With the mocks upon us, here is a quick post to help you get ready. It covers what we looked at in the session before Christmas and provides resources to help you revise.
STRUCTURE OF THE MOCK PAPER:
Question 1 a) - Reflection on your skill progression across the course
Question 1b) - Analysing one of your production with a focus on AUDIENCE
Question 2 - Essay on the music industry in the online age (two questions to choose from)
Let's focus on Question 1 a) first.
Question 1a) - Reflecting on the development of your skills across the course from the Foundation Portfolio to the Adavanced Portfolio.
Here are 2 good presentations from other centres to help you prepare, revise and structure your essays.
The other one cannot be embedded but is from Long Road...
SEE IT HERE
EXAMPLES OF PAST QUESTIONS:
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.
AND HERE'S ADVICE FROM PETE FRASER, YOUR CHIEF EXAMINER:
(From his blog - an essential revision tool: Pete's Media Blog )
"You will notice that each of these (questions) 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!"
SEE YOU IN THE NEXT POST FOR QUESTION 1b)
