this one comes up, I’d see it as pretty similar. For moving image, the language of film and television is defined by how camera, editing, sound and mise-en-scene create meaning. Likewise an analysis of print work would involve looking at how fonts, layout, combinations of text and image as well as the actual words chosen creates meaning. Useful theory here might be Roland Barthes on semiotics- denotation and connotation and for moving image work Bordwelland Thompson


So what do you do in the exam?


You need to state which project you are using and briefly describe it
You then need to analyse it using whichever concept appears in the question, making reference to relevant theory throughout

Keep being specific in your use of examples from the project



Here is a link to a good answer to q1a and 1b from the January session.

Interesting aspect of ownership

Guardian map of Murdoch ownership

How to conduct Media Research

A useful guide here How the media airbrush celebrities

When you research existing documentaries, it is useful to take screen shots of interesting shots. You can then open up the storyboard template from within the 'Pages' software program. Next, annotate the shot types and how their choice creates the narrative & message of the doc. When you have completed it, screen shot it again. It will automatically be saved as a PNG file on your desktop which you can then upload to your blog as an image.