Approaching Question 1a G325 media studies

8/6/2019 Approaching Question 1a G325 media studies

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Approaching Question 1a


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What different forms of research

did you do? Again you will need to include a variety of

examples- institutional research (such as on

how titles work in film openings), audience

research (before you made your products andafter you finished for feedback), research into

conventions of media texts (layout, fonts,

camera shots, soundtracks, everything!) and

finally logistical research- recce shots of yourlocations, research into costume, actors, etc


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What digital technology have you

used? This should not be too hard- include hardware (cameras,phones for pictures/audio, computers and anything elseyou used) software (on your computer) and onlineprograms, such as blogger, youtube etc

In what ways can the work you have done be describedas creative?

This is a difficult question and one that does not have a

correct answer as such, but ought to give you food forthought.


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What production activities have you

done? This should include both the main task and

preliminary task from AS and the main and

ancillaries at A2 plus any non-assessed

activities you have done as practice, andadditionally anything you have done outside the

course which you might want to refer to, such as

films made for other courses or skateboard

videos made with your mates if you think youcan make them relevant to your answer.


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What do you understand by post-

production in your work This one, Ill answer for you- for the

purpose of this exam, it is defined as

everything after planning and shooting orlive recording. In other words, the stage of

your work where you manipulated your

raw material on the computer, maybe

using Photoshop, a video editing programor desktop publishing.


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Creativity

Creativity is the hardest one in many ways because itinvolves thinking about what the creative process mightmean. Wikipedia describes it as "a mental processinvolving the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new

associations of the existing ideas or concepts, fueled bythe process of either conscious or unconscious insight."For your projects it might involve considering whereideas came from, how you worked collaboratively toshare ideas, how you changed things or even how you

used tools like the programs to achieve somethingimaginative.


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real media conventions

Use of real media conventions involves

consideration of other texts that you

looked at and how skilfully you were ableto weave their conventions into your work

or ways in which you might have

challenged them.


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How would you organise an answer?paragraph 1 should be an introduction which explains which projects you

did. It can be quite short.paragraph 2 should pick up the skill area and perhaps suggest somethingabout your starting point with it- what skills did you have already and howwere these illustrated. use an example.

paragraph 3 should talk through your use of that skill in early projects and

what you learned and developed through these. again there should beexamples to support all that you say.

paragraph 4 should go on to demonstrate how the skill developed in laterprojects, again backed by examples, and reflecting back on how thisrepresents moves forward for you from your early position.

paragraph 5 short conclusion

Remember it's only half an hour and you need to range across all yourwork!


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How to prepare for question 1b


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Representation

If you take a video you have made for your coursework,you will almost certainly have people in it. If the topic isrepresentation, then your task is to look at how thoserepresentations work in your video. You could applysome of the ideas used in the AS TV Drama exam here-how does your video construct a representation ofgender, ethnicity or age for example? You need also torefer to some critics who have written aboutrepresentation or theories of media representation andattempt to apply those (or argue with them). So who

could you use? Interesting writers on representation andidentity include Richard Dyer,Angela McRobbie andDavid Gauntlett. See what they say...


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Genre

If youve made a music magazine at AS level, ananalysis of the magazine would need to set it inrelation to the forms and conventions shown in

such magazines, particularly for specific types ofmusic. But it would not simply comprise a list ofthose conventions. There are a whole host oftheories of genre and writers with differentapproaches. Some of it could be used to informyour writing about your production piece. Someyou could try are: Altman, Grant and Neale- allare cited in the wikipedia page here


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Narrative

A film opening or trailer will be ideal for this, as they both dependupon ideas about narrative in order to function. An opening must setup some of the issues that the rest of the films narrative will dealwith, but must not give too much away, since it is only an openingand you would want the audience to carry on watching! Likewise atrailer must draw upon some elements of the films imaginarycomplete narrative in order to entice the viewer to watch it, againwithout giving too much away. If you made a short film, you will havebeen capturing a complete narrative, which gives you somethingcomplete to analyse. If you did a music video, the chances are that itwas more performance based, maybe interspersed with some

fragments of narrative. In all these cases, there is enough aboutnarrative in the product to make it worth analysis. The chances areyou have been introduced to a number of theories about narrative,but just in case, heres a link to a PDF by Andrea Joyce, whichsummarises four of them, including Propp and Todorov.


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Audience

Every media product has to have an audience, otherwisein both a business sense and probably an artistic sensetoo it would be judged a failure. In your projects, you willundoubtedly have been looking at the idea of a targetaudience- who you are aiming it at and why; you shouldalso have taken feedback from a real audience in someway at the end of the project for your digital evaluation,which involves finding out how the audience really readwhat you had made. You were also asked at AS toconsider how your product addressed your audience-

what was it about it that particularly worked to speak tothem? All this is effectively linked to audience theorywhich you then need to reference and apply. Here aresome links to some starting points for theories:


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Media Language

A lot of people have assumed this is going to be themost difficult concept to apply, but I dont think it needbe. If you think back to the AS TV Drama exam, whenyou had to look at the technical codes and how theyoperate, that was an exercise in applying medialanguage analysis, so for the A2 exam if this one comesup, Id see it as pretty similar. For moving image, thelanguage of film and television is defined by howcamera, editing, sound and mise-en-scene createmeaning. Likewise an analysis of print work would

involve looking at how fonts, layout, combinations of textand image as well as the actual words chosen createsmeaning. Useful theory here might be Roland Barthes onsemiotics- denotation and connotation and for movingimage work Bordwell and Thompson


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representation

Finally, representation particularly focuseson the ways in which particular socialgroups are presented back to us by the

media. So in your case how have youportrayed young people or females ormales in your work? what messages areimplied in what you have constructed andwhat would particular types of criticism(e.g. feminism) make of it?


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paragraph 1 Intro: which of your projects are you goingto write about? briefly describe it

paragraph 2: what are some of the key features of theconcept you are being asked to apply? maybe outlinesome of the theories briefly

paragraph 3: start to apply the concept, making closereference to your production

paragraph 4: try to show ways in which ideas work inrelation to your production and also ways in which thoseideas might not apply/could be challenged

paragrpah 5; conclusion


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collective identity

So as you will notice, the questions may focus on howrepresentations are constructed (or how the mediamediate representation/identity) but you also need toconsider how people reador make sense of thoserepresentations and how groups of people mightconstruct their own identity (e.g. online through socialmedia). The last two questions above essentially coverthe same territory, but ask you to reflect upon it in aslightly different way- a quote in a question usuallymeans here is something you can argue with- and you

should. I would argue that the media never simply'reflect' reality but construct a representation of it, sothere would be something to really get your teeth into!

And a look at contrasting representations of a particulargroup would allow you to explore the complexity, asindicated in the last question.


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Ifwe look at the bullet points in the Specification, which defines

what should be studied, we should be able to relate them to the

questions set so far:

How do the contemporary media represent

nations, regions and ethnic / social / collective

groups of people in different ways?

How does contemporary representationcompare to previous time periods?

What are the social implications of different

media representations of groups of people?

To what extent is human identity increasinglymediated?


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The kinds of thing you might use as

case studies include: national cinema,

television representations,

magazines and gender,

representations of youth and youth culture,

representations of different ethnic and

cultural groups

sexuality, gender, disability


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This part of the exam asks you to do three more

specific things, whatever topic you answer on:

1. You MUST refer to at least TWO

different media

2. You MUST refer to past, present and

future (with the emphasis on the present-

contemporary examples from the past five

years)

3. refer to critical/theoretical positions


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So for 1. you might compare and contrast

examples from film and TV or from

newspapers and social media.


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For 2. the main thing is to ensure you have

a majority of material from the past five

years. There were a number of answers

last year which were dominated by older

films, so beware of this!


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For 3. you need some critics/writers who

have developed ideas about

representation and identity. In previous

posts on this topic, I referred to several

useful theorists in relation to youth as a

case study.

Approaching Question 1a G325 media studies

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