[Pete has written on this more than once; I've gathered all of these texts into this one post]
With three weeks to go to the G325 exam, it's time to see how the material you have gathered might be used in answering the questions. First we will look at questions 1a and 1b, then at the questions on Media in the online age.
These were the questions in January, so obviously the June exam will not feature the same ones (!) but the general principles which I shall explain here will still apply.
The first steps for these two questions is to read the instructions! You also need to consider the number of marks available relative to the time for the exam as a whole. It's two hours long and worth 100 marks, so a 25 mark question should be completed in a quarter of that time (30 minutes). that's how long you should devote to each of these questions. If you prefer to do Section B (the 50 mark question) first, that's fine- you can answer questions in any order. Just make sure you do answer all three and you devote the right amount of time to each.
So in terms of instruction, the main things to note here are that for 1a you write about ALL of your work across the course (and you can write about anything else you might have made on other courses or in your spare time too!) and for 1b you just write about ONE of your productions. Try not to overlap too much, so that each answer is different.
1a is entirely concerned about skills development, but the area that comes up will be quite specific. So as you can see, in January, it was about development of skills in research and planning; the other areas which can come up are skills in:
digital technology use
post-production
use of real media conventions
creativity
It is possible that a question might refer to two of these categories, so be prepared to talk about any/all of them!
a few tips on what they mean:
digital technology refers to hardware, software and online technology, so the cameras, the computers, the packages you used and the programs online that you have worked with. It is worth considering how all this inter-links.
post-production would actually fall under digital technology as well, so if that comes up it would probably represent an expansion of points you'd make in one section of digital technology. It is really about everything you do after constructing the raw materials for your production; so once you have taken photos and written text, how do you manipulate it all in photoshop or desktop publishing for a print product or once you have shot your video, what do you do to it in editing.
research refers to looking at real media and audiences to inform your thinking about a media production and also how you record all that research; planning refers to all the creative and logistical thinking and all the organisation that goes on in putting the production together so that everything works and again gives you the chance to write about how you kept records of it.
Creativity is the hardest one in many ways because it involves thinking about what the creative process might mean. Wikipedia describes it as "a mental process involving the discovery of new
ideas or
concepts, or new associations of the existing ideas or concepts, fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious
insight." For your projects it might involve considering where ideas came from, how you worked collaboratively to share ideas, how you changed things or even how you used tools like the programs to achieve something imaginative.
Use of real media conventions involves consideration of other texts that you looked at and how skilfully you were able to weave their conventions into your work or ways in which you might have challenged them.
You will notice that most of the above were areas that you covered in the evaluation task at the end of each of your productions. This time, you are putting together ideas from evaluations and standing a bit further back to look across your production work and reflecting on how you developed across the course. You should feel free to acknowledge weaknesses and to reflect upon how you learned from them and how you overcame problems. It is not a place to be defensive about your work but to really reflect on it!
so 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 something about your starting point with it- what skills did you have already and how were 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 be examples to support all that you say.
paragraph 4 should go on to demonstrate how the skill developed in later projects, again backed by examples, and reflecting back on how this represents 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 your work!
Question 1b
I like to think of this question as being about moving a couple of steps away from your production work and imagining you are someone else looking at it for the first time. How would you analyse this music video, this magazine or whatever? Imagine you didn't make it but that it is a real media production.
Again the question will specify an area/concept for you to apply. The areas that could come up are:
Audience
Narrative
Genre
Representation
Media Language
For each area there are theories or ideas which your teachers will have introduced you to which you need to know a bit about and then you have to apply those ideas to ONE of your productions and analyse it accordingly. Decide in advance which piece you will write about and make sure that whatever the concept, you can actually do it. Again, here is a bit of a breakdown of what the five concepts might involve.
Audience can refer to how media products target audiences, which audiences actually consume media products, but most interestingly how media audiences actually read or make sense of media products and what they might do with them. There is a lot of interesting material on all this and you should certainly be familiar with some of it.
Genre is all about the ways in which we categorise media texts. Whatever you have made will in some way relate to other examples of the same genre, whether it be in print, audio, video or online. Again a lot of different media critics have written their own 'take' on genre and this would be useful to apply to your work.
Narrative is about how stories are told. Applying different models of narrative structure to your work may reveal unconscious things that you did in the way you have constructed it. Again a familiarity with some of these models or theories will be helpful in the exam.
Media Language is probably the most open one if it comes up, because it allows you to talk about the other areas as well (genre, narrative, audience) as it is about the techniques and conventions of different forms of media (how shots are organised in film, how text is laid out on a page).
Finally, representation particularly focuses on the ways in which particular social groups are presented back to us by the media. So in your case how have you portrayed young people or females or males in your work? what messages are implied in what you have constructed and what would particular types of criticism (e.g. feminism) make of it?
so again, how do we write about this in half an hour?
para 1 Intro: which of your projects are you going to write about? briefly describe it
para 2: what are some of the key features of the concept you are being asked to apply? maybe outline some of the theories briefly
para 3; start to apply the concept, making close reference to your production
para 4: try to show ways in which ideas work in relation to your production and also ways in which those ideas might not apply/could be challenged
para 5; conclusion
[this is copied in directly
from a blog maintained by the chief examiner of our exam board, Pete
Fraser, which I highly recommend you become a follower of and use!!! See
http://petesmediablog.blogspot.com/]
As you saw in yesterday's post, these are the previous questions which came up for this part of the exam:
Describe how you developed research and planning skills for media
production and evaluate how these skills contributed to creative
decision making. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how
these skills developed over time.
Describe the ways in which your production work was informed by research
into real media texts and how your ability to use such research for
production developed over time.
Describe how you developed your skills in the use of digital technology
for media production and evaluate how these skills contributed to your
creative decision making. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to
show how these skills developed over time.
You will notice that each of these begins by asking you to 'describe'
and then goes on to ask you to reflect in some way: "evaluate", "how you
used" "how your skills developed". herein lies the key to this part of
the exam! You only have half an hour for the question and you really
need to make the most of that time by quickly moving from description
(so the reader knows what you did) to analysis/evaluation/reflection, so
he/she starts to understand what you learnt from it.
there are five possible areas which can come up
Digital technology
Research and Planning
Conventions of Real Media
Post-Production
Creativity.
If you look through those questions above, you will see that they all
contain at least two of the five- creativity is mentioned (as 'creative
decision making') in two of them alongside the main area (digital
technology on one, research and planning skills in the other). In the
third of those past questions , research is combined with conventions of
real media. So as you can see, the question is likely to mix and match
the five, so you HAVE to be able to think on your feet and answer the
question that is there.
So, how do you get started preparing and revising this stuff? I would
suggest that you begin by setting out, on cards or post-its, a list of
answers to these questions:
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, and additionally 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 you can
make them relevant to your answer.
What digital technology have you used?
This should not be too hard- include hardware (cameras, phones for
pictures/audio, computers and anything else you used) software (on your
computer) and online programs, such as blogger, youtube etc
In what ways can the work you have done be described as creative?
This is a difficult question and one that does not have a correct answer as such, but ought to give you food for thought.
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 and after you finished for
feedback), research into conventions of media texts (layout, fonts,
camera shots, soundtracks, everything!) and finally logistical research-
recce shots of your locations, research into costume, actors, etc
What conventions of real media did you need to know about?
For this, it is worth making a list for each project you have worked on
and categorising them by medium so that you don’t repeat yourself
What do you understand by ‘post-production’ in your work?
This one, I’ll answer for you- for the purpose of this exam, it is
defined as everything after planning and shooting or live recording. In
other words, the stage of your work where you manipulated your raw
material on the computer, maybe using photoshop, a video editing program
or desktop publishing.
For each of these lists, your next stage is to produce a set of
examples- so that when you make the point in the exam, you can then back
it up with a concrete example. You need to be able to talk about
specific things you did in post-production and why they were
significant, just as you need to do more than just say ‘I looked on
youtube’ for conventions of real media, but actually name specific
videos you looked at, what you gained from them and how they influenced
your work.
This question will be very much about looking at your skills development
over time, the process which brought about this progress, most if not
all the projects you worked on from that list above, and about
reflection on how how you as a media student have developed. Unusually,
this is an exam which rewards you for talking about yourself and the
work you have done!
Final tips: you need some practice- this is very hard to do without it!
I’d have a crack at trying to write an essay on each of the areas, or at
the very least doing a detailed plan with lots of examples. The fact
that it is a 30 minute essay makes it very unusual, so you need to be
able to tailor your writing to that length- a tough task!
Tomorrow- question 1b and how to approach it, including how different it is from 1a!
[taken directly from the chief examiner's blog:
http://petesmediablog.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-prepare-for-question-1b.html]
In Sunday’s post, I listed all questions which have been set in previous sessions:
Analyse 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
Bordwell and 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.
