Your sample Q1a answers

I've passed these on, so for now just the one new one - worth reading mainly for the suggestions:

[eg1: this is only part of the full text]

Describe how you used your research into real media texts for your production work, and describe how you developed your ability to use this research over time.

The transition from AS to A2 was huge, I feel that all of my skills have improved especially research and production skills. At AS I created a 2 minute opening for a slasher film, “Last One Standing”, centred on a voyeur targeting and killing a teen girl in her suburban, semi-detached home, with ‘Blair Witch’ themed flashbacks of her with her friends in the local woods hinting [foreshadowing or signifiying] at an earlier beginning to the stalking, and a threat to her remaining friends, A2 I created a music video,  for Robbie Williams’ ‘She’s The One’ three generations of a boy and girl (ages: 5, 12, 18) and how their relationship developed from innocent friendship to romance, using changing technologies and other aspects of mise-en-scene to signify the changing time period and create verisimilitude for each. We also had a performer who was signified as Robbie.

For both productions I started with researching genre conventions (for the opening Slasher/Horror like ‘Halloween’ and for the music video, Pop, with artists such as Olly Murs, The Saturdays and One Direction these egs should come out through later points, probably a waste here). For my slasher 2 minute opening I researched existing films that include aspects that were similar to my idea [no: make these two clearly sep points: general genre research AND multi-genre research into certain aspects; the difference at A2 is you looked beyond music vid], such as, flashbacks which were found in the “Blair Witch Project” and POV of the killer looking at the house, found in “Halloween” by John Carpenter, this showed me how to make the audience feel like they are looking at the same thing the killer is [you should denote some of the media lang observed/used to achieve this] and also sort of go on a journey with the killer which builds the tension for both the viewer and the victim.

I developed these skills in my advanced portfolio, for example, instead of searching into just one specific genre initially I searched into several [no! we did this too at AS: started with the general THEN focussed on genre. Perhaps you used web 2.0 sites eg Facebook/fan forums to get further suggestions for viewing at A2? And because you weren’t relying so much on DVDs you were also able to use the YouTube recommendations sidebar?]. I looked at a range of genres, from Katy Perry (Pop) to The Darkness (Rock), this helped me distinguish different genre conventions and what to include in my pop video. To create our video, the main pop artist we looked at was Olly Murs because he is similar to Robbie as he is known as cheeky [again, not strictly necessary for every point, but you want to denote some of the specific media lang (in this case I’m assuming direct gaze at the lens/audience with winking or ‘gurning’ as RW’s often described? Plus other ‘antics’ that will be scripted but are designed to appear spontaneous – postmodern deconstruction of the music video form by exposing the supposed behnd-the-scenes aspects? Give example/s] and his videos linked to some aspect of ours, for example, in most of his videos he is in love with a woman, this helped because we were also portraying a heterosexual relationship. Another media text was the 2009 John Lewis advert, this was about a heterosexual couple who have grown up together, it also showed different time periods, which really helped in our video because getting the mise-en-scene correct was vital and to create verisimilitude was just as important because we wanted the audience to relate to the on screen characters. The video wasn’t the full on typical Pop genre [the media lang here is high key lighting which tends to glamourise the subject, thus its use in pop videos – low key or natural lighting is more common in rock (eg Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony or Chilli Peppers’ alt version of the Under the Bridge vid), especially Indie for its connotations of realism. You need to try harder to reflect your research + cite a relevant eg of a pop vid using natural lighting], because we didn’t use special effects or studio lights, partly because we didn’t have access to them but also are video wasn’t a big production, it was more like a home video of the generations. [okay, so maybe you argue your AS was more like a form of postmodern bricolage: reassembling familiar signifiers, but your A2 work, whilst similarly postmodern in its intertextuality, sought to create something more fresh and distinctive? Also, you were aware of reflecting the dominant discourse around sexuality (as Fairclough would argue), but felt that anything but a heteronormative text wouldn’t work for the genre or audience?]