Chris Anderson- The Long Tail

Andrew Keen

Poses some interesting challenges to how great the internet has been by way of contrast to the videos below.

Marshall McLuhan

Worth checking the prophetic nature of his ideas from the 60s and 70s

David Gauntlett

Henry Jenkins (Online Age)

Evaluations

The four questions that must be addressed in the evaluation are:

• In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real
  media products?
  
• How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
  
• What have you learned from your audience feedback?
  
• How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
  
  
  Level 1 0–7 marks
  
  • There is minimal skill in the use of digital technology or ICT in the evaluation.
    
  • There is minimal understanding of the forms and conventions used in the productions.
    
  • There is minimal understanding of the role and use of new media in various stages of the production.
    
  • There is minimal understanding of the combination of main product and ancillary texts.
    
  • There is minimal understanding of the significance of audience feedback.
    
  • There is minimal skill in choice of form in which to present the evaluation.
    
  • There is minimal ability to communicate.
    

Level 2 8–11 marks

• There is basic skill in the use of digital technology or ICT in the evaluation.
  
• There is basic understanding of the forms and conventions used in the productions.
  
• There is basic understanding of the role and use of new media in various stages of the production.
  
• There is basic understanding of the combination of main product and ancillary texts.
  
• There is basic understanding of the significance of audience feedback.
  
• There is basic skill in choice of form in which to present the evaluation.
  
• There is basic ability to communicate.
  Level 3 12–15 marks
  

• There is proficient skill in the use of digital technology or ICT in the evaluation.
  
• There is proficient understanding of the forms and conventions used in the productions.
  
• There is proficient understanding of the role and use of new media in various stages of the production.
  
• There is proficient understanding of the combination of main product and ancillary texts.
  
• There is proficient understanding of the significance of audience feedback.
  
• There is proficient skill in choice of form in which to present the evaluation.
  
• There is proficient ability to communicate.
  
  Level 4 16–20 marks
  
  • There is excellent skill in the use of digital technology or ICT in the evaluation.
    
  • There is excellent understanding of the forms and conventions used in the productions.
    
  • There is excellent understanding of the role and use of new media in various stages of the production.
    
  • There is excellent understanding of the combination of main product and ancillary texts.
    
  • There is excellent understanding of the significance of audience feedback.
    
  • There is excellent skill in choice of form in which to present the evaluation.
    
  • There is excellent ability to communicate. 
    

Sample Answers

Hi folks, hopefully the examples contained in the following PDFs will allow you to better plan and structure your responses.

http://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/286030-a2-level-exemplar-candidate-work-unit-g325.pdf

http://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/179236-example-candidate-answers-from-june-2013.pdf

Question 1A Program of Study

Try and spend at least one hour per day one Media, this way you will be in control of your revision and will be more productive.

The areas you need to study:

Question 1A (to be applied to ALL work from preliminary through to A2 main & ancillary)

1. Digital technology
2. Research and Planning
3. Conventions of Real Media
4. Post-Production
5. Creativity.

Sample Questions: Please do Q1 & Q3 below for Monday 11 April, thanks

Q1
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.

Q2
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.

Q3
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.

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

Question 1B Program of Study

There are 5 possible areas that can come up:

1.Genre
2.Narrative
3.Audience
4.Media Language
5.Representation

QUESTION 1 B REVISION. 

PAST QUESTIONS:

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.

Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to audience.

Apply theories of media language 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, 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_genre

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 http://www.slideshare.net/petefrasers/narrative-theory-hand-out-copy 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. Here are some links to some starting points for theories:

general intro

presentation on reception theory

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 a past session.

Online age Program of Study

You will have a choice of doing ONE of two questions on "Media in the Online Age".
You need to look at TV AND MUSIC
What you need to revise and plan essays for are:

How production, distribution and exchange have been affected by Web 2.0
How has the relationship between institutions and audiences changed since Web 2.0?
What has the impact of Web 2.0 been on consumption?
How have audience behaviours changed through development of Web 2.0?

How producer/content rights holder behaviours have changed?

Who are shaping these industries and behaviours for the future and how?

You need to look at these  PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE aspects of these issues, with a concentration on the present and future.

You need to refer to theorists (Andrew Keen, Tapscott & Williams, McLuhan, Gauntlett etc etc) in order to reinforce your arguments, especially in regards to specific trends and behaviours.

Use the Prezi on this, my Twitter feed articles, and the readlists to support your arguments.

THIS MUST NOT JUST BE AN ESSAY DISCUSSING ONLINE SERVICES FOR CONSUMING TV & MUSIC!!

Representation

Here is a really useful introduction to the overview of Media Representation theory:



It's really worth your while watching this lecture (all 4 parts) from leading theorist Stuart Hall. He has some really interesting ideas on the presentation/representation of the conflict in Northern Ireland. It is also interesting to think of who constructs representation of race, gender, politicians etc too.


This presentation is very useful as it gives a short synopsis of the dominant critics/theories. It is very important that you try and see if these theories apply to your own production work so far, or if not, how not. It is fine if a theory doesn't apply, but you must articulate and argue why you think it doesn't.



David Chandler's introduction to Representation
http://www.scribd.com/doc/14165439/Media-Representation-David-Chandler

Laura Mulvey: The Male Gaze
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/gaze/gaze09.html

Apply the theory of Representation to ONE of your coursework productions. 
25 Marks: 10 Explanation/Argument, 10 Examples, 5 Terminology
30 Mins

Examiner's Report:

Once again, marks for 1(b) were often the lowest awarded but there was a significant increase in the application of theories to the candidates’ own chosen text. A large number of candidates were able to access the question by focusing on the extent to which they had reinforced or

challenged gender stereotypes usually by applying Mulvey’s ‘Male Gaze’ and Propp’s ‘spheres of action’ (other concepts are available). Representations of class and ethnicity were frequently discussed in terms of hegemony. There was also a sense of how active audiences might decode the representations that had been created using Hall’s dominant, oppositional and negotiated. All this was pleasing but there are two important points to make – firstly, candidates need to ‘switch register’ from 1(a) to 1(b) to move from talking about what they did to how the text can be analysed. Still only a small number of candidates manage to this, with the majority writing about how they applied the theory, as opposed to how the theory can be applied to the text. Much more disturbing was the overwhelming acceptance of the ‘male gaze’ as a neutral fact of life, something to be straightforwardly ‘applied’ in the production of a text, with the objectification of women accounted for as no more than a convention. Although candidates would not be penalised for describing their own text in these terms, if Mulvey’s theory was appropriately applied, centres are encouraged to support candidates in taking a rather more critical perspective on representation. 

Media Language

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 beRoland Barthes on semiotics- denotation and connotation and for moving image workBordwell 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.

Begin making you won notes on the following slides/presentation then I'll give you a hand structuring your responses.

Media language from Andy Wallis

10 g325sectionaq1b-5medialanguage from ctrmedia