Pete's Media Blog

MediaMag competition

2012-01-26T09:34:00.000-08:00

don't forget! Next wednesday- 1st February is the deadline for entries for the competition! Full details are here:

http://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/mm/index.html scroll done to the blue banner and download the pdf.

and one for teachers- Julian McDougall asked me to post this link to a free research event: http://www.wlv.ac.uk/default.aspx?page=29167

Media Magazine 38

2011-12-10T09:06:00.000-08:00

MM38 is now out- a Politics special, featuring a top 30 YouTube videos with a political theme from me. You can find the 30 videos here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/petefraser1?feature=mhee

Presentations from student events at Rich Mix and NFT

2011-11-17T10:19:00.000-08:00

Presentations from events on music video, TV drama and film openings

Film openings event

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A couple of useful links on youtube

G322 clips for TV drama

and a really excellent site with breakdown of rules of continuity editing and all kinds of other moving image stuff

Music Video top tips

Rich mix2

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TV Drama exam tips

Tv drama

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Media Magazine Student Conference

2011-11-03T23:23:00.001-07:00

An excellent day all round, with good morning presentations from Christine Bell, Steph Hendry and Julian McDougall from the three exam boards. Julian's video here. and a keynote on Media Studies and the riots from David Buckingham:

Riots

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Around 70 students stayed through lunch to hear about university life from three Higher education students.

In the afternoon, Garth Jennings gave an entertaining and inspiring presentation all about his work, including some footage he shot at the age of 11! And in the final session, Paul Lewis and Babita Sharma gave us all a real insight into the work of journalists in print and TV.

main points from my presentation on improving your production work

Presentation nov 4

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News Reporting in a Year of Big Stories 3

2011-10-16T04:59:00.000-07:00

Last time we looked at the newspaper coverage of the riots. In this post, we will look at the role of social media and television and try to relate it to some of the areas of the A2 exam.

There are many videos relating to the riots on youtube, some of which are taken from Sky and BBC coverage, others from bystanders' cameraphones. I was quite interested in some videos from 'Russia Today' which are on there, using footage without commentary, just the occasional fragment of speech.

When TV was covering the riots on a round-the-clock basis, it seemed as always with rolling news that they were desperately trying to keep talking about it all the time too. An endless search for 'experts' (anyone with an opinion) took place and reporters were constantly trying to explain and pin down the meaning of the riots. 'Community leaders' and politicians were called upon to 'condemn' the riots and particularly shocking footage was repeated endlessly. But whenever someone spoke from outside this consensus , however, they tended to be dismissed or even insulted. One clip illustrates this well.

The writer Darcus Howe offers his explanation and rather than listen to what he says, the newsreader keeps interrupting him and misrepresenting his views. She also gets his name wrong and accuses him of having been a rioter. It backfires as he tells her what he thinks of her. Later the BBC had to apologise. Interestingly, the clip has had almost five million views since.

As endless 'experts' were brought out during the week, Newsnight hit probably the lowest point by inviting David Starkey, the historian who had become a household name earlier in the year for his appearance on Jamie's Dream School, onto a panel to give his verdict. This raised a lot of questions about what constitutes an expert, as his area is Tudor History. Clearly he was on to say something controversial, which he duly did.

Starkey complained afterwards that the other panellists kept interrupting him and that he was bullied. I find it very hard to make that reading as he seemed determined to shout down anything they might say. The BBC were told that OFCOM would take no action against them for allowing Starkey's racist views as it was felt that the presenter and panellists challenged him sufficiently, though Owen Jones, the author trying to get a word in, disagreed, calling OFCOM "toothless..by failing to tackle the out-and-out racism of a discredited historian".

The clips above, along with many of the others on youtube, would form a useful study for media in the online age considering how mainstream, amateur and international coverage of the riots are used online. It is always illuminating to see the discussions that go on around clips in the comments on youtube and to trace the political debate taking place there.

Though TV spent a lot of airtime covering the riots, it was quite controversial that the police demanded that they hand over their footage for it to be used to identify and convict suspects. Taking what has gone on air is one thing, but demanding footage which has been shot but not broadcasted is another and puts the media in a difficult position as in future they are perhaps more likely to be targeted by people they are filming and seen as an instrument of the police. This article from the Guardian talks about the issues raised by this action.

Regulation of the media became a hot topic in relation to social media during the riots, with at least two people jailed for incitement to riot for things they posted on facebook (even though their proposed actions never took place) and twitter quickly being blamed for passing information around. Louise Mensch, a conservative MP, even suggested that in times of crisis, the government and the police should have the power to shut down social media temporarily. Apart from the technical problems of doing this, there are also questions about whether the technology really had the role that was being suggested. Many people argued that twitter acted more as an information source for those who wanted to avoid danger or help clear it up and certainly the idea that it was being used to secretly organise rioting or looting is a bit far fetched as your identity is public as soon as you send a tweet.

Data from Twitter in early August shows how surges in social media occurred after events rather than before. For the topic of WeMedia it would be interesting to consider this as a case study by comparison with some of the coverage of the Arab Spring and claims made about the role of Twitter there.

The Guardian and the London School of Economics have teamed up for a project called 'Reading the Riots' which seeks to understand the whole thing and is well worth looking at.

And finally the topic of collective identity would be ideal for a case study of news coverage of the riots and how young people in particular have been represented.

There are no easy answers to the issues raised by the riots, but there is much food for thought and material for debate.

News Reporting in a year of Big Stories 2

2011-10-10T08:56:00.000-07:00

Coverage of the riots on TV in the 1980s was nothing like we had this year. Back in 1981, hard though it is to believe, we only had three channels, there was no breakfast TV, and news was only on in the bulletin slot (6pm, 9pm, 10pm, etc). Technology for news gathering out on the streets was very different too and it was limited to the official news reporting teams- home video cameras were a real rarity at that time and the idea of people capturing the story on their phones was of course unheard of, because the mobile phone didn't even exist. Never mind spreading the story by twitter, facebook, blackberry messenger or the internet...

Over the next two blogs, I'm going to point to a range of examples that you might want to pursue in preparation for the A2 exam topics. The riots could be used as case studies for Collective Identity (how young people and black people in particular were represented), for WeMedia (how significant was social media during the riots and what has been claimed in the aftermath), for media in the online age (how did we find out about what was going on and how did this compare to the past?) and for media regulation (should TV companies have given their footage to the police and does social media need regulating in times of crisis?).

Firstly, newspaper coverage. A look at the front pages during the week of the riots gives an overview of the way the story was told. As the disturbances on Saturday night happened after the sunday papers had gone to press, the first opportunities for the front pages did not come till monday- which is one reason that rolling news on TV and the instant coverage from social media was so important. here are some of Monday's front pages:

The Mirror and The Guardian go with the image of the burning furniture store in Tottenham, whilst the Sun suggests those involved may be of primary school age. The Telegraph takes the looting angle, with an emphasis almost on the comedy of it (a reference to British 'carry on.'. films) which of course defines the riots in terms of greed rather than anger and had already gained widespread coverage in this footage from Sky News:

On the Tuesday, after trouble had spread much more widely, almost all the papers went with an attempt to personalise the rioting with the iconic hooded figure:

As you can see, mob/yob and anarchy now become the by-words but the images used are strikingly similar, if not identical. The hooded or masked young male (black in most, white in two) strides triumphant in front of a burning vehicle. The exception is The Telegraph's choice of a dramatic shot of a woman jumping from a blazing building, which became another iconic image of the riots.

By Wednesday, with the Prime Minister and Boris Johnson back in the country determined to show themselves in charge, thousands of extra police on the streets and things calming down a bit, the front pages had shifted emphasis:

Now it's all 'fightback' with exaggerated notions of what weapons might be deployed by the police, but also the riot clean up (sweep scum off the streets) which seemed to embody Cameron's 'Big Society' idea. There is also now an emphasis on the individual hero (personalising the riot stories) which develops further from Thursday to saturday, with heroes and villains identified to add to public outrage:

finally, celebrity advice is offered in the shape of the Rooneys, who like Rio Ferdinand claim to know what life is like on poor estates and ask people to stop rioting...

In the next part, we will look at some of the TV coverage and the issues around social media that were raised by some politicians.

Newspaper front pages all taken from http://www.thepaperboy.com/uk/

The changing face of the blog!

2011-10-05T04:53:00.000-07:00

I just applied a new 'dynamic' template to the blog which means you can change the way you display it to something that suits you. Have a go and see which one you prefer! Let me know via twitter whether you like it this way or want me to revert back to the old template.

Three adverts in the meantime!

The second Media magazine annual student conference will take place on November 4th at Logan Hall in London. There are currently a few of the 900 tickets remaining, so get in quick! The programme is here but highlights of the day include Professor David Buckingham talking about media coverage of the riots, Paul Lewis of The Guardian and Alex Thomson of Channel 4 news continuing the theme of this term's blogs with a discussion of News reporting in the Year of Big Stories, a panel of media students talking about their university courses and taking your questions on whether it's worth it and director Garth Jennings talking about his work, from Blur's Coffee and TV to Son of Rambow.

Alex Thomson
Paul Lewis
Garth Jennings
David Buckingham

Blur - Coffee And TV on MUZU.TV

I also want to publicise the student production competition already announced in the latest Media Magazine. It's a great opportunity to get your work noticed!

If you are proud of your practical work in video, print, audio or web design and whether you make your own media in or out of school/college this competition needs YOU!

To celebrate our forthcoming 40th issue and 10th birthday, MediaMag is holding a competition for the most creative, competent and impactful productions created by our readers. So download the entry form and get involved!

And for teachers, I want to draw your attention to this event on 1st December:
The Centre for the Study of Children Youth and Media in conjunction with the Media Education Association present:

Researching Media Learning

A one-day event presenting and discussing the findings of two research projects exploring media learning and progression, in both primary and secondary education:

Developing Media Literacy: Towards a Model of Learning Progression
An ESRC Funded Project: David Buckingham, Andrew Burn, Becky Parry and Mandy Powell

Persistence of Vision (POV) was an MEA project jointly funded by the UK Film Council’s education strategy “Film: 21st Century Literacy”, by Creativity Culture Education and by three local authorities (LAs): Devon, Norfolk and Worcestershire:
Cary Bazalgette, John Potter and Becky Parry

With discussants Jackie Marsh, Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield and Julian McDougall, Reader in Education at Wolverhampton University

On the 1st December 2011 from 10 AM until 5 PM. Followed by a wine reception and the MEA AGM.

London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, London. WC1N 3QS

Travel Info

To book a place please register here

The £15 price includes lunch and a wine reception.

Places allocated on a first come, first served basis.

Amanda Knox appeal case- tabloid attitudes to women

2011-10-05T04:30:00.000-07:00

I've been a bit shocked by some of the coverage of this and was pleased when Graham Linehan (writer of Father Ted) tweeted a link to a very well written article from Rolling Stone magazine which explained the whole story in clear unsensationalised terms. You need to read the whole story there as it gives a very different perspective from the one that has dominated the press since the murder.

Even before reading that article, I found so much of the coverage of the case distasteful and vicious. It is clear from the Rolling Stone article that there was a massive bungle on the part of the Italian police in terms of gathering evidence, followed by outrageous assertions from a prosecutor who was already known to be obsessed with the idea of satanist conspiracy. Added to this was the intense bullying of Amanda and her fellow suspect while in custody to force a confession and the desire of the press to wallow in lurid speculation. 'Foxy Knoxy' became her nickname and, is often the case with stories of women accused of crime, allusions to witchcraft and sexual excess were made.

The British tabloids, especially The Daily Mail were particularly keen to view her as guilty, partly because the victim Meredith Kircher was a British student, but also partly because it reinforces their misogynstic world view that a woman who doesn't conform to their expectations must be guilty.

A look at the tabloid front pages for the past two days is quite interesting. Here are today's (Oct 5)

Most feature the same picture of Knox arriving back in the USA, but the headlines are striking. The Mirror and The Mail both take the angle of lack of justice for the victim 'Meredith who?' and 'Give our girl justice too' (even though it seems pretty certain from the evidence that the actual killer is behind bars). The Star tries to suggest that Knox is both greedy and has more to hide by its 'Secret £20m diary' whilst 'The Sun' brings back the sex angle, presumably with classic stereotypical overtones of lesbian aggression: 'Knox's prison sex ordeal'.

The day before, the image captured on so many front pages was of her sobbing on her release:

These front pages come from a very useful site http://www.thepaperboy.com/uk/ where you can get readership info and front pages from all major UK papers dating back several months.

Again The Mail suggests that she will be making loads of money out of selling her story, with the implication that she is somehow guilty anyway "four years jail for Meredith's murder, now conviction is quashed". Interestingly, the Mail made a massive mistake on the paper's website when the announcement of the appeal verdict was made. In an attempt to get the story up quickly, the paper mistook the verdict on a slander charge as a verdict on the murder charge and put this up on the site:

(screengrab from paidcontent.org)

Paidcontent report:
"The Mail Online not only mistook the Italian court’s guilty verdict for slander as guilty of everything, it posted a story under the byline Nick Pisa purporting to detail the return journey of Knox and her ex-boyfriend to separate prisons where they would be put on suicide watch. The story also quotes “delighted” prosecutors who said “justice has been done.”

Which just shows how much of a story is written in advance! All made up!

Finally, the way in which media coverage simply seems to have wanted her to be guilty so that the lurid cocktail of sex, murder and satanism could be used in stories is well illustrated by the loathsome low of Tuesday's Channel 5 show 'the Wright Stuff'

Under the headline: 'Foxy Knoxy: would ya?' the panel, bizarrely comprising Christopher Biggins, interior designer Kelly Hoppen and Liz McClarnon of Atomic Kitten, discussed whether anyone would risk a sexual relationship with Knox now that she is out of jail. On the C5 web page, the segment was previewed with:

"She's innocent. She's also undeniably fit and loves wild sex. Or did. So if you were a guy who'd met her in a bar and she invited you back to hers, would you go?"

Wright pointed out on the show that she had been declared innocent but insisted she is "foxy as hell". He later defended the discussion as 'serious'.

Would coverage like this occur for a man accused and acquitted of murder? I think not. As Graham Linehan noted- hunches, misogyny, puritanism, guesswork- the loathsome tabloid attitudes which they use to sell their papers.

News Reporting in a Year of Big Stories-1

2011-10-02T01:00:00.000-07:00

This has been a remarkable summer for news coverage. Traditionally, the summer is a quiet time as politicians are on holiday and journalists struggle to find enough to interest their viewers, listeners and readers. This year, however, both at home and abroad, there were a number of major news stories which have significant implications for media students. Over the next few weeks, I shall be blogging about these stories and suggesting ways in which they might be used as case studies for your work, particularly at A2 for the exam paper ‘contemporary media debates’. I have been collecting interesting links throughout the summer which I hope will be useful to you.

The riots

I was away on holiday when the riots happened, but, like a lot of people, found it hard to tear myself away from the rolling coverage on the BBC and Sky News channels, as well as from the range of provocative hashtags on twitter like #riots #londonriots #riotcleanup etc. At the time, I found myself feeling a mixture of emotions. On the one hand, I kept thinking that this was the inevitable outcome of savage government cuts imposed on the poor and anger at the repressive use of the police force but on the other hand, seeing live on TV the behaviour of the looters and buildings being set ablaze, I felt angry at the damage they were doing in local communities. It was tempting to agree with people who wanted to bring out the army and the watercannons to put a stop to it, but when I stopped watching it on TV and online and started to think about it, I realized that the emotional responses I was having were probably not that far different from the adrenaline rush of those who were involved in it and from those giving it non-stop coverage. Despite the intensity of those emotions, we were not seeing the apocalypse unfold on our streets.

When I thought about it, I realized that like any news story, the riots were constructed for us and with our collusion as audience members; of course, the events happened, and pretty awful they were too, but our understanding of them was very much mediated by the web, the radio, the newspapers and particularly TV. We can ask all kinds of questions about why they happened, why people got involved and who was right and who was wrong, but the sense we made of them was determined by how they were reported.

People blamed social media for a lot of what happened, arguing that gangs orchestrated looting and violence through twitter and facebook and particularly blackberry messenger. They also argued that twitter played a heroic role in the cleanup with volunteers emerging as a result of requests for support there. I would argue that television was much more significant, however. However unpalateable it might be to say, the live coverage made it seem very exciting, with blazing buildings, confrontations with police and people nicking stuff and appearing to get away with it. It actually looked like the police and the politicians were no longer in control and that power had shifted to the youth. Scary for many of us watching, but surely exciting enough for some people to want to go out and have a piece of the action.

The riots make an ideal case study in many respects and there is a real archive of material to be had online. Youtube is packed with videos of some of the key moments and several newspaper archives look really useful to go back through.

Paul Lewis, of The Guardian was on the ground reporting throughout the riots and his tweets gave a vivid account of what was happening. He is a really good person to follow on twitter and regularly tweets links to interesting and useful online articles from the paper and other sources, especially on the riots and their aftermath. He summarises the role of twitter for journalism in relation to the riots very well here.

One of his tweets alerted me to this fantastic resource: a social media timeline of the London Riots, by Anthony DeRosa, from Reuters news agency.

Scrolling through this resource shows the story unfolding,mainly through twitter, but also shows some of the false leads and the ways in which rumours can easily get out of hand. For example, this image of the London Eye, supposedly on fire and careering down the Thames:

This was an extreme example, but there were plenty of other stories circulating at the time which led to minor panics. But perhaps the biggest panic of them all is what is known as a moral panic, which is what the riots became. Elsewhere on petesmediablog, we have looked at how young people have been demonised through media coverage over the years. As the riots spread and saturation media coverage occurred, a lot of what was being said started to take on the form of a moral panic and indeed when the Prime Minister made speeches about the incidents, he described them in such terms.

These articles demonstrate how the 2011 'riots' and the response to them seem to fit in a long tradition of such panics. The Jakarta Globe analyses the image of the hoodie from afar and The Economist systematically works through the parallels between 2011 and other 'moments' of civil disturbance in the UK.

In the next blog, we'll have a look at some of the coverage on TV and in the tabloids, as well as considering the extreme reaction in the aftermath.

Welcome to new students- welcome back to others!

2011-09-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

I've been very busy, so have kept putting off producing the first blogs of the new term. So while you wait for something more focussed and specific, here are a few bits of media to whet your appetite.

First of all, a bit of politics, economics or whatever you'd want to call it...

TV News tends to give a lot of airtime to people like this, who couldn't give a toss about what happens to anyone else, but are set up as 'experts'. At least this time, this one says what he really thinks, as he dreams of ripping everyone off for millions when he gets the chance.

Last weekend, peaceful protestors in New York were attacked by the police while making their point about the global economic crisis, blaming Wall Street (the US stock exchange). Here we see some amateur footage of women protestors being 'maced' (sprayed with the equivalent of teargas) by the cops.

At the time of writing, this video has been viewed almost 700,000 times, so it is possible to get your message across these days without the help of broadcast TV.

This next video turned my stomach when I saw it..an expensive advert for one of the possible Republican presidential candidates next year. Currently Governor of Texas, apart from being proud of having 235 people executed in his state since he took on the job, he has a track record of pretty much looking after the rich. Have a read of his wikipedia entry. 'Heaven help us all...' as Stevie Wonder sang, if this guy becomes President.

Enough of this anger! Well maybe not...if you are lucky enough to have Sky Atlantic, on friday evenings you should be watching the magnificent Treme, set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Season 2 is now on, created by David Simon, who also made The Wire, and featuring several of the cast from that programme. The music is epic, the stories interweave and, like The Wire, all the institutions of modern society come under scrutiny.

Closer to home and just started on Channel 4 on thursdays, #EducatingEssex, yet another programme about school, claiming to be a sympathetic portrayal, filmed by 65 fixed cameras over the course of a year at Passmores in Harlow. Worth a watch!

So there you go- a few of our themes for the year- representations of school, American TV Drama, user generated content, TV news and politics. Oh and just to finish, with his 'autobiography' out this week, a bit of Alan Partridge:

follow me on twitter @petesmediablog

presentation for teachers

2011-07-05T15:18:00.000-07:00

Used at BFI 6/7/2011

Film openings bfi copy

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Film Openings event at the NFT

2011-07-02T23:32:00.000-07:00

I had a very enjoyable day at the National Film Theatre yesterday, chairing an event of film openings from schools and colleges. We looked at some material which is expanded upon in my post below on film openings, but also some additional material which I am linking here. We were joined by two industry speakers whose work could be useful to a wider audience of students, so I am posting links to them here too.

Three film openings on www.artofthetitle.com which I showed at the event

Catch Me If You Can

Good as a graphic titles sequence and an illustration of how a film-maker can suggest things about character and narrative as well as establish a sense of place in an opening. A very large number of titles integrated into the graphics, which serve as a good model for thinking about how titles need to be used in student film openings too.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

In this sequence, we looked particularly at the fragments of narrative (a kind of back story) and at the way the titles appear in red on black with a little 'bleed' each time, but of particular interest is the use of sound, which is quite 'layered' with the Johnny Cash song, the heartbeat noise, the bits of dialogue and other little stings which link with the images.

Napoleon Dynamite

This sequence is a really novel way of representing the titles, but also gives us a sense of the characters, even though only one character appears and then only on his ID card.

Our guests for the day were the man behind all the Bond film titles from Goldeneye to Casino Royale, Daniel Kleinmann, and the editor of the film released today, Monsters, Colin Goudie.

Daniel mainly works in commercials, having started in music video in the 1980s with work for the likes of ZZTop, Adam and the Ants and Gladys Knight; he is based at Rattling Stick in London and his recent adverts can be seen here. His titles for Casino Royale drew upon the influence of Saul Bass (Vertigo, see post below) and blended graphic work with live action to introduce the then new Bond, Daniel Craig.

Casino Royale

Colin Goudie has worked on a number of films and TV productions as a sound and vision editor and his latest work on Monsters was the subject of our session. The film is released today at both arthouses and mainstream cinemas and is well worth seeing. He describes it as a love story and a road movie, but it has the look of Sci-fi in a post-apocalyptic world.

The official site is here

Colin talked very animatedly about the process of making the film, including the improvisation, the largely amateur cast and the use of multiple locations. The film has caused quite a stir as it has been made on a micro budget yet got quite a big release. Another BFI event interview with Colin appears here.

Colin also mentioned the value of youtube clips which show how things are done. One on visual effects is at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBeHljB6uFU

Film openings for A level

2011-07-01T09:27:00.000-07:00

This post is aimed at students doing the film opening task for AS Media with OCR, but there is plenty of advice here which can be of use to students doing other film-related projects, such as a short film or a trailer. The main thing is to make your final project look like what it is supposed to be- so if it is meant to be a trailer, you need to be sure it shows the conventions of a trailer, but if it is a film opening, it MUST follow the conventions of film openings!

The OCR AS video task asks you to make "the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes". Many students fall into the trap of thinking this is a really easy task and they can just have a laugh doing it and walk off with a good grade. Nothing could be further from the truth! Expectations are very high from this production work and you will need to work systematically and be extremely well organised if you are to be successful.

However, there are a number of steps you can take which will undoubtedly maximise your chances of producing something for which can get you good marks and of which you can be proud!

Step 1: Ideas

Keep them simple. the more complicated your idea, the more will go wrong. Put limits on settings, actions, characters, story. Try to whittle down the pitch so it can be explained in 25 words, like these here or try to summarise it so that if you were explaining it to someone in a lift, you would get through your explanation and they would understand it by the time the lift reached the floor you are going to.

Step 2: Research

This is a much abused term and often seems to be seen by students as doing some kind of survey and watching a few film openings chosen by the teacher.WARNING- this is not enough!

Research for this kind of project really means getting a full understanding of what the task involves by looking properly at real examples and at examples done by previous media students. A few years ago, this would have involved a big collection of VHS tapes but since youtube came along, frankly, it's all there on a plate for you to select from. This link will take you to a whole load of film openings from a range of different genres.

Even better though, is www.artofthetitle.com, where you can download openings from a huge variety of films in SD and HD without any adverts or other stuff getting in the way. The site also features directors, designers and others, talking about their work on these openings- for films, tv programmes and video games.

For some really innovative graphic-style titles from the past, the work of designer Saul Bass is well worth a look. There is a collection of his work here on youtube, including this one for Hitchcock's 'Vertigo'

Research needs to cover film conventions- how is an opening established in terms of story, genre, location, character, camerawork?- but also institutions- which personnel, jobs and organisations are credited in those opening two minutes and in what order and why?- and the audience- all media texts are specifically targeted at particular audiences and you need to consider how this is done and who that audience is.

You can do the conventions bit by watching a range of examples and identifying how they work; institutions can be covered by making good use of a range of examples on the artofthetitle site. An exercise that helps with this is this one here, making a timeline of the titles from an existing sequence. This example of what a student did to plot the titles of 'Iron Man'

For the audience research, the temptation is to do loads of questionnaires and then endless pie charts. You really don't need to do this and it is of questionable value anyway. Two strategies I would recommend are for quantitative data (numbers) do some online research to find breakdowns by audience age and gender for particular films and for qualitative data (what people say, in more depth) have some regular feedback sessions with your classmates where you look at each others' ideas, progress, animatics and rough cuts and then finally your finished work to give and get feedback. This needs structuring with some focussed questions, and you could always video it and put bits on your blog for evidence.

Finally, look at old student work. A search for 'G321' on youtube or vimeo or 'Year 12 film openings' will yield lots of results. Your task is to identify the strengths which you could learn from and the weaknesses which you will attempt to avoid!

Here are a couple of sites which contain plenty of them and an example to get you started.

Hurtwood

Latymer

Step 3. Planning

This is the other big aspect of the process where you can do so much to ensure the overall success of your project. I would suggest that a blog is the best place to gether evidence of both your research and your planning, so that the whole project can be seen as a journey. It is also a lasting record for when you come to do the exam at the end of the second year, when you will need to refer back to things you did a while ago in your preparation for the exam. Blogging can allow you to show all kinds of examples which have inspired you and which you have used for research.

For planning, everything needs to be taken into account. It is always tempting not to bother with storyboards but it is a mistake if you do so. You need a visual plan for your work as it won't just happen when you have a camera in your hand! I would recommend using post-its for constructing a storyboard, as you can move the frames around and change the order easily. Once you have done the storyboard, the next step is to turn it into an animatic, which quite literally involves taking a photo of each frame (on your phones or a webcam, nothing fancy) and then dropping the frames onto the timeline of your digital editing program. You can then cut them to length, add titles and sound and then export the whole thing as an animatic- a moving storyboard. here's one...

L3 Group 7: JAHMAL & SVEN - OPENING SEQUENCE ANIMATIC from cmdiploma on Vimeo.

You can get feedback on yours from your peers and then adjust for the final shoot accordingly. Other planning which you could easily evidence on a blog would be moodboards of the overall piece- which could initially be produced using found images- 'recce' shots where you go out on location and take snaps of places you might use and things like costume and prop ideas. All the way through the project you can be taking screengrabs of your work in action, like work you are doing in photoshop or your digital edit program.

The other crucial aspect of planning is logistics.This involves production management skills, thinking ahead to everything that could possibly go wrong on your shoot and to every little detail of what you will need. Nothing should be left to chance- costumes, props, locations, camera equipment and people all need orgnaising. Don't have your actors just wearing any old clothes- plan what they will wear; don't rely on someone else remembering particular props, have a list of who is bringing what. Don't assume everyone will simply turn up- make sure everyone has all the phone numbers and everyone knows exactly where they should be and when.

As for locations, make sure you have got the place you want at the time you want and without other people getting in the way of your shoot. If any of these things can't be achieved, re-think where you are going to shoot. It looks terrible if you have members of the public around in the background or a tripod sitting in the corner, so plan things so that you can control your set!

Step 4. Production

As director, you will need to be in charge of your actors and it will be your job to get the best out of them. Key elements of this are explaining what you need and what their role involves, rehearsing so that their performance looks convincing and enthusing them so they give their best. A lame performance will spoil your film opening!

You also need to know your equipment- you should have had lots of chances to use it to experiment, to try things out as you build up the project but by the time of the main shoot you should be absolutely in command of it. If you fumble around or forget bits of kit, you will have wasted your own and other people's time.

Use your storyboard but get extra takes- don't rely on one angle for everything or just one take. when you come to review the footage there may be little bits you don't like, so several takes of each shot will give you some choice. You might do a bit of improvising on the day with other shots that you haven't thought of before. Extra footage costs nothing, so you might as well get it. go for some unusual angles and go for plenty of variety, especially close-ups.

Step 5: Post-Production

When you have all your footage, you need to get it organised back on the computer in the edit program, labelled and sorted. When you start to edit, always think of the big picture first before you go on to the small detail. If you obsess about getting a particular shot or transition absolutely right before you've got a rough edit in order, you may end up running out of time!

You need to give equal prominence to all the formal aspects- soundtracks,camerawork, choice of mise-en-scene, pace of editing and of course the titles, so be thinking about those all the way through your edit. Don't leave any one aspect until the last minute; it's all important.

Finally, remember it is a film opening not a whole film or trailer; don't have too much happening or try to tell too much of the story, but on the other hand don't make it so impressionistic that it looks like a trailer.

In a future blog, I will consider some good ways of doing the evaluation for the AS specification.

Evaluation for OCR coursework

2011-06-30T03:27:00.000-07:00

This is the final part of my guide to coursework and how to make the most of it. This guide to evaluation largely only applies to OCR work, so if you think you are doing AQA or WJEC, it is important that you check with your teachers about how evaluation needs to be done, as it is very different.

The key principles for OCR are that there are a number of questions which must be specifically addressed in the evaluation and that you should think of it as a creative reflection task rather than a written essay. The evaluation has to be presented digitally, but it can take a number of different forms and you are actively encouraged to be experimental with this. It may be that your school or college restricts the options you can use but you should note that the best marks go to those who really try to engage with digital formats as enthusiastically as possible!

It is important to note that the evaluation element is worth 20 marks, which is a fifth of the marks for coursework overall, so it is important that you take it seriously and do it well.

So what are the questions?

At AS there are seven:

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of film openings)

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups ?

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?

and at A2 there are four, which as you can see, contain some overlap with AS, but for which there is an expectation of a greater level of sophistication.

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products ?

2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

4.How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The evaluation can make use of any digital format, but in order to get top marks, will need to really engage with the potential of the medium, so if it is on a blog, we would expect to see lots of use of pictures, links and video, for example. If it is on a powerpoint, the same would apply, but we would probably see even less written text, as we would expect the powerpoint to be presented by someone, so any writing would be just there as prompts. If the evaluation were all to appear on a DVD, the likelihood is that much of it would be in video form. I am going to suggest some ways of approaching each of the questions as tasks, which make them more creative and more fun to do, but which also involves more planning and thought than a straight written answer would involve.

For both AS and A2, question 1 is the same- it's about forms and conventions of media texts. A lot of students have had great success using something we 'nicked' from www.artofthetitle.com, which we referenced in the blog on film openings.This involves selecting nine frames from your opening and presenting them as a grid, just like they use on artofthetitle to illustrate openings. In this case, however, each of your frames has to represent a different aspect of the film you have made.

So you might select nine frames, each of which represents one of the following:

The title of the film
Setting/location
Costumes and props
Camerawork and editing
Title font and style
Story and how the opening sets it up
Genre and how the opening suggests it
How characters are introduced
Special effects

here is an example by Tom

Having chosen these frames and put them in a grid using photoshop, Tom now has to do a brief analysis of each to justify his choices. This could be done through bullet points on his blog, though he has opted for full sentences.

"This is our contact sheet for our opening sequence. The first frame is of our main title. We decided to have the main title at this point as it enters dramatically. This is because the music changes and gets louder, also the picture changes from black to the panning shot. We chose the title ‘Retribution’ meaning “punishment that is considered to be morally right and fully deserved”. This title would be typical of an action thriller.

The second frame we chose is of the setting. It is a fade between the building and the skyline panning shot. It has an urban feel and suggest industrial trading. The purpose of the the purpose of the building is to show that the opening is set in a run down, secluded area. These types of shots are typical of openings as they put the audience in the right frame of mind for the film.

The third frame is to represent our costumes and props. It is of the petrol being poured over the hostage character. It shows the murderer character in a suit costume and the gerry can which is being used to poor petrol on the victim. We put our murderer character in a suit as it makes him look more important and higher up to the hostage. It is also a typical thing for openings to do because it helps the audience to understand who is who.

The fourth frame is to show our font. The font that we chose was called ‘Dirty Ego’. We found it on www.dafont.com. We chose this font because the style of the font looks rough, dirty and it has a stencil like appearance."

Another approach which works very well is this one from Lucy

As you can see, they have integrated some shots from their video into a sort of mini director commentary. Ideally, any bits where you talk about your work will feel more natural and less scripted, but nonetheless this is a really good start for doing some creative reflection on the work.

Question 2 at AS asks about how social groups are represented. A good way of expressing this is to do a bit of comparison between the way you have represented a character and how mainstream media has done it. So for example, if you are doing the magazine task, you might set a screengrab from your work alongside one from a real magazine, as in this example from Romany here:

"The postures of both men are similar in the sense that they’ve both got their hands in their pockets. They also share similar facial expressions – both serious and staring straight at the camera, although Andrew’s eyes are hidden by his aviator sunglasses. In addition to this, both men are wearing similar costumes – jeans and a t-shirt layered with a shirt on top. As well as this, the background setting is very similar – both pictures were taken outside on a field with trees in the distance. However, the lighting used in the photos is different with one displaying a much brighter blue sky and the other a more overcast grey outlook. Also, they have different hairstyles – Andrew’s is longer, darker and covering his face more, whereas the man from Rinoa has shorter, lighter gelled up hair. Overall I think that these elements of the photos represent a normal young social group and that my magazine reflects this throughout – the people featured in my magazine are quite normal looking – there’s nothing extreme or obscure about their appearances."

For question 3 at AS, the emphasis is on the role of media institutions, which should have been an area of your research, so that you have a good understanding of how distribution of films or magazines works. One way of approaching this is to do an audiodub director's commentary which just focuses on this aspect.

Yasmin and Tilly's work here is a good example:

You could easily think of a parallel task for magazines, such as a video walk through of your magazine where you might do a similar voiceover and then embed it on your blog.

Questions 4 and 5 look at the audience from slightly different perspectives. A simple way to approach question 4, which you can build in to your research early on, is to do what the media industries do and profile a typical audience member. Here is an image of the ideal viewer for Yasmin and Tilly's film and their description of her likely tastes:

"This is Shanelle Goodwin. She is 15 years and 7 months old, and lives in the suburbs of Leeds.
she dresses fairly straight forwardly - just jeans and a top. She enjoys sleepovers with her friends, and shopping at the weekends with her pocket money. She shops in places like H&M and River Island, Jane Norman, New Look, and Topshop.
She enjoys films like Mean Girls, Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging, House Bunny, St Trinians, Sex and the City, Mumma Mia, she enjoys watching them at the cinema and also buying them later on DVD and watching them with her friends, and jelly and icecream.
They would watch Hollyoaks, Friends, Scrubs, Family Guy, X Factor, America's Next Top Model, One Tree Hill. The main channels would be Channel 4; E4; Living Tv; ITV; BBC Three; Comedy Central.
The music this girl would listen to would be anything in the charts, varying from pop, hiphop. r 'n' b, indie music - not really a 'rock' or 'classical' or 'dub-step'. Listens to Kiss FM and Radio 1 for the 'chart hits'.
I think our film would appeal to this girl as she is a stereotypical girly girl who enjoys typical girly things, therefore, if this film was shown at her local cinema, this may appeal to her, as it's similar to other films she likes, such as Mean Girls, House Bunny, and Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging and St Trinians."

Romany's video for question 5 on magazines is a good way to approach it:

Another excellent option is to use the youtube tagging function which allows you to show precisely how the audience is addressed and to link to other texts online, as in Sven and Jahmal's here:

At A2, the question about the links between the main and ancillary products can easily be addressed by making putting in cutaways to the print work where video is the main task:

and the audience and conventions tasks could be variants on those we have seen from AS.
At AS, the question on preliminary task v final project could be looked at using some screengrab comparisons, but hopefully you will think of something more inventive!

Finally, the question about technologies allows you to bring together your understanding of software, hardware and online tools and how they might all interact in your project. This can be very reflective in relation to your own skills development and like several of the other tasks can be used to build up evidence towards the A2 exam, where for question 1a you are asked about your development across the course. Good visual examples of this reflection on technology are here:

So my advice is to use some of this work as a starting point and hunt around for other examples, but to really go for it and be inventive with what you do. What we DON'T want to see is essays on blogs or powerpoint slides. If it is so dull, you wouldn't read it, then take it from me, no-one else would either!

To see the whole evaluations from some of the students featured here:

Finally, try Elliott's epic video which covers all the questions in one elaborate sweep!

Evaluation- Elliott from cmdiploma on Vimeo.

Remarkable single take video!

2011-05-30T10:53:00.001-07:00

The A2 exam- links to material!

2011-05-29T01:01:00.000-07:00

Having done nine posts over the last week, added to some posts I did this time last year, I thought it would be a good idea to do a little summary to help you find what you need...

General Advice and a page of all the old questions
How to approach q.1a
How to approach q.1b

Contemporary Media Regulation
Media in the online Age
Global Media
Postmodernism
WeMedia and Democracy
Media and Collective Identity

Tips on organising answers to 1a and 1b
structuring an answer to Online Age question (also useful for other topics)

WeMedia and Democracy Exam questions

2011-05-29T01:00:00.000-07:00

As we saw last Sunday, these are the previous questions set for this topic:

How far can the media in 2010 be considered to be democratic?
Assess the claim that the media is becoming more democratic.
Discuss the meanings of the term ‘we media.’
Explore the claim that the ‘new’ media are more democratic than the ‘old’ media.
What is ‘we media’ and what difference does it make to citizens?
‘We get the media we deserve.’ Discuss, in relation to the role of media in a democracy.

So as you can see, several previous questions focus on old media v new media, some on what might be defined as wemedia and some very specifically on notions of democracy.

If we 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:

• What are ‘We Media’?
• Where / how has ‘We Media’ emerged?
• In what way are the contemporary media more democratic than before?
• In what ways are the contemporary media less democratic than before?

The kinds of thing you might use as case studies include:
‘homegrown’, local, organic and potentially counter- cultural media
(eg blogging and digital film uploading and sharing)
You could compare potentially alternative / progressive ‘we media’ examples with other examples of more orthodox production and ownership models
you should know a bit about the history of such media before the web (fanzines, pamphlets, radical documentaries, etc)

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

For this topic, since a lot of what you look at is likely to be online, a comparison between online media and any form of traditional media (newspapers, broadcast news, film) would ensure you quickly meet the criteria for no.1

For no.2, the main thing is to ensure you have a majority of material from the past five years. This really should not be a problem when using online media, and to be honest I think you could use material from the last few months to construct a really good answer!

And for no.3 you should have a range of writers that you could use- for example Dan Gillmor who coined the term 'We Media'or sceptics of the power of social media such as Evgeny Morozov or some of the advocates of people power through social media such as Clay Shirky

There are points on my post about doing the online age option in the exam which would be quite useful here too and if you look at the posts I did previously such as this one on fans or this one on music or this on video games you might find them useful. In all cases, you should be looking for case studies which raise questions about how much the web and social media appear to offer more democratic options for the audience than what was there before. The work of Graeme Turner is quite useful for offering a critique of many assumptions about democracy and new media. You can preview his book here.

For this topic, it is likely you will look at news and citizen journalism, but you could also look at media such as reality TV and shows where ordinary people get to be stars through public participation (the 'democracy of texting'). You could also look at the creative options open to ordinary people such as youtube and how far this really does represent a change. David Gauntlett's work on creativity would be useful here.

Postmodernism exam questions

2011-05-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

As we saw on Sunday, these are the previous questions set for this topic:

What is meant by ‘postmodern media’?
Why are some media products described as ‘postmodern’?
Explain how certain kinds of media can be defined as postmodern.
Explain why the idea of ‘postmodern media’ might be considered controversial
“Postmodern media blur the boundary between reality and representation.” Discuss this idea with reference to media texts that you have studied.
Discuss why some people are not convinced by the idea of postmodern media.

So as you will notice, the questions may focus on what postmodernism is and how you apply ideas about it to examples, but also to why there is an argument about the term itself. I suspect if you have studied this topic, you will have been introduced to the debates around it and have the ability to apply definitions to examples, but I'll point you in the direction of some useful material here too.

If we 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:

• What are the different versions of post-modernism (historical period, style, theoretical approach)? (first and fourth questions above)
• What are the arguments for and against understanding some forms of media as post-modern? (possibly all six questions!)
• How do post-modern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation? (first, second, third and fifth questions)
• In what ways do media audiences and industries operate differently in a post-modern world? (quite a hard one, maybe a bit of the third and fifth ones)

The kinds of thing you might use as case studies include:

How post-modern media relate to genre and narrative
computer / video games, virtual worlds, augmented reality and and new forms of representation,
post-modern cinema,
interactive media,
social media and social networking,
reality TV,
music video,
advertising,
post-modern audience theories,
aspects of globalisation,
parody and pastiche in media texts or a range of other applications of post-modern media theory.

It is pretty open in terms of what you might have studied, so I would expect answers to draw upon very different case study material.

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

So for 1. you might compare and contrast examples from film and TV or from games and the web.

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 examples, so beware of this if you are writing about games or the web, you can be pretty up to date, but the same is true of examples from TV, music video or cinema. This is not to stop you referring to historical examples, just encouraging an emphasis on recent ones. For the point about the future, you could say something about how as we all live more of our lives online, more and more texts take on elements of postmodernism.

For 3. You will hopefully have been introduced to some theory and your teachers will have tried to make it accessible- some key names are Baudrillard and Lyotard and their ideas are summarised quite neatly here

Media Magazine published an excellent article in MM22 about postmodernist texts a couple of years back by Richard Smith. I've uploaded the pdf so you can find it easily here

Mighty boosh and postmodernism copy

View more documents from petefrasers.

Have a read of it and then try a little exercise using the resources my colleague Nick Potamitis created here - the postmodernist advent calendar!

Click on each picture in turn and identify what the media text actually is; each one has at some time been described as 'postmodern'. Using Smith's article, work out what it is about the text that makes it postmodern. Then find three CONTEMPORARY examples of your own and do the same thing.

By the way, if you don't know what some of the 30 examples on the calendar are, I'll be posting the answers on slideshare!

Oh and here's a great example of postmodernism in action...

Later today: final exam advice- WeMedia and Democracy

Media in the Online Age exam questions

2011-05-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

Late tips: Rebecca asked for anything on Games and News

here is a good piece on online games and the kids' market- notably some info on Club Penguin, which has been the subject of very interesting research by Jackie Marsh.

And for news, a blog by Roy Greenslade about how online news is still largely dominated by the same news outlets as before the rise of the web.

As we saw on Sunday, these are the previous questions set for this topic:

“The impact of the internet on the media is revolutionary”. Discuss.
“For media audiences, the internet has changed everything.” Discuss
“The impact of the internet on the media is exaggerated”. Discuss.
Discuss the extent to which the distribution and consumption of media have been transformed by the internet
Explain the extent to which online media exist alongside older methods of distribution in 2010.
Evaluate the opportunities and the threats offered to media producers by the internet.

Questions tend to focus on what difference the internet has made ('revolutionary', 'changed everything', 'exaggerated', 'transformed''opportunities and threats') but also looking at audiences and producers. So long as you read the question carefully to see which angle it is looking for, you shouldn't have a problem. However, this focus on 'difference' does mean you have to be thinking about what the media was like pre-internet.

If we look at the bullet points in the Specification, which defines what should be studied, we should be able to see what kinds of question can come up:

• How have online media developed? (change from the past)
• What has been the impact of the internet on media production? (does it allow more people to produce their own media? what effect has it had on mainstream media?)
• How is consumer behaviour and audience response transformed by online media, in relation to the past? (audiences and the difference the internet has made)
• To what extent has convergence transformed the media? (technology's impact- mobile devices, tv online, etc)

the kinds of thing you could talk about would include:
music downloading and distribution,
the film industry and the internet,
online television,
online gaming and virtual worlds,
online news provision,
various forms of online media production by the public or a range of other online / social media forms.

It is pretty open in terms of what you might have studied, so I would expect answers to draw upon very different case study material.

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

So for 1. Different types of media online count, so the fact that you are talking about say, music downloading and people making youtube videos would tick the boxes for two media, even though they are both online.

For 2. the main thing is to ensure you have a majority of material from the past five years. I'd urge you to make it even more recent than that- say the time you have been doing the course, as the web changes so fast. Talking about the future for this topic is easy- you can speculate about how your chosen examples might develop in the future- what next after facebook? what can you see happening with mobile media? how will traditional media cope with further spread of fast wireless connections? Some good speculation on this you could use is here

For 3. you need some critics/writers who have developed ideas about online media. I'll be recommending some below.

Over the past two years, I've blogged a lot about media in the online age, with a huge range of examples on which you could draw.

Alan Partridge's web series is a good case study of how TV might adapt for the web and it would make a good comparison with Dub Plate drama, designed specifically with the web in mind, with its alternative endings which could be voted for via TV or MySpace. there is a further blog on microseries here. If you used these in an answer, you'd need a second case study which linked with a different medium, perhaps something like Twitter.A second piece on Twitter is here.

For theorists, I blogged last year to introduce some useful writers, Find them here. A useful revision activity would be to watch the BBC Virtual revolutions series, which I blogged about here. I've also posted stuff about changing technology here and on how audiences are collaborating to make videos online here and on Michael Wesch's analysis of online production and internet memes.

So there is plenty of material! The main thing is to narrow down what you intend to use and to have some arguments to make around it. Look at the previous questions and decide which of the examples you want to draw upon would work with them and what kind of argument you would want to make.

Oh and here is the story behind a great bit of up to date online age stuff!

Lady gaga

Good article about claims that the internet is like the Wild west

Tomorrow: Postmodernism!

Collective Identity Exam questions

2011-05-27T00:06:00.000-07:00

As we saw on Sunday, these are the previous questions set for this topic:

Analyse the ways in which the media represent any one group of people that you have studied.
With reference to any one group of people that you have studied, discuss how their identity has been ‘mediated’.
Analyse the ways in which the media represent groups of people.
“The media do not construct collective identity; they merely reflect it”. Discuss.
“Media representations are complex, not simple and straightforward”. How far do you agree with this statement in relation to any one group of people that you have studied?
What is collective identity and how is it mediated?

So as you will notice, the questions may focus on how representations are constructed (or how the media mediate representation/identity) but you also need to consider how people read or make sense of those representations and how groups of people might construct their own identity (e.g. online through social media). The last two questions above essentially cover the same territory, but ask you to reflect upon it in a slightly different way- a quote in a question usually means 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, so there would be something to really get your teeth into! And a look at contrasting representations of a particular group would allow you to explore the complexity, as indicated in the last question.

If we 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 representation compare to previous time periods?
• What are the social implications of different media representations of groups of people?
• To what extent is human identity increasingly ‘mediated’?

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

It is pretty open in terms of what you might have studied, so I would expect answers to draw upon very different case study material.

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

So for 1. you might compare and contrast examples from film and TV or from newspapers and social media.

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!

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. Have a look at those posts as you should find plenty of use!

You can't cover everything in this exam, as you only have an hour, so you need to be selective and very systematic in your answer. Have case study examples which really illustrate the kinds of points you want to make.

The ultimate best link for this topic is Dave's Collective identity Blog, which is terrific for a case study of Youth.

Tomorrow: Media in the online Age

Global Media exam questions

2011-05-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

As we saw on Sunday, these are the previous questions set for this topic:

What impact does the increase in global media have on media audiences?
What impact does the increase in global media have on media production?
What impact does the increase in global media have on local identity?
To what extent are the media now more global than local or national?
Discuss the positive and negative effects of globalisation of the media.
Discuss the idea that the media is becoming increasingly global.

As you can see, though there is some variation between questions, some have very similar wording. However, don't get a shock if the wording is different in the exam this summer! There is a limit to how many questions can be on 'impact'!

If we look at the bullet points in the Specification, which defines what should be studied, we should be able to see what kinds of question can come up:

• What kinds of media are increasingly global in terms of production and distribution? (production question above)
• How have global media developed, in historical terms, and how inclusive is this trend in reality? (questions on audiences and local identity above)
• What kinds of audience behaviour and consumption are increasingly global? (audiences above)
• What are the arguments for and against global media, in relation to content, access,
representation and identity? (probably the last three above)

the kinds of thing you are expected to know about would include:
film: debates around cultural imperialism- why do countries need their own cinema rather than just US products?
television and national versus imported broadcasting- what difference does having your own national tv stations make?
national press in relation to global news provision- do you get different stories or different versions of stories in local national media?
media marketing aimed at cross- national territories- how media products are global
examples of media that contradict theories of globalisation
other examples of global media practices.

It is pretty open in terms of what you might have studied, so I would expect answers to draw upon very different case study material.

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

So for 1. you might have one online case study example and one about cinema, or one about news in the press and one about news on TV.

For 2. the main thing is to ensure you have a majority of material from the past five years. If you are stuck for this, have a look at the Cuba Tweets case study below. For some reference to the future, you could talk about how globalisation is likely to continue as more and more material goes online and connections get faster and more countries have wider web access and speculate a little about what this might mean.

For 3. you need some critics/writers who have developed ideas about global media- there are a lot of people you could draw upon, so hopefully you have studied some with your teachers.

You can't cover everything in this exam, as you only have an hour, so you need to be selective and very systematic in your answer. You need to ask yourself what you do and don't understand and to concentrate on improving those areas you are going to write about and having examples to back up your points.

Cuba Tweets Case study- over the past few weeks, Julian McDougall has been tweeting useful links which could be used in a case study in the exam for Global media (although WeMedia and Online Age would probably work too). Follow him on twitter to catch them all, but here are some of his links- no need to use them all, but you'll learn a lot just by reading/watching it all!:

Cuban Media tweet-study starting point = Democracy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poO5BgU2PZo&feature=related
Cuban Media tweet-study: Rough Guide on Media in Cuba: http://tiny.cc/4hw3n
Cuban Media tweet-study: Richard Gott on Cuba + US: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/02/barack-obama-cuba-fidel-castro
Cuban Media tweet study - Granma (state controlled newspaper): http://www.granma.cu/ingles/
Cuban Media tweet study - Accessible Chomsky to 'apply' to contemporary Cuba: http://tinyurl.com/4jyfe7o
Cuban Media tweet study - Internet in Cuba: http://opennet.net/sites/opennet.net/files/cuba.pdf
Cuban Media tweet study: Strawberry and Chocolate: https://www.msu.edu/~colmeiro/alea.html Important film for Cuba, identity, tolerance.
Cuban Media tweet study: Cuba Va (young Cubans, self-representation, identity - 1990s). http://history.sundance.org/films/204
Cuban Media tweet study - state use of internet: http://monthlyreview.org/castro/
Cuban Media tweet study: Castro on Wikileaks http://links.org.au/node/2049 + recommend Jose Bell Lara's work for gobalisation / Cuba.
Cuban Media tweet study - more 'global' context: http://cubasolidaritycampaign.blogspot.com/2011/02/cuban-revolution-in-21st-century-by.html
Cuban Media tweet study - Generacion Y blog: http://tinyurl.com/6cw74mj Acclaimed 'citizen journalist' from Cuba.
Cuban Media tweet study - Venegas, recommended: http://www.lybrary.com/digital-dilemmas-state-individual-digital-media-cuba-p-75237.html
Cuban Media tweet study: Classic theory to 'apply': http://www.openculture.com/2010/04/marshall_mcluhan_the_world_is_a_global_village_.html
Cuban Media tweet study: Literacy levels in Cuba (important context for global media etc): http://tinyurl.com/5u52skc
Cuban Media tweet study: Cuban film, ideology, history: http://www.publicacions.ub.es/bibliotecaDigital/cinema/filmhistoria/Art.%20Mraz.pdf
Cuban Media tweet study: Guerilla Radio (the Cuban Hip Hop "struggle under Castro"): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-rDkhIvR_4
Cuban Media tweet study: Wendy Chun 'Control + Freedom' - good framework to apply to Cuban internet: http://tinyurl.com/3du89j4
Cuban Media tweet study: Elian - article on 'virtualisation': http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php

Cuban Media tweet study: telenovellas (soaps) as springboard for public debate - http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42978
Cuban Media tweet study: re Generacion Y (see previous tweet)
http://cubarights.blogspot.com/2011/05/cuban-blogger-pays-price-for-her.html

TOMORROW: Collective identity

Contemporary Media Regulation exam questions

2011-05-25T01:06:00.000-07:00

As we saw on Sunday, these are the previous questions set for this topic:

How effectively can contemporary media be regulated?
To what extent is contemporary media regulation more or less effective than in previous times?
Evaluate arguments for and against stronger regulation of the media
How far do changes to the regulation of media reflect broader social changes?
Discuss the need for media regulation
To what extent can the media be regulated in the digital age?

As you can see, though there is some variation between questions, you should not have a shock when you turn up for the exam! Two of the previous questions refer to 'effectiveness' - in other words, does regulation work? A third asks something very similar- 'to what extent can it be regulated?' and two of them ask you to look at the arguments around regulation- why do people believe it is needed and 'for and against'.

One way or another, this summer's questions should be in similar territory. Even if you get something which appears to go off at a tangent- like the question of how far it 'reflects social changes', you should be able to adapt your response based on the material you have studied.

If we look at the bullet points in the Specification, which defines what should be studied, we should be able to see what kinds of question can come up:

• What is the nature of contemporary media regulation compared with previous practices? (Past v Present)
• What are the arguments for and against specific forms of contemporary media regulation? (what do people say- note this is not asking for your opinion, but for you to weigh up the arguments of others!)
• How effective are regulatory practices? (does it work?)
• What are the wider social issues relating to media regulation? (put regulation in the wider context of society)

So we can see, all those areas have come up already and will come up again! As you have a choice of two questions, there should be nothing to panic about regarding what might come up!

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

For regulation, this should be perfectly possible. For point 1 You could choose to write about:

Film censorship/classification
The regulation of advertising
Newspaper regulation
Computer / video game classification,
The regulation of online media, social networking and virtual worlds
Contemporary broadcasting (TV and/or Radio)

Any two of these compared and contrasted, with some knowledge of what the rules are, who does the regulating, how it works and what the arguments are with close reference to specific examples will give you most of what you need! It will then just be a matter of answering the specific question. BUT make sure you do refer to TWO! It doesn't need to be absolutely balanced, but if you only refer to one medium, like film, it will cost you a lot of marks. I'd say go for an answer which is between 60-40 and 50-50 balanced between reference to your two media. If you write about three media, then either one third on each or 40% each on two, 20% on the third will give you time and space to do a good job.

For point 2, the main danger is spending too much time writing about the past, which many candidates have a tendency to do; the topic is CONTEMPORARY Media regulation, which means NOW, so that is where your emphasis should be. If you write about online media or newspapers, that should be easy to do, as there are some fantastic case studies around this year! But even writing about film should be possible with recent examples. If you don't know any, go to the BBFC student site for some tips! The BBFC even has an app for your phone now...

The tricky bit to get to the top of the mark range is FUTURE media, but that need not be a big deal. Just makes sure you say something about where the evidence is pointing for the future- I'd suggest, for example, that as we become more 'digital' it is harder to control what people do online so a key thing for the future is education so that audiences understand the implications of what they may access and what they can say. I'll give an example of this later, referring to Twitter.

Finally for point 3, you need some relevant writers/critics/theorists to reference in relation to your examples and answer. Don't just write the history of media effects, hypodermic syringe theories or all that stuff, but reference people who are relevant to the argument you are making. So, for example, if you are talking about anxieties about children's media consumption in the digital era, the research by Tanya Byron and Sonia Livingstone's EU Kids online project would be particularly relevant.

Current Case study: Twitter

The row this week over the Ryan Giggs case is a perfect example of the problem of regulation in the digital age. As you may know, a number of celebrities have taken out injunctions against newspapers, preventing them from printing stories about them (usually to do with some kind of sexual indiscretions/extra-marital relationships. These injunctions have an additional clause which turns them into what is known as 'superinjunctions' in that not only can the newspapers (or broadcasters) not report about the celebrity's affair, but they can't even mention that there is an injunction at all.

Sometimes, newspapers or broadcasters in other territories might decide to report the case as the injunction does not apply overseas. In such instances, it is not that hard, via google, to find out the details, but there may still only be a limited number of people who bother to do this; social media have of course changed all this, as it is very easy for messages to spread on a site like facebook. Twitter, with its instant messaging and hashtags, has taken this considerably further.

On 8 May, a twitter user set up a false account and posted details of six alleged superinjunctions. It was covered on BBC News and it only took me a quick search on twitter via #superinjunction to find them, by which stage lots of people had been re-tweeting them. One of the six made headlines with a denial, but the other five have, as far as I am aware, remained quiet. The Sun made several attempts to get the superinjunction for one of the celebrities overturned (the footballer) as his name was being repeated across social media quite a bit yet newspapers were not allowed to print it; the footballer then took out a writ against twitter to get the name of the person who tweeted the information. Last week, this led to massive retweeting of his name and it spread so much that it was even being chanted by Man City supporters on sunday. Finally an MP took advantage of what is known as parliamentary privilege (freedom from prosecution if done inside Parliament) to name Ryan Giggs, so the newspapers could then report it.

This case shows how impossible it is to control social media in the way that mass media can be regulated; if a newspaper faces an injunction and breaks it, then the editor or owner could go to prison or the paper face a massive fine (hardly worth it for a story about a footballer and a Big Brother contestant, though maybe if it's a major state secret or political scandal). On Twitter, once one person tweets, it is possible, as in this case, that thousands more will follow. So how do you catch the first one and do you prosecute everyone? There are a lot of interesting articles around in the papers and and online about this at the moment, so I would expect to see some good answers in the exam!

here's a couple of links for now:

Good article on claims that the internet is like the Wild west

Guardian writer asking for screening of all twitter messages !
Peter Preston on the legal implications
and also an hilarious tale of a twitter spoof by Graham linehan about Bin Laden's TV viewing and how quickly people believe it

finally if you want one of your mates to appear in the media with a superinjunction, try this (it's just for fun)

Tomorrow: Global Media

How to prepare for question 1b

2011-05-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

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. 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 the January session.

Tomorrow we will start to look at the section B topics, with Contemporary media regulation

Approaching Question 1a

2011-05-23T07:16:00.001-07:00

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!

A2 Media exam coming soon!

2011-05-22T07:07:00.000-07:00

Those of you in Year 13 are now on the final stretch with just the one assessment to come- the A2 exam. For those of you doing OCR paper G325 Critical Perspectives, over the next few days, I am going to try to put together tips and links for every topic on the paper. In this first post, I'm doing a list of all the previous exam questions and then each day for the next week, I'll take a topic and concentrate on how to deal with those questions and what you might use. So watch this space!

I shall tweet each time a blog is finished and ready to read- so follow me on twitter to get that information as soon as it's out!: I am @petesmediablog.

Ok here are ALL previous questions for each element, from the exams in Jan and June 2010 and Jan 2011:

1a
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.

1b

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.

Section B

Contemporary Media Regulation

How effectively can contemporary media be regulated?

To what extent is contemporary media regulation more or less effective than in previous times?

Evaluate arguments for and against stronger regulation of the media

How far do changes to the regulation of media reflect broader social changes?

Discuss the need for media regulation

To what extent can the media be regulated in the digital age?

Global Media

What impact does the increase in global media have on media audiences?

What impact does the increase in global media have on media production?

What impact does the increase in global media have on local identity?

To what extent are the media now more global than local or national?

Discuss the positive and negative effects of globalisation of the media.

Discuss the idea that the media is becoming increasingly global.

The Media and Collective Identity

Analyse the ways in which the media represent any one group of people that you have studied.

With reference to any one group of people that you have studied, discuss how their identity has been ‘mediated’.

Analyse the ways in which the media represent groups of people.

“The media do not construct collective identity; they merely reflect it”. Discuss.

“Media representations are complex, not simple and straightforward”. How far do you agree with this statement in relation to any one group of people that you have studied?

What is collective identity and how is it mediated?

Media in the Online Age

“The impact of the internet on the media is revolutionary”. Discuss.

“For media audiences, the internet has changed everything.” Discuss

“The impact of the internet on the media is exaggerated”. Discuss.

Discuss the extent to which the distribution and consumption of media have been transformed by the internet.

Explain the extent to which online media exist alongside older methods of distribution in 2010.

Evaluate the opportunities and the threats offered to media producers by the internet.

Postmodern Media

What is meant by ‘postmodern media’?

Why are some media products described as ‘postmodern’?

Explain how certain kinds of media can be defined as postmodern.

Explain why the idea of ‘postmodern media’ might be considered controversial.

“Postmodern media blur the boundary between reality and representation.” Discuss this idea with reference to media texts that you have studied.

Discuss why some people are not convinced by the idea of postmodern media.

WeMedia and Democracy

How far can the media in 2010 be considered to be democratic?

Assess the claim that the media is becoming more democratic.

Discuss the meanings of the term ‘we media.’

Explore the claim that the ‘new’ media are more democratic than the ‘old’ media.

What is ‘we media’ and what difference does it make to citizens?

‘We get the media we deserve.’ Discuss, in relation to the role of media in a democracy.

So there they all are!

AS Media Studies Exam Tips

2011-05-15T06:39:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't been posting recently- been busy! If you are doing OCR AS Media, it's your exam this week, so you might need some tips. Don't panic- here are the main things to bear in mind for the exam.

For Q.1 you get 30 mins screening and notes 45 mins writing; it's worth 50 marks. these marks are divided up between Explanation, Argument, Analysis (20) Examples (20) and Terminology (10)

there is no point trying to guess what the sequence will be, but if you want to see some previous extracts chosen for the exam, you can find them here:

(summer 2009- ignore the comments!)

(January 2009)

(January 2010)

You have to analyse how four technical features are used in the extract: camerawork, editing, mise-en-scene and sound. Each of those features can be sub-divided, so for camerawork you should consider shot distance (LS, MS, CU etc), angle and movement, for example. For editing such features as pace, how time and space are manipulated, transitions and matches on action would feature. Mise-en-scene needs to consider costume, colours, props, settings and so on- everything that appears in front of the camera, and sound features voice, music and sound effects.

For each of them, you need to show how a particular representation is constructed through these technical codes. The different representations which can come up are gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, class/status, disability, regional identity. Whichever one comes up, it should be fairly obvious in the sequence and part of your job is to show how it is constructed for the viewer through those technical features.

Key to your task is note-taking: you might do this through a spider diagram or a chart or whatever, but you need to take as many notes as you can while you watch so that you have plenty available to write about. It is important that you cover all four technical areas and I would suggest that the simplest way to put them in your essay is to deal with each one in turn. DO NOT just write a blow by blow account of the sequence as you won't get a good mark! Pick out striking moments and concentrate on how the four codes work in those moments.

Examples are key and they are worth 20 marks, so make sure you have a lot of them to back up your points! Your introduction should be really brief- no more than a sentence, then GET ON WITH IT! A good conclusion would be to just say something about how the four areas, working together construct the representation. After 45 minutes of writing, draw it to a close, as you need to then get on with question 2!

Section B will pose a question about the media industry you have studied. You might find the question hard or confusing, but you have to answer it! Again you will have 45 minutes and it is marked in the same way. What you use for the content of your answer will depend upon the area you have studied, your precise case studies and the question itself. But these are the things you should know about in order to face any possible question...

Production Funding Distribution Marketing Exchange

Do you know what these mean? How do they apply to your industry?

Ownership- who owns your case study examples? what is the significance of this?
cross-media convergence and synergy- what's the difference and how do these apply?
technology- how important have recent changes in it been?
hardware and proliferation (just means spread)- what impact has new hardware had on your industry?
technological convergence- in what ways does this apply to your industry?
targeting audiences- who is targeted and how?

A few Tips:

do a little plan before starting
answer the question set (and not a question you imagined!)
structure your argument carefully
support all points with examples throughout
use the time effectively- stop q.1 so you have 45 mins to answer q.2 and use as much of the next 45 mins as possible!
Keep your intro and conclusions short!

Good luck!!

Collective Identity for A2

2011-05-15T06:14:00.000-07:00

A good article from Aleks Krotoski in today's Observer, helpfully suggested by Helene:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/15/aleks-krotoski-britishness-internet

Cuba tweets case study

2011-05-08T03:52:00.001-07:00

Follow Julian McDougall's Cuban media case study via his tweets- lots of good links for Global media or WeMedia topics!

http://twitter.com/#!/JulianMcDougall

Collective identity: Youth 2- School and online

2011-03-18T01:00:00.000-07:00

In the last post, we looked mainly at demonisation and a little at how subculture might lead to self-representation. In this post, we will consider the latter issue further with a look at how people represent themselves online. we will also look at some examples of more complex representation, where the stereotypes are played with in the way that characters are portrayed more sympathetically and developed so that the audience can understand them better. We will end by taking a look at different representations of school and the impact that these might have.

This great little video sums up quite neatly the way that people try to express an identity online. Apart from your photos, how else do you try to construct your own identity online, or indeed multiple identities in different places? In what ways does that identity become part of a collective group when you join say, facebook groups or forums or participate in sites like World of Warcraft?

Back in the 1960s, Erving Goffman wrote this book. The ideas in it are summed up in the first speech bubble.in the second is how it might still be seen to apply today.

Two good contemporary examples of how fiction can change our first impressions of characters are Fish Tank and Misfits. Both are worth exploring much further. In Fish Tank Mia is presented to us at the start as an angry 'chav' girl, but by letting us into her story she is given great depth and we can come to understand her feelings and her relationships with the adult world.

In Misfits, Kelly is represented in a similar way at the start, but she emerges from the series as a much more complex character.

I will be writing a lot more about Misfits in an upcoming blog, but suffice to say that I think it is one of the best British dramas of recent years.

I just got sent a link to this video, which I hadn't seen before. It is made by three students doing Video production at Essex University and is meant to be an affectionate send-up of their home town. If you go to their channel profile, you can hear an amusing radio interview with them about the project.

School is a rich area for analysis, since its fictional screen representation and its coverage in the news is so frequent and can always be measured against our own experience. From Harry Potter and St.Trinians to Grange Hill and Inbetweeners, fictional schools always provoke debate.

In this extract from Grange Hill, we see the community gang up to take action against the school bully, Gripper. It feels very old fashioned and static now, forming an interesting contrast with programmes like Waterloo Road.

Non-fictional representations are equally interesting for the assumptions they lead to on the part of audiences. Jamie Oliver's Dream School has provoked lots of opinions about how young people behave and what schools should be doing. It is a preposterous idea- sending a bunch of celebrities in as untrained teachers and dressing up over-aged youth in school uniform again. If you watch the Tv episodes, they are tightly edited so that we gete the programme makers version of events- often with lots of shouting and confrontations. Watch them on youtube and you get a slightly different view. The kids aren't quite so antagonistic, for starters.

Ex-teacher Katherine Berbalsingh became famous overnight when she gave a speech at the Conservative Party conference in the autumn about how bad our schools are and how they let the kids down. Her views on solutions fit very closely with those of the education secretary, Michael Gove. Since that speech, she has left teaching, the school she taught at has been closed down and she has published a book which is a supposed diary of a year in her life as a teacher. She has also been in the media quite a lot, especially on the BBC as a spokesperson for education. She is a good example of the opposite of demonisation- someone whose views are picked up as somehow having status and value because of her experience and because they chime with a kind of 'commonsense' that is around at that time. In her book she changes the names of her ex-students to words which supposedly 'represent' their personalities. It's worth thinking about how news coverage of someone like her affects audience views of young people and how they should be treated.

Our final 'critic' for this post is de Zengotita, who wrote a book caled 'Mediated', which argues that most of what we know about the world comes through the media, so it is bound to influence our thinking about it and even the way in which define ourselves.
How far do we think this is true and what evidence would we use to back it up?

Collective Identity: Youth- demonisation

2011-03-16T01:17:00.000-07:00

This is the most popular topic for the A2 OCR exam, with case studies of all kinds of social groups being possible to undertake. I did an event at Rich Mix in London this week for 170 students which focussed on Youth as a group for study, so I decided to share the material with other readers of the blog here. I made a lot of use of material featured in my friend Dave Harrison's blog here at http://collectiveidentity.posterous.com

I started with some quotations about young people and asked the audience when they thought these things might have been said:

'Kids are out of control... They're roaming the streets. They're out late at night.'

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

You can probably tell by the language that the second one is much older, but it surprised everyone to find out just how old. The first was from Gordon Brown in 2008 and the second from Plato in the 4th century BC. So as we can see, complaining about the behaviour of young people is nothing new!

We looked at this shocking video, from a Barnardo's campaign, all dialogue coming from what adults had written on national newspaper websites in response to stories about teens

We went on to look at other press coverage, but bearing in mind the five structuring points for this topic from the Specification:

how media today represent youth in different ways
how these representations differ from those in the past
what effect these representations have
how young people use the media to form a collective identity
how far identity is increasingly constructed by, through or in response to the media

In January's exam, these were the two optional questions:

analyse the ways in which the media represent groups of people
what is collective identity and how is it mediated?

So we were looking at examples and arguments in order to try to see how we might use them to answer such questions.

We looked at the way the meaning of the hood has changed over the years, with examples from fiction and non-fiction, including some of these:

From these and others, we were able to identify the use of the hood as a sign of comfort, protection, religious and academic status but also of disguise, transformation, concealment and violence. Most recently in relation to youth it has often become almost synonymous with criminal behaviour. News coverage of the student protests culminated in these front covers the next day, a moment captured which once again involves a hooded youth in an act of criminality, standing in for the whole story.

This demonisation of youth can be taken to absurd extremes perhaps having the effect that the Barnardos video illustrates, as in this Sunday Express campaign and more humorously this story reported in The Cambridge News.

A survey of the content of national and regional newspapers found that out of 6500 stories about teenage boys, over half were about crime and only in one in ten allowed the voice of a young person to be heard in a quote. The language used to describe teenage boys was quite harsh: nearly 600 references to 'yobs', 250 to 'thug' and over 100 to 'sick', with 'feral' and 'hoodie' close behind. There were some positive terms used, such as 'angel', 'altar boy'. 'model student' and 'every mother's perfect son' but these only appeared in relation to boys who had died, either murdered or in accidents. There is more detail on this and some other surveys on Dave Harrison's blog here.

A useful critic in relation to this is Stanley Cohen, who wrote about the media coverage of mods and rockers from the 1960s, in his book 'Folk Devils and Moral panics'. His ideas still apply today.

Although Cohen points to the ways in which the media amplify anxieties and events and create a moral panic, the demonisation of youth in this way can only come about if there is some kind of collective identity to which to point. Dick Hebdige's study 'Subculture, the meaning of style' examines how young people construct their identity through fashion and musical influence. His arguments still apply today even if subcultures do not neatly divide in quite the way they did in the 70s, given the way music has tended to hybridise. Two current subcultures are shown below- Emo and Goth. can you identify others?

Nick Barham's interesting book 'Disconnected' was based on research he did talking to teenagers about their lives today. Given the absence of young voices in news coverage, it makes for an interesting contrast, one that is taken up by Nathan in Misfits.

Misfits - Nathan on Youth by LRCMediaPractical

Alan Partridge

2011-03-10T09:04:00.000-08:00

LAST EPISODE Friday 11 March!

It crept out with very little publicity and in a completely new form- a webseries sponsored by Fosters lager- but nevertheless he's here; Alan Partridge, one of the great comic creations of the last twenty years, is back with some new material.

I follow Armando Iannucci on Twitter- he's the man who created Steve Coogan's character, - and it was through one of his tweets that I first heard about the return of the character. Alan first appeared on radio as a sports journalist on 'On the Hour', a spoof news programme on Radio 4, a role he reprised in 'The Day Today' which ran for two series on BBC2 in 1994. He was given his own spoof chat show, which ran first on the radio and then on TV, 'Knowing me, Knowing You' and after a lot of cameos for events like Comic Relief and on stage for Coogan's stand-up shows, he returned to TV in 'I'm Alan Partridge' which also ran for two series in 1997 and 2002.

Partridge is a tragi-comic creation, probably based upon an amalgam of various TV and radio 'personalities'. In many ways, the character grew in depth with 'I'm Alan Partridge' which shows him trying to resurrect his career on Radio Norwich, having been dumped by BBC TV following his disastrous chat show. In the new 12 part webseries, which started last friday and by monday had nearly 200,000 hits, he has fallen even further, now appearing on the fictitious North Norfolk Digital radio, with the whole programme done as if filmed on webcams in the studio.

The Daily Telegraph's reviewer describes it as "If anything, this first film is even darker in hue than the last Partridge series, I’m Alan Partridge, which concluded in 2002. Our anti-hero’s hair is more lank, his clothes more appalling and his demeanour more obviously desperate. There’s an audacious passage in which Alan tries to recall what he has for lunch the previous Sunday, and can’t; the result is an excruciating 30 seconds of dead air. And, of course, he hasn’t located his sensitivity gene – he can be relied upon to spray around tasteless comments about, say, Jonestown and the child protection register."

The Guardian had an article on Monday all about the background to Fosters sponsoring the webseries and the kinds of budget involved. It is a really interesting case study of media in the online age and the changing distribution models that this has brought about.

Apparently, Fosters paid the production costs, which were still similar to those for making a TV show, even though it has more limited camera use and the single set of the radio studio.

The first episode has over half a million hits on YouTube with later episodes currently on around 150,000 and even though a new comedy on Channel 4 would expect to be seen by 1.5m to 2m viewers, this is still seen as a success. The aim is to resell the programme to a conventional broadcaster after the internet airing is complete and then to sell it overseas and put it out on DVD.

So Partridge for the web- of course there are loads of clips from all the old series and all kinds of one-offs on youtube and the Alan Partridge app is one of the most popular on the iPhone, even though it just consists of a whole load of his banal catchphrases. I quite like the sporting mashups various people have done using his lines from 'The Day Today':

Alan on music:

Alan meets his namesake

Alan's story on the spoof 'Anglian lives'

I shall be looking forward to every episode of the new webseries as it seems once again that the team who created him have produced something which hits the zeitgeist.

Footnote: the series is not available to US viewers, so a protest movement has broken out, starting with this mashup protest video

Media in the online age presentation

2011-03-09T12:37:00.000-08:00

Here are the main slides and images from a presentation I did recently at both Rich Mix in East London and Reigate college. Some bits are missing, such as the videos , though many of these are linked on earlier blogposts.

Online Age Short

View more presentations from petefrasers.

In this presentation, I refer back to several previous posts, such as the online series. I also ask students to think about their own media technology use and that of younger children today to consider the pace of change. In case studies of news and music I seek to consider how hardware, software and shifts in audience behaviour might raise issues about the online age. This presentation needs both Michael Wesch's video on Youtube and David Gauntlett's on Understanding everyday media to set up the debates.

The presentation ends with a look at the difference between online drama and Tv drama before considering how you might use the examples in the presentation for the january exam questions.

Dub Plate Drama

2011-03-09T12:21:00.000-08:00

Recently I had the pleasure of meeting Luke Hyams, the creator of ‘Dub Plate Drama’ and listening to an excellent talk he gave about his work. It is interesting that everyone I have mentioned the programme to has simply looked at me quizzically as they’ve never heard of it, yet at its peak it attracted an extraordinary 450,000 viewers on Channel 4, after midnight, with many more catching it on PSP, MTV Base and MySpace. The programme has slipped under the radar of older viewers yet at the session where I heard Luke speak, there were dozens of students asking him questions about it who clearly knew the series well. I had only heard of it previously when one of my students chose to use it as the focus for their Critical research project in the old A level; I felt quite guilty having to ask the boy, Moses, to repeat the title several times as I thought he must be mistaken. It was only on looking further that I realised what an interesting media text he had selected.

Luke talking about his work

link to Play.com to buy it

Dub Plate Drama is an example of ‘transmedia’, a cross-platform/multiplatform text, delivered through a number of different ways. It was originally shown three times a week on Channel 4 and seven times a week on E4 and MTV base and available throughout the week via MySpace. The programme is based around the lives of characters trying to break into the music industry and the ways in which violence, drugs and other issues impinge upon them. It featured many up and coming young artist from the black music scene, notably Shystie, who was the star of the first series. Luke told us that the series set out to be socially relevant and responsible, with a ‘do the right thing’ character at its centre. Episodes had an interactive element with the audience offered the opportunity to decide between two alternative endings each week. As I noted earlier, at its peak, one episode drew 450,000 viewers after midnight on Channel 4, though this was perhaps as a result of the audience for a comedy film preceding it staying watching, but even on an average week it picked up 150,000 viewers for this slot, which was more than healthy. Adding the viewers from other platforms, the regular audience was in excess of half a million.

The two choices each episode tended to be ‘Most dramatic option’ v ‘What would you personally probably do?’, so for example in an episode where a character’s disabled mum sees her son being attacked by a gang outside the house, the choice was whether to go out and try to help but risk getting battered herself or wait for the police to arrive. The audience often tended to vote for the more cautious option, which as luke explained, was a shame as in this instance, seeing the mother go out brandishing her walking stick and whacking the attackers was more dramatically exciting!

One of the challenges the programme faced was attracting sponsors for something that dealt with issues and characters which generally had a bad image in the press- hooded black youth, knife and gun crime were seen by many potential sponsors as something they would not want to touch. This was compounded when one of the actors who played a leading character from series 1 was convicted for murder in real life. However, sponsorship for the third series arrived in an unexpected form, with Childline. The charity coincidentally was trying to shift its image and predominant user base to connect with hard to reach groups; it was seen as white and middle class and also there for females. By careful association with the programme using idents and mini- ads featuring the characters, they managed to shift this image and from almost 100% of phone calls being from females, they moved to 50% from males seeking help- a remarkable change. Scripts were pitched to Childline before each episode and they particularly liked the audience involvement in deciding the dilemma.

Lots of black music artists have appeared on the programme, including N-Dubz and Ms Dynamite, as well as others who were more up and coming and have since gone on to greater fame. Though there is interest in franchising the programme with a US version, there are no plans to run it again in the UK. You can buy both series one and two on DVD online (very cheaply!) at play.com or Amazon and still see episodes on MySpace. Though it is no longer possible to influence the outcome of episodes, Luke did explain that they would shoot several minutes of each of the two possible outcomes for the next episode each time and that certain features from the edit thereafter would be different according to the choice the audience made. In at least one instance, the choice made resulted in a chain of events which led to the death of a key character- though the audience did not know this would happen when they made their decision.

Dub Plate Drama would be a really useful case study for both the Collective Identity topic and for Media in the Online Age.

Tabloid phone hacking

2011-02-08T02:10:00.000-08:00

Last night's Dispatches programme on Channel 4 lifted the lid on the newspaper phone hacking scandal. Reporter Alex Thomson, more familiar from Channel 4 news, (follow him on Twitter @alextomo) took us through the background to the story and interviewed a range of people, from Max Clifford to Alistair Campbell, revealing a much bigger and more wide-ranging scandal than many people had imagined.

Last month, the Prime Minister's Press secretary, Andy Coulson, resigned from his post because of the continuing revelations from the phone hacking scandal that dated back to 2006 or even earlier. At that time, Coulson had been editor of the News of the World, when a reporter, Clive Goodman, was found to have hacked into the voicemails of members of the Royal Family. He always denied any knowledge of the reporter's activity, claiming he and a private investigator who did the hacking had been acting on their own, but as more evidence emerges, it was clear from last night's programme that it would be very hard to imagine that he had no knowledge of what was going on.

The programme showed how pressure on reporters to generate stories in the cut-throat competition of tabloid journalism led to them resorting to illegal means. It also pointed to the possibility of cover-ups at the highest levels, with interviewees suggesting that the police were reluctant to investigate because the News of the World had a history of paying police officers for information. The programme also alleged that other newspapers have been phone hacking for several years themselves, which explains why they have given so little coverage to the story.

Alex Thomson was shown just how easy it is for information to be gathered online about an individual, including finding their mobile phone number, and then the trick, which I won't repeat here, for getting access to their voicemail. Suffice to say that it is wise to change the pin code on your voicemail if you don't want reporters snooping on your messages...

The programme suggested around 4000 people's phones have been tapped, and that figure could be much higher, with Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and many others now asking the police to see if there was evidence that they too had been victims of it. The newspaper regulatory body, the PCC, was shown to have little or no power as Thomson noted that it had been lied to by the News of the World.

So why does this matter? Well, it seems to me that this is an important question for media students and raises important issues about the media in a democracy. If journalists can get away with hacking into phones and publishing details of people's private conversations which they have collected illegally and then when the police are asked to investigate, nothing happens, that is quite significant.

Labour MP Tom Watson, who we met in a previous blog as one of the few defenders of videogames in Parliament argued in the programme that politicians were too scared to tackle News International over the phone hacking scandal and I think he's right. Tom is worth following on twitter too. @tom_watson And why are politicians scared? Because newspapers still have a lot of power and they are afraid that the Murdoch papers- The Sun, The News of the World, but also The Times and Sunday Times can turn public opinion against them. The stories from hacked voicemails that papers were publishing during the last few years were not just about the antics or personal lives of celebrities, they also included politicians.

Finally, the programme gave a pretty strong indication of why Rupert Murdoch would rush over from the USA to take personal charge of the response to the scandal now- he is attempting to buy the remaining 61% of BSkyB which he doesn't currently own and the government has to decide whether it is in our interests to have someone controlling even more of our media. If he gets a lot of bad publicity, then maybe the decision will go against him, but if he can smooth things over... Of course, he has the help of his son, James Murdoch and the help of Rebekah Brooks, the Chief Executive of News International who admitted to a committee in parliament that the organisation had been known to pay police officers for information. They helped by having the Prime Minister, David Cameron, over to dinner during the christmas break...purely social, nothing to do with any of these shenanigans. That's the same David Cameron who employed the dodgy Andy Coulson as his trusted Press Secretary...

Anyway, if you didn't see it, here it is on 4OD

Can TV presenters say what they like?

2011-02-08T01:07:00.000-08:00

Following the recent arguments around representation of social groups in Eastenders and Come Fly with Me, which I covered in January, there have been more discussions of representation in the media, notably the Sky Sports sexist remarks incident, which led to the sacking of Andy Gray and the resignation of Richard Keys, followed by the Mexican car comments made by Top Gear presenters.

Though Gray and Keys tried to argue that their comments were meant as a joke, anyone who heard them would find this hard to believe, given the tone in which they were said. Gray in particular is known for the speed with which he criticises referees (often very unfairly, in my view) and this just seemed to take it one step further in suggesting that referee's assistant Sian Murray shouldn't have been there simply because she was female. Interestingly, evidence from Italy, where female officials at games are much more frequently seen, suggests that the accuracy of their decision-making is much higher than male officials- but you wouldn't expect Gray to know about that (or that he would believe it). The number of videos which suddenly emerged of the pair's sexist behaviour and attitudes in the days following the incident suggested not so much 'dark forces at work' as Keys called it, as people biding their time having had to put up with the pair and the unpleasant working atmosphere over a long period of time at Sky. The hilarious interview Keys gave to talksport radio, where he sounds like a cross between Alan Partridge and David Brent, gradually digging a deeper hole for himself as he attempts to apologise, hours before his resignation, is reproduced below.

Jeremy Clarkson's speech at the National Television Awards took a different view. he argued that it was all indeed harmless banter and that if the BBC had taken a similar line, he and his colleagues would have been sacked 100 times. He suggested that

"we've arrived at the stage now where you actually can be busted for heresy by thought, which is terrifying. You could think a thought and someone could sack you for it. While we try very hard on Top Gear not to be sexist, if a man wants to think that, then that's fine. You should be allowed to think what you want to."

The trouble is, that it's all very well for middle aged men to say they should have freedom of speech about whatever they want, but at whose expense? Insider comments from Sky suggested that Keys and Gray had effectively been sexist bullies at the studio for a long time and that women did not feel they could complain. maybe the same is true at Top Gear? Certainly, Steve Coogan thinks so. At the weekend, he wrote an extraordinarily damning piece for The Guardian, where he attacked the casual racism of the Top Gear trio. It is extraordinary because Coogan has been a guest on the show three times in the past and because of just how damning his comments were.

He described Jeremy as being like a school bully and argued that if the jokes about Mexicans had been substituted for Pakistanis or Jews, there is no way they would have got away with it. Coogan describes the comic writers he has worked with as a

"diverse, eclectic group of people with one common denominator: they could all defend and justify their comedy from a moral standpoint. They are laughing at hypocrisy, human frailty, narrow-mindedness. They mock pomposity and arrogance.

If I say anything remotely racist or sexist as Alan Partridge, for example, the joke is abundantly clear. We are laughing at a lack of judgment and ignorance. (whereas) With Top Gear it is three rich, middle-aged men laughing at poor Mexicans. Brave, groundbreaking stuff, eh?"

I agree with Coogan's argument- you should read it in full here- because Top Gear is not some minority programme with a tiny audience of like minded middle aged casual racists, but is actually one of the BBC's biggest programmes with a huge audience of young kids, who look up to these three. As Coogan says:

"The Lads have this strange notion that if they are being offensive it bestows on them a kind of anti-establishment aura of coolness; in fact, like their leather jackets and jeans, it is uber-conservative (which isn't cool).... Big viewing figures don't give you impunity – they carry responsibility. Start showing some, tuck your shirts in, be a bit funnier and we'll pretend it all never happened"

Judge for yourself!

What's the point of media education?

2011-02-08T00:49:00.000-08:00

Every now and again, usually at 'A' level results time, you get media coverage attacking the subject of Media Studies. David Buckingham's excellent presentation from the Media Magazine conference gives an overview of these attacks and offers some strong rebuttals of them. It happens at all levels, though, with people arguing that students shouldn't be 'wasting their time' with the media but should be learning to read and write and add up, whether it be children in primary schools, English in KS3 (last year's story about a school teaching about The Simpsons), at GCSE and A level ('dumbing down' when you supposedly should be doing Science and Languages) and even at university (where supposedly graduates in Media are heading for jobs in fast food outlets and nothing better).

Often Media teachers are put on the back foot trying to defend the subject from these attacks. A new project, which I am jointly co-ordinating with Jon Wardle from Bournemouth University, seeks to offer the opportunity to set out an agenda for studying the media, by asking a range of academics, teachers and others to write their own 'manifesto for media education'. We already have contributions, among others, from Henry Jenkins, David Buckingham and David Gauntlett and are adding more every week. We are keen to add the views of students, either as comments on the articles already there, or as full pieces, if you want to write one. We already have one video contribution from students which we will be adding to the site shortly, so if you'd rather make a video about your reasons for studying the media, that would be fine too!

Anyway, check it out, read the articles and see if you are inspired to respond- all welcome!

http://www.manifestoformediaeducation.co.uk/

Debates about representation

2011-01-12T14:53:00.000-08:00

Representation is one of the key concepts in Media Studies and of course is a focus of the textual analysis question in the AS exam. In the last couple of weeks, however, it has made the news on a number of occasions and become quite a live issue in public debate.

Over the past few weeks, EastEnders has run a storyline about cot death, in which the character of Ronnie loses her baby and then steals Kat and Alfie’s baby to replace it. As any regular viewer will know, Ronnie is a character not blessed with good luck and this latest disaster has sent her over the edge; but it has also led to around 9000 complaints from viewers, apparently a record for a soap storyline and to the BBC apparently agreeing to end the story early.

So why the fuss? soaps are known for their high emotions. Well, for viewers who have lost a baby to cot death, such a storyline not surprisingly brings back painful memories, but that is the case with many of the narratives of programmes like Coronation street, Casualty, Hollyoaks or Emmerdale - often followed by an announcement on the lines of ‘if you’ve been affected by the issues in this programme, here’s our helpline. In this case the objection was not to having a storyline about cot death- apparently the programme makers had consulted with the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths in advance anyway- but to the way the story represents the grieving mother. Much of the campaign against it was led by Mumsnet, a parenting website which has built up a reputation as a pressure group and regularly hosts webchats with public figures such as .... The argument they put in a letter to the Director General of the BBC Mark Thompson, after thousands of negative comments about the storyline on Mumsnet was that

“as is all too common, a bereaved mother has been portrayed as deranged and unhinged... For many, EastEnders might be their first or closest experience of a newly bereaved mother's reaction and subsequently they may treat baby snatching as a typical desire”

They go on:

“Mumsnetters are also frustrated that so much potential to raise awareness of SIDS and to show viewers what it is like for bereaved parents and their families and friends has been squandered.

The approach shown by the programme makers appears at best to be ill-informed, and at worst looks like a cynical ploy to make headlines by creating deliberate controversy.”

So the argument is that the way Ronnie is represented is typical of fictional portrayals of mothers who have lost a child to cot death, concentrating on a negative and volatile response to bereavement but also that this representation will create or reinforce an impression in audience members that this is what all such grieving mothers will be like. Many of the personal tales on Mumsnet from mothers who have lost babies in the past focus on how this is the opposite of their experience and their response to the death of their baby, thus suggesting that it is not a ‘true’ representation.

The story was compounded with newspaper reports that the actress playing Ronnie, Samantha Womack, had handed in her resignation from the programme in disgust after first reading the script, which was swiftly denied. There have also been reports of the actress being verbally abused in the street (it’s not clear if she was addressed as the actress and attacked for playing the part or as the character and attacked for stealing the baby). So a line between fiction and reality is blurred in more ways than one.

I don’t feel qualified to have a strong view on this particular representation, because I don’t really follow EastEnders anymore, but I think it is important to put all representations carefully in their context. If people are saying ‘grieving mothers are frequently portrayed as unhinged’ I’d want to know about the other examples they are referring to; if they are saying ‘audience members will think all bereaved mothers are going to react like this” I’d want to know how real audiences have read the story. Clearly, the level of coincidence involved is typical of melodrama- there are two babies in the same square at the same time of near identical age, they both happen to be wearing the same outfits, the mother of one has been taken back into hospital without her baby, the grieving mother manages to take her dead child into the pub and swap it over. So the story needs to be seen within its genre too. OFCOM is more measured in cases like this, and will not pass judgement on the complaints until the storyline has run its full course, by which time the story may feel very different.

the other recent controversy around representation involves the new comedy series from Walliams and Lucas, 'Come Fly with Me', which began on Christmas Day. If you haven’t seen it, they draw heavily on the sketch show style of Little Britain crossed with the docusoap format of programmes like 'Airline', which has run for a number of years. The pair play all the eccentric characters who appear each week to work at the airport, often in very heavy makeup, which must take hours to apply. As in 'Little Britain', there is a wide range of grotesque stereotyped characters, a lot of dressing up in drag and some predictable jokes, but the show has come in for criticism because of their portrayal in particular of ethnic characters.

The tradition of ‘blacking up’ has long been seen as offensive, used to make jokes at the expense of ethnic minorities, particularly in sitcoms and variety shows in the 60s and 70s and criticism here has been levelled at their portrayal of the West Indian character, Precious Little, who always finds an excuse to shut the coffee shop, and at Asian concourse vehicle driver, Taaj, who fantasises about becoming a film director and describes his vehicle as a ‘pussy magnet’. Following complaints on Twitter, Matt Lucas responded: ‘Like in Little Britain we try to reflect, affectionately, the multicultural Britain we love. No offence is intended. x.’

In this case, many of the complaints focus on the idea that this kind of representation is a throwback to how TV (and by extension British society) was in the past, with casual racism being apparently acceptable, whereas Lucas and Walliams argue that in playing all of the characters (each of whom is the butt of jokes) they are dishing out the comedy in equal measure to black and white, rich and poor, men and women, gay and straight. Interestingly, comedian Jim Davidson, who has been accused of racial stereotyping in the past, has come out in support of the show and used it as an excuse to attack ‘political correctness’.

He said: ‘I don't believe for one minute they have a racist bone in their bodies. They are falling victim to political correctness - just as I did. And political correctness is killing comedy.

‘We are a multi-racial society and we should celebrate the fact. They are showing the characters you would expect to see at an airport and that includes people like Precious and Taaj. Wouldn't just showing white characters at the airport be more racist?

‘It amuses me in a way that Lucas and Walliams have been allowed to "black up". I'm glad it seems common sense is now starting to replace political correctness in telly land.’

Davidson added: ‘A lot of ethnic people come to my live shows and I have never had anyone tell me they had been offended.’

from Chortle.com

Unlike 'EastEnders' where the complaints entirely focus on what is seen as sensationalising the representation of a serious issue, for 'Come Fly with Me', the issue is about making fun of people because of their ethnic background. But once again, context is everything. I’d want to know what sense real audiences make of those representations; the cross-genre context needs to be taken into account in terms of how we might read it, since anyone who has seen the programme which it spoofs will recognise the behaviour of the characters and the conventions of storytelling with which it plays.

Representation is always contestable and always more complex than the newspaper headlines which try to define it! So how do you see the representation of the cot death and Ronnie's response and what do you think of the accusations of racist stereotyping in 'Come Fly with me' ?

Mad Men- series 4 almost over...

2010-11-28T15:37:00.002-08:00

In October, I managed to watch the first three series of Mad Men, which I'd somehow failed to catch over the last few years. It's gripping stuff, despite the fact that not much happens in most episodes and I'm glad that I've now knocked off 51 episodes so that this Wednesday when I see the final episode of series 4 I will be completely up to date.

If you don't know the show, it's set in the 1960s and tells the story of the Madison Avenue advertising executives through a fictional agency and particularly through the messed up central character, creative director Don Draper, an anti-hero for our time, as much as any other.

The title sequence is a graphic tour de force and takes you straight into the mindset of Don Draper, who appears to be falling from a high floor of a New York skyscraper.

Mad Men Title Sequence from Caleb Woods on Vimeo.

Across series 1, we see Don's series of adulterous relationships set against the backdrop of his family life, creating a tension which is then layered with flashbacks to his own childhood, revealing his secret past. By series 2 it becomes impossible to contain all his secrets as his marriage starts to disintegrate and in series 3 it falls apart completely. Series 4 sees him in a bachelor pad in New York, but unhappier than ever as his life and work seem to unravel around him.

But this is only a part of a complex web woven by the writers; there are several interesting characters who develop over the four series, notably Peggy, who starts episode 1 as the new girl secretary introduced to the firm but by series 4 has developed into the only female creative in the company and in many ways the only character who can handle Don- possibly because she is one of the few women who hasn't had a sexual relationship with him.

The programme is all set against a backdrop of American social and political history in the 1960s, including Kennedy's election and assassination, the black civil rights movement, the Cuban Missile crisis and the Beatles at Shea stadium, but it is also a fascinating analysis of power relations, especially the role of gender in US society of the time. Despite the appalling behaviour of the male characters at times, especially Don, the viewer is drawn into a strange sympathy with them as their complexity is allowed to emerge. It is an interesting example of the American tradition of quality TV drama, as seen in the Sopranos, ER, House and others, but in its ad agency setting it defies the usual genre characteristics of the crime series or the hospital show. If you haven't seen it, there's a box set of series 1-3 available (£30 in HMV), but be warned, once you start you won't be bale to stop!

Here's one of the most popular scenes from the programme, where Don convinces Kodak of his sales strategy for the carousel slide projector, complete with images from his fragmented family life

Mad Men ´The Carousel´ from Emilio on Vimeo.

And here's the official site, where you can play games and even take on the role of characters

Twitter- why it might be useful for A level

2010-11-28T15:37:00.001-08:00

Are you on twitter? Do you tweet? Last week, I saw a list of the ten most influential brands in the UK and the US and Twitter was up there near the top of both them, along with Google, Facebook and Apple on both and John Lewis on the UK one. But if you ask in the average classroom, 'who uses twitter?' the numbers will be well down on who uses facebook- so how come it's seen to be so important?

It was started in 2006, and in case you don't know, involves being able to send messages of up to 140 characters (a tweet) to all users of the system who follow you. Your messages are not private, but can be seen by anyone signed up to twitter, though they only automatically get messages from people they have elected to 'follow'; all other messages would involve a search. Messages can be grouped together by the use of a hashtag #, so for example if people are at an event and want to send live comments on it to the twitter feed there can be a common hashtag which they all use for their messages so they get to read anything related to it, rather than just messages from people they already follow.

There are currently estimated to be 200 million people signed up to Twitter, though many may just be readers of tweets or people who haven't signed in for a while; nonetheless there are huge numbers of people who do use it daily. One feature that makes it stand out from other forms of blogging and social networking is the number of well known people who use it. Unlike websites for bands or actors, where usually someone is employed to send out messages and keep us informed about the star's life, twitter is frequently used by celebrities themselves to send out their thoughts, which is one of the reasons they frequently get into trouble with it. As it is an instant medium and easily used on a phone, very often people tend to tweet their thoughts without considering the consequences. A number of sports people have got into trouble in this way after tweeting their reaction to being left out of teams, for example. Politicians likewise have a tendency to 'put their foot in it' when left to their own (mobile) devices, without their spin doctors to tell them what to say.

Many people think of tweeting as rather self-indulgent and narcissistic, saying 'who cares what so-and-so had for breakfast', which is of course true, just as it is with endless status updates on facebook, but as with any new medium, with twitter you have to be selective. If people you follow are rather boring to read, you can just as easily 'unfollow' them.

It is estimated 65 million tweets are sent every day, so there will be a lot of variety in terms of what is sent in the messages. It does tend to be more of an older group of people who use it by comparison with facebook and other social networks, with only about 11% of its users being in the 12-17 age range.Women are slightly more likely to use it than men and about 75% of content on it comes from 5% of users. A popular use of twitter is the re-tweet (RT) function, where you can send on an interesting message you have seen to all your followers.

Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian last week wrote an interesting piece on the importance of Twitter which you can find here. He outlines 15 things that twitter does effectively, which include the effectiveness and swiftness of its distribution, its value as a search, aggregation and marketing tool, its diversity and the ways it is challenging and changing conventional politics. Well worth a read, as is this article from The Guardian about how people tweet during certain TV programmes to form commentating communities. Some programmes, such as 'Giles and Sue live the Good Life' have benefited hugely from the amount of discussion from tweeters during the episodes.

So who is worth following for A level Media?

@julianmcdougall wrote the OCR textbook and he tends to use his tweets to send out useful links for the A2 exam in particular

@henryjenkins is the American academic who wrote 'Convergence Culture' and has done a lot of research on fans

@ainnucci Armando Iannucci the creator of 'The Thick of It' and Alan Partridge, amongst much more, is always amusing and interesting

@petesmediablog is me- I don't say much but you might find other people I follow quite interesting!

Get yourself on there, add a few people then have a hunt around for comedians, actors, film-makers, politicians, journalists you find interesting. It could open you up to a whole load of interesting stuff!

Twitter on trial: #iamspartacus

2010-11-14T12:59:00.000-08:00

Last week saw the first stirrings of rioting in response to the coalition government's policies as students holding a demo in London broke into the Conservative Party HQ in Millbank Tower and smashed some stuff up. On Thursday, almost every national paper had the same picture on the front page, but with a variety of different headlines, offering slightly different perspectives on the whole event. there is an interesting analysis of the coverage on the POLIS blog here while this montage from Political Scrapbook shows just how dominant the image was.

I was quite struck, however, by this slightly wider shot of the moment which someone tweeted on friday:

In this, we can clearly see just how many photographers are there with a ringside view so that what seems like chaos starts to look...set up?

Twitter was a good source for inside material on wednesday during the demo when people were tweeting about what was happening as it happened and others were re-tweeting and commenting upon the flow of events.

On thursday, Twitter itself hit the news with an appeal case in Doncaster Crown Court. Back in January, a man called Paul Chambers, on his way to see his girlfriend in Northern Ireland, got to the airport near doncaster to find it was shut. He tweeted: "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!!". It was meant as a joke and he didn't really think that anyone other than his girlfriend would see it. Unfortunately, apart from his 600 followers, someone did and called the police. neither they nor Robin Hood airport thought it was a serious bomb threat, but he was brought to trial and convicted for sending a menacing communication. His appeal this week was thrown out, with the judge actually increasing his fine and making him pay costs. In the meantime, he has lost his job as well.

On Twitter, this caused a bit of a stir, with avid tweeter Stephen Fry offering to pay off his fine and many people seeing it as a threat to free speech. The judge appears to have taken the view that there was no humour involved, saying the tweet was "menacing in its content and obviously so. It could not be more clear. Any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way and be alarmed."

The implications of this case are wide-ranging, as people using twitter or indeed any social network, like Facebook, could be open to prosecution for any public remark, however it may have been intended. This case coincided with an incident where a Conservative councillor, Gareth Compton, from Birmingham was reported to have tweeted after getting annoyed by a phone-in on Five Live: "Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan't tell Amnesty if you don't. It would be a blessing, really."

He too was arrested and has been suspended by the local party. His tweet contained the hashtag #R5L indicating that his words were a response to the phone-in, where Ms.Alibhai-Brown had been making some forthright points about the war in Iraq, with which he disagreed. Though his words were rather clumsy and even offensive, it would be hard to argue that they were meant as a direct threat.

She heard about the tweet and suggested he should be arrested and someone went on to report him to the police. He was arrested under suspicion of a breach of section 127 of the 2003 Communications Act – Improper use of public electronic communications network, where "a person is guilty of an offence if he sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character". Though this law is rarely invoked, it is a bit alarming in terms of its breadth, as it would appear that many thousands of messages on twitter or facebook each day could fall foul of it- think of some of the things you may have sent or just posted on your facebook wall which you thought were just funny...

Anyway, this point was taken up in a big way on friday, when thousands of twitter users, including many celebrities like Dara O'Brain, Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry re-sent the Chambers tweet along with the hashtag #iamspartacus, a reference to the 1960 film where rebellious gladiators refuse to let Spartacus carry the blame and all claim to be him.

Charlie Brooker's tongue-in-cheek column for The Guardian takes it one step further.

If you aren't on Twitter yet, don't be put off by commentators who suggest it's just a middle-aged and middle class fad. There are a lot of influential people on there and a lot of people who tweet interesting and useful stuff; next week, I'll be suggesting some people you could follow on Twitter, so in the meantime, set yourself up an account!

I'm @cmdiploma by the way!

Conference 21 October

2010-10-24T07:05:00.001-07:00

What a great day! We all really enjoyed ourselves and felt a great atmosphere from the whole event. As I get them, resources from the day will be added here.

The day began with an excellent presentation by David Buckingham deconstructing the attacks on Media Studies which often appear in the media. The presentation is here

Db for emc

View more presentations from petefrasers.

This was followed by Julian McDougall's presentation in which he encouraged students to take on a critical role in relation to theory and applying it to mainstream media. Julian emphasised the political nature of claims about democracy in the media. His presentation is here.

Mediamagconf j mcd

View more presentations from petefrasers.

My presentation after break was made easy for me because I had so many great bits of student work to show to illustrate my points (and one or two not so great bits). Most of what I said is covered in previous blogposts but I have also added the written bits of the slides here and one of the videos.

Mm conf

View more presentations from petefrasers.

Annette Hill's presentation on media representation of the supernatural was very interesting and her book is linked here.

Jenny Grahame gave an overview of how you might develop your skills as a student of media and how MediaMagazine might help.

Jenny

View more presentations from petefrasers.

The panel session at the end of the day was very entertaining, with some lively questions from the audience and some good advice from our panellists. Paul's advice was to always be on time, Lindy's was to not be fearful of getting knockbacks and Ed advised to really know what you want to do and be focussed.

The Media Magazine Conference: Getting inside the Media Industries

2010-10-16T04:22:00.000-07:00

At the conference on Thursday, I will have the privilege of chairing the afternoon session where three creative people from different media fields will be talking about their work and showing us some examples of what they do. This blogpost is a taster for the session to give some background on the three panellists and to show some clips from their work.

Edward Stern

Edward is Lead Writer at Splash Damage, a game development studio specializing in multiplayer First Person Shooters. Splash Damage has won over 200 awards and nominations and has an average MetaCritic rating of 87. He studied A Level English, History and Economics, and then relieved Glasgow University of a M.A. Hons in Modern and Medieval History, while being heavily involved in student radio, theatre, and music. In 1996 he moved to Hong Kong where he worked in business news television, then moved back to the UK in 1999 to work for a variety of doomed dot.coms, eventually ending up making television about games. He got hired by new startup game studio as freelance writer, then part-time, then full-time, then designer-writer, then senior designer, working on Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, then Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. He’s currently working on Brink for Bethesda Softworks, to be released next year.

You can see an interview with Ed here

Official site for Brink here

Paul Harding

Paul has been a full time professional photographer for 12 years, working in sport for the last decade. He spent a year with Allsport (now Getty Images) before leaving to go freelance for a while, then took on a staff position at Action Images sports photographic agency and has been with them ever since. Originally he joined as a member of the picture desk, shooting mainly features and studio assignments but slowly taking on more sport and working less in the office.

During this time he has covered many different events in all areas of sport ranging from the obvious (football, rugby, tennis etc.) to the strange (bog snorkelling & toe wrestling!), and all areas relating to sport (sponsorship, events, awards, PR) and has worked for many prestigious clients including FIFA, UEFA, Powerade, Lucozade, Barlcays and the WTA.

Some of Paul's pictures:

Lindy Heymann

Lindy’s second feature film, KICKS was released theatrically in the UK in June 2010 and is due out on DVD in November. Her live concert film for legendary British band The Specials to celebrate their 30th Anniversary Tour was released on DVD in March 2010 and has been nominated for a UK Music Video Award for Best Live Coverage.

She has a prolific career in Music Videos, directing well over one hundred to date. She has worked with artists and bands as diverse as Take That, The Charlatans, Suede, John Lydon, Sinead O'Connor, David Gray, Paul McCartney, Leftfield, Terry Hall and Faithless. She directed both Suede's first video and their last, which starred the veteran British actor John Hurt.

She has recently completed the screenplay for her next feature, IN CLOSE UP, which she has co-written with Ben Bond, having been awarded development funding from the UK Film Council.

Specials!

Suede- final video starring John Hurt

Take That- behind the scenes

Kicks site

Music Video: Rich Mix presentations- Liz kessler

2010-10-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

Material from two sessions at Rich Mix in Shoreditch 9/11 and 18/11. These videos were shown by Liz Kessler from academy films

Wiley

Lissie

Will Young

OK GO

Music Video: Rich Mix- History of Promos

2010-10-09T12:30:00.000-07:00

Len Lye: Colourbox 1935

Go Team: Ladyflash here

Nat King Cole: Frim Fram Sauce

Nino Ferrer (classic Scopitone) Le Telephone

Beatles: Can't buy me love

Madonna: open your Heart

50 cent: Candy shop

Jay z: 99 Problems

geri halliwell: Its raining men

Jennifer Lopez: I'm Glad

the Grey Video

Lego Queen

Cebu prison thriller

Lady gaga/Beyonce: telephone

machinima version

Music Video: Corin Hardy

2010-10-09T10:44:00.000-07:00

For the second year running, I had the privilege this week of interviewing music video director Corin Hardy, who works for Academy Films in London. Corin is known for his imaginative animations, often making music videos that don’t feature the artist at all. His approach is heavily influenced by his interest in the horror genre, fuelled by viewing lots of horror films in his teenage years, when he first started experimenting with animation. His first short film, Butterfly, is available to download for £1.49 on iTunes, and is well worth the investment.

Corin’s first music video was for Keane and he has made further videos for the band since, including War Child which is an example of an interesting workshop-collaborative approach. Corin went into a school as part of a project on raising awareness about war zones and worked with a group of teenagers to produce animations responding to the theme. The result is quite moving and clearly shows how quickly people can pick up techniques to produce something effective.

In a similar workshop project one weekend, Corin worked with a group of beginners to produce a video response to the track Fuzzbox by Bomb the Bass featuring Jon Spencer. With no budget but complete freedom, Corin was able to get the group to formulate their ideas and pull together a bunch of props to make a highly imaginative and borderline pornographic (!) animation. ‘Fuzzbox’ referred to the guitar pedal, but the group gave it a sexual meaning and this is the result.

Corin’s video for the Prodigy’s ‘Warriors Dance’ saw him return to a technique he had used as a teenager, cutting up cigarette boxes to make figures to animate. The band were unavailable for the video, as they were on tour, which once again gave him free rein. In this case, they are like ants dancing in the bar while the humans are away.

For an earlier video for little known band The Horrors, Corin used a different animation technique; this time, the band were present- shot against a white background, having to imagine what might happen to them if they were under attack from various creatures. He then printed out every third frame of the video on paper, creating a pile 1500 sheets high, spread the paper around his living room and with large quantities of ink drew and splattered the sheets to create this amazing spectacle. Corin is proud of the success of this video- which you will note has close to 2 million hits on youtube- not bad for a little known band!

His video for Paolo Nutini takes some inspiration from the 1987 video for Jackie Wilson's 'reet petite' (which the sound echoes in some ways). this time he has made a complex mixture of live action and animation and as with his Horrors and Prodigy animations, it ends with the creation being destroyed. This witty play with Nutini's song and even with the image of the artist is another indication of why Corin can be seen as a really creative talent.

here is 'reet petite':

To make animations like these is a very lengthy process and on a low budget, which most of these videos are, that means the work is not that well paid!

His most recent music promo for Biffy Clyro is live action, but draws upon his interest in horror, with reference to films like 'Deliverance' and 'The wicker man' as well as the Mexican festival of the dead.

From his website, the 'making of..' video is quite illuminating

Corin's website is here

If you are making a music video for your A level (or another media course) it is well worth considering the option of animation which might allow you to take it into really different and unusual areas; but beware, it is an immensely time consuming process- even if the performers don't answer back!

Music Video for A level

2010-10-08T06:22:00.000-07:00

Probably the most popular task over the last 20 years in the second year of A level courses has been making a music video. Changes in technology have meant that what students can produce has changed dramatically in that time; from the early days of crash editing between two VHS machines, when you had to do every shot pretty much in sequence to today's digital editing, where you can set up multiple timelines, the possibilities for music video on no budget have been transformed.

In this post, I will set out what I think are the key steps that you need to go through in making a music video and illustrate with examples made by professional directors and by students.

First of all, though, I think it is important to determine what a music video actually is; it would be too simple to say well, its a video and it's got music, so it must be a music video, because those criteria could apply to all manner of short films. I would see six key elements which would be there in almost every music video:

The video lasts at least as long as the track (can be longer if you have an intro or outro or both)
The video features the artist/band quite prominently
The video features some element of performance- singing and playing instruments (usually miming) and often dancing or acting too
The video has some kind of concept along with the track
The video does not feature a complete narrative but the concept may involve fragments of narrative
Different genres of music produce slightly different visual conventions in music videos

These criteria are an important starting point, as often student music videos seem to disregard them, which is a mistake. If you don't show some element of performance by the artist you are entering the realm of a small minority of music videos, which are maybe so strong conceptually that the artist doesn't matter or from very particular sub-genres of dance music. I would beware of this. If you are Chris Cunningham dealing with Aphex twin, it's fine, but at a level it is likely to end up looking like it isn't a music video...

My ten step guide starts with some activities to build skills that you will need later on...

Step 0: limbering up

This involves doing some exercises, just like you would if you were a sportsperson getting ready for the race or game. If you try shooting a karaoke-style multi-angle version of a track for fun, you will have the chance to make lots of mistakes and to get some inhibitions out of your system if you are going to be the performers in your own video. See an example:

svens edit of jam malice (tom b, jahmal, sven) from cmdiploma on Vimeo.

Totally improvised (!) but shot from three or four setups, this exercise gives confidence and builds skills with synching up performance and soundtrack.

A second exercise which works really well as a whole class and gets everyone to pay very close attention to how the video is constructed is a frame by frame re-make of part of an existing video. By storyboarding this and then filming shot by shot to stay faithful to the original, it helps give you more sense of how cutting works in real music videos. Student ones are often too slow paced, so that when you look at real ones you might see as much as three times as many shots on average being used than in a student one. Again here is an example, along with the 'original'

Step 1: Choosing your track

for your final production, it can be a mistake to go for something too well known as the image of the original will always be hanging over you, particularly the image of the artist. There is plenty of material available from relatively unknown bands which you could use from MySpace or elsewhere; you can create an image from scratch with your own performers adopting the role of the band.

The other things are to choose a track which stimulates some visuals and which isn't too long. Three minutes for a music video is enough of a challenge, so don't go for some five minute epic- you'll struggle to sustain it for the viewer.

Step 2: Write a treatment

A treatment is your pitch for the track, with a suggestion of what your 'concept' might be. It needs to be clear, workable and realistic in what you aim to do. If your idea is too elaborate, more can go wrong and you'll only be disappointed!

get feedback on this from teachers and fellow students and then review it in the light of their comments.

Step 3: Do lots of research

You should be looking at real music videos from the same genre of music as your own, not to copy them slavishly but to get a sense of what the conventions are. look closely at them and break them down to see how they work. How do they use verse and chorus? how do they use the beat and rhythm? how do they showcase the star? How much do the visuals relate to the lyrics? what's the concept?

try these two for example

You should also look at student videos to identify strengths you can draw upon and weaknesses you can avoid. here are a couple- what works and what doesn't?

L3/13 - Feeling a Moment (Matt & Tara) from cmdiploma on Vimeo.

Step 4: Plan for everything

Storyboard as much of it as possible

It might be tempting not to bother with storyboards but it is a mistake if you do so. You need a visual plan for your work as it won't just happen when you have a camera in your hand! I would recommend using post-its for constructing a storyboard, as you can move the frames around and change the order easily. Once you have done the storyboard, the next step is to turn it into an animatic, which quite literally involves taking a photo of each frame (on your phones or a webcam, nothing fancy) and then dropping the frames onto the timeline of your digital editing program. You can then cut them to length, in time with your music on the audio line and then export the whole thing as an animatic- a moving storyboard. Here's one of the first thirty seconds of a video...

The other crucial aspect of planning is logistics. This involves production management skills, thinking ahead to everything that could possibly go wrong on your shoot and to every little detail of what you will need. Nothing should be left to chance- costumes, props, locations, camera equipment and people all need orgnaising. Don't have your actors just wearing any old clothes- plan what they will wear; don't rely on someone else remembering particular props, have a list of who is bringing what. For a music video, the instruments are props, so don't forget them! Don't assume everyone will simply turn up- make sure everyone has all the phone numbers and everyone knows exactly where they should be and when.

You really will need suitable places for the performances and you will need to think about variety for these. You should also aim to shoot the whole thing well in advance of deadlines, as you may end up having to shoot some of it again!

Above all else, make sure your performers have rehearsed and know the words and that they are willing to throw themselves into it. If they don't look enthusiastic and don't look as if they mean it, the video won't work!

Step 5: set up a blog

This should be the place for all your evidence, showing the journey of your project. You can use it to link to ideas and inspiration, to examples of your research into music video, the genre and your particular artist, to post recce shots and ideas for hair and costume, for your storyboards, your animatic, screengrabs of work in progress and for feedback from others.

Step 6: know your equipment

Make sure you have practised with the equipment and that you know how to set it up and how to get the best from it. Cameras, lights and the edit program are all going to be important to how your video looks, but an easy one to forget is the music- have the track, (preferably with some 'beeps' at the start so it will be easy to synch video material with the master track at the edit stage) and have it on something where it is audible. It is no use just having your singer with headphones on so the camera can't hear the music- it needs to be played out loud!

Step 7: the Shoot

Shoot the performance at least ten times with different set-ups. You may think this is excessive, but if you are going to have something to cut together with coverage of every second of the track, you need lots of material. Make sure you have plenty of cutaways as well, for interesting shots that will retain the viewer's interest. Experiment with extra angles and lighting changes and don’t forget: lots of close-ups, which is the dominant mode of music video !

Step 8: capturing

Label everything you capture and organise it so its easy to find;don’t capture stuff you don’t need, but do capture full takes of the song, as if you stack them on top of each other in the timelines, you can strip away what you don't need easily thereafter. By the way, multi-track timelines like Premiere and Final Cut are ideal for editing music video- iMovie and MovieMaker are much harder to use for lipsynch material.

Step 9: the edit

Synch up performances first and get the whole picture rather than tiny detail
Cut and cut again, aiming for a dynamic piece of work. Do any effects work last.
Upload a rough cut to your blog and get feedback, then act upon this to finesse your final version.

Magazine work for A level

2010-10-01T08:36:00.000-07:00

One of the most popular coursework tasks at A level is to make all or part of a magazine. For the OCR specification, this involves producing the front cover, contents page and a double page spread from a new music magazine. Usually, the task is done individually. You can work in a group of up to four people, but if you do, you have to produce the equivalent number of editions of the same magazine in a 'house style'. What I cover here is particularly of relevance to the music magazine task, but the ideas could be applied in relation to other types of magazine assignments.

Many centres choose this task because they think it will be easier to manage than video work, which may be the case, because more of the task is 'desk-bound'; this is probably true, but in my experience this task is extremely hard to do well and needs a lot of careful planning, organisation and preparation, as well as the ability to stand back from your work, take criticism and admit when you have got it wrong.

Lots of students do lots of good research for this task, but very few seem to be able to carry that research through to the final production to make something that shows they understand conventions. I think for this task, you need to consider both the magazine as a whole and the three components you have to make. So that means looking at the overall style and conventions of real magazines but also looking closely at the specifics of front covers, contents pages and double page spreads.

You might start with magazines in general and then home in on music magazines more specifically, but you need to end up looking at the sub-genre for the target audience at which you are aiming. It is very easy to get it completely wrong by trying to replicate the conventions of one sub-genre when really your audience belongs to another.

A search through google images for 'music magazine covers' gives you a good range to look at- though be careful, as you can see, some of these have been mis-filed!

The same is true for contents pages and double page spreads, though what you begin to notice is that this search also includes examples of student work, from their A level blogs!

It is really important that you look carefully at all elements of the magazine that you are being asked to produce to ensure that you really understand exactly what the conventions are and why they are there. A good way to do this is to annotate your research material as research evidence. But remember when you come to produce your own, use that annotated model and really look at it, rather than just forgetting it!

Here's a basic annotation of a cover from a student blog

Covers are usually the easiest bit to get right, but you still need to think carefully. Where is your masthead going to be? there's a reason that they tend to be at the top and from the left- that's to do with how the magazine will be displayed in a rack in the shop. If you put it elsewhere on the cover, in effect your logo/branding becomes hard to find. Why do we need a barcode and a price? What's the point of a strapline and how many of the features need to be flagged up for us on that cover? If you look at a few different magazines, certain patterns start to emerge.

Look at the colourscheme and the use of fonts- how many different colours are used on the text and how many different fonts are used? They may be different sizes but they don't vary that much. Look at the picture chosen- usually the model will be looking at the camera and in turn the viewer. Think about how that image has been posed and the probability that many images will have been taken to select from. Then consider the layout of the whole thing. How much can the model overlap the masthead without a loss of identity for the brand?

Contents pages often go wrong, but again a few simple observations will help you a lot.

This edition of Q magazine is quite typical. There is a main picture of a band from one of the lead articles and a smaller one of Nick cave from another section, so a visual sense of some of the variety to be found that month. There is a lso a list of what's in the magazine which extends to at least fifteen examples, with several elements to the 'Oasis Special!'. This gives us a sense of the value for money that we will get from the magazine. Surprisingly often, a student contents page will only feature half a dozen items, but who would pay good money for such a small publication?

Note also the use of colour and font here- it is clean and limited- simple, despite the amount of detail. The whole layout is in columns, with boxes being used to guide the reader's eyes. Your contents page needs to do the same, whatever genre of music you use. There is also repetition of the logo from the cover, smaller, but a reminder to the reader, as well as a link to the magazine's online presence at the top. All this needs to guide your thinking when you make a a magazine.

Finally, the element where most students 'come unstuck' is the double page spread. there may be a lack of clarity as to what this might mean, as some students just seem to see it as an opportunity to make any two random pages from the magazine (I've even seen a horoscope page!). What it should be is a feature article which gives you the opportunity to show what you can do with text, image and layout.

This NME example with Lily Allen is one way of approaching it. Note that the image stretches across the border and the amount of text is limited, with quite a striking use of 'blackmail note' titles.

It is nonetheless, still quite clearly built in columns and the image would again be the result of choosing from a large number taken at a shoot. You might opt for a multi-image approach, but again you need to base it clearly on real examples and to make your text size appropriate. Quite often students choose a font that is much too big, in order to fill the page, which immediately makes their work look like it does not understand conventions. Finally, the text itself needs careful thought and multiple drafts. All writing needs proofreading so that there are no spelling errors! In the real world, you'd get the sack if there were as it would make your magazine a laughing stock!

Throughout the process, you should keep full records of everything you do- all your research, your planning step by step, revisions and drafts. As much visual material as you can gather will hold you in good stead.

Have a look at the student blogs here and here for some really good examples of how you might work and what you might produce!

Good luck!

Beachcombing: Getting creative ideas and making them work...

2010-09-21T09:39:00.000-07:00

Over the next few weeks I will be posting blogs about practical production, designed to help you get the most out of your work. These will be specific to popular projects like the music magazine and film opening which lots of students do at AS level, and the music video, short film and trailer which are popular at A2. This week’s post is about some techniques and ideas which can help you generate creative work of your own.

At the weekend, I was lucky enough to be at a talk given by Tim Clague, a BAFTA nominated screenwriter and film-maker who describes himself as “a storyteller for the google generation”. I have heard Tim speak before and if you ever get the chance to see him in action, you should take it, as he is extremely entertaining and has lots of good tips for ‘thawing’ what he calls the ‘creative freeze’ that often happens when people are trying to come up with ideas and be creative.

In this video which introduces his work, Tim talks about how he uses story charts and visual tools to help him to put stories together.

Tim's blog at Projector Films is packed with useful resources and ideas. In the post called beachcombing, Tim discusses how gathering together fragments of ideas from which you might eventually make something is a process that doesn't happen instantly and needs to be worked through.

Beachcombing
Uploaded by martonhouse. - Explore lifestyle, fashion, and DIY videos.

Tim's ideas are aimed at helping people get the most out of their jobs, notably media creatives, but they could apply equally to media students. In future weeks we will look more closely at the precise needs of particular assignments, but you should have a look at Tim's videos and other resources to get thinking about ideas and planning for your work.

A useful resource on his blog is his storyboard template for word which you can find here.

Tim likes to gather stuff together and store up ideas which eventually come together in his projects; this is a technique which is not unique to him. His storycards, where he literally pins up little cards with fragments of ideas on and then re-organises them into the shape of his overall project, is a good way of working.

He notes that this collecting of ideas was the way H.G. Wells worked. In his case, he used to write things on scraps of paper, screw them up and pop them in a jamjar. When the jar was full, he would empty them out and start to put together his stories. imagine, this may have been how 'The Time Machine' and 'War of the Worlds' were written. Tim recommends that you collect ideas from everywhere- the world around you is a good place to start. Snap pictures on your phone of anything interesting that you see; keep fragments of text messages or facebook updates- you never know when they might come in handy. A good source of powerful ideas that Tim mentioned is post secret.com which describes itself as " an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard". Imagine these tiny secrets becoming the starting point for a story.

Some years ago, director Mark Adcock whose showreel can be found here, did a talk for my students where he told us that he used to put together a 'steal-o-matic' before making a music video, which consisted of ideas from films that he wanted to use. In his case, the one he showed us was a VHS tape with clips from old silent movies and surrealist films, for a music video he made for an artist called White Town. These days, with so much stuff on the web, it is much easier to get these ideas together and make your blog your 'steal-o-matic'. the key for Mark, as for Tim, was not to steal just from one place but to get ideas from everywhere.

So start beachcombing!

9/11 Controversy and news coverage

2010-09-12T06:57:00.001-07:00

"Is the Terry Jones who's going to burn the Koran the one from Monty Python? Because if so he's a very naughty boy." tweet by David Schneider last week. When I read this and various more sick jokes that were floating around online, it did make me think about how the threats of an eccentric bigot from a little known sect had gathered such momentum to become a major talking point.

A few weeks ago, no-one had ever heard of Pastor Terry Jones from the Dove World Outreach Center in Florida, yet towards the end of last week as the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America approached, he became the top story on TV, Radio and online (though not in the English tabloids, where it was still Wayne Rooney). Listening to radio coverage on Friday, the day before the anniversary, I noticed that the emphasis was starting to shift to commentators asking the same question. How did this get so out of hand that someone whose views should have very little credibility and who represents a group of people that you could fit onto a bus, is being pleaded with by the President of the USA and the UN Secretary General and invited onto every US network to speak live to the nation? And can this story tell us anything about the way news is distributed in the current media landscape?

A bit of background. Jones' church has apparently existed for about a quarter of a century, like many 'born again' sects in the USA, not picking up many members. He has campaigned against Islam and homosexuality for quite some while, and recently published a book called 'Islam is of the Devil'. For the past few months, his youtube channel has featured videos attacking Islam and in July he announced 'International Burn a Koran Day'. In mid-July he began to put out messages on twitter, accusing Islam of being like fascism and announcing "9/11/2010 International Burn a Koran Day."

He started a Facebook group and picked up several hundred 'fans' and by the end of the month some anti-Jones facebook groups had started up. The mainstream media started picking up the story and on 29 July he did this interview on CNN, which was circulated internationally.

Given the huge amount of video contributions on youtube and the range of eccentric minority interest websites around, this would still have little significance, but as is often the case in our media-saturated world, news channels are desperate for material to fill airtime and Jones began to be featured by a range of media outlets. By the beginning of September, this mixture of his use of social media (youtube, twitter, facebook) and opposition to his ideas popping up online led to an absolute scramble to speak to him.

The combination of the annual remembrance of 9/11, which always gets some media coverage, stories about an Islamic cultural centre to be built in New York and the continuing presence of US troops in Afghanistan contributed to Jones' views being given prominence. Though the fire department in the town of Gainesville, where the 'church' is based refused to grant a permit to hold a bonfire, the media effectively 'fanned the flames' before they were lit in giving him such coverage.

The cultural centre had been the subject of scare stories whipped up by some right wing bloggers earlier in the year so that many people believed it was a mosque to be built 'on the graves of those who died on Ground Zero', whereas it was actually some streets away and includes includes 'a theatre, performing arts centre, fitness centre, swimming pool, basketball court, childcare area, bookstore, culinary school, art studio, food court, September 11 memorial, and prayer space'. This of course in the most multicultural city on the planet, so really ought to be no big deal. In the minds of many people, fuelled by the media coverage, it became an insult to those who died, with Islam taking the blame. So Jones' statements dropped neatly into a pre-existing news story.

As the anniversary approached, so he got more coverage, much of it live, with his every pronouncement given the status of something between a plane hijacker and a world leader. His demands for a showdown with an 'Iman'(actually Imam, but he knows so little about Islam that he got the name wrong) to get them to back down on the 'plans for the mosque' and then finally his decision not to carry out the book burning gained him access to live broadcasts around the world. Meanwhile all manner of public figures lined up to pass comment and in Muslim countries there were protests which led to some people dying.

Many commentators have suggested that this was an example of news coverage getting out of hand and creating a story which caused an awful lot of damage. I agree. It's one of the big dangers of social media, that the extreme views of a minority expressed to a minority online get whipped up by broadcast media- which still reach a far bigger audience- and these views gain undue credence and respectability in order to fill airtime and provide 'a good story'.

On Saturday morning, I heard an interview on Radio 5 with the British mother of someone who died in the tower on 9/11. It was heartbreaking and poignant as she told of how she saw the coverage live that day and tried to ring her son but knew that he was dead. But what made it worse was when the interviewer then went on to ask what did she think about the threatened book burning and the proposed mosque, each of which she angrily condemned as just as bad as each other. It was lazy and intrusive journalism; it should have ended with her recounting her grief, but it ended up once again reinforcing the myths and opening up division.

Normally I'd try to put some lighthearted clips in my blog, maybe response videos from youtube, but it wouldn't be appropriate for this topic (plus I couldn't find any!). Instead, I found this clip from a month ago from a little known US radio politics show, where the excellent host lets the Rev Jones explain all his views. If the mainstream media had been sensible, they'd have listened to this and just said, "ignore him, the man's a bigot and ignorant" But they had to have a story...

We English- Simon Roberts, photographer and Shane Meadows, film-maker. Collective Identity

2010-09-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

During the summer holiday, I had the pleasure of visiting the National Media Museum in Bradford, which I had not looked round for many years. If you get the chance to go, you should, as there are some really interesting exhibitions about the history of the media and some interactive features you can play around with, like a bluescreen TV studio and operate some large TV cameras on a set. While there I heard a boy arguing with his parents that the museum wasn't anything to do with his course (which I assumed must be GCSE Media Studies) because it wasn't very up to date (they were in the Photography gallery which traces the history of photography sinvce about 1820). His mother was (angrily) pointing out that to understand the present it is important to know something about the past, and I'd definitely agree! The TV gallery in particular was fascinating for this, with a feature where you could select a video of any one of 1000 classic british programmes and go to a booth to watch it- a bit like live youtube! It also contains loads of old TV sets, dating back to the 1930s, many of which look amazing (and amazingly small!)

Anyway, one of the seasonal exhibitions, which came to an end this weekend, particularly caught my interest as it was not only visually intriguing but also tapped into the argument being made above and could be a really interesting case study for the Collective Identity topic in the A2 exam. The exhibition and lots of useful background material actually continues permanently online, so everything you need would be there.

Simon Roberts' exhibition and book 'We English' looks at the English at leisure; he travelled across the country in a motorhome from 2007-8 taking photographs of English people at sporting events, in the countryside, at the seaside and in a range of outdoor leisure activities. Having previously done a book of photographs about Russia, he was keen to investigate a topic closer to home:

"Initially, I was simply thinking about Englishness and how my upbringing had been quintessentially English. How much of this was an intrinsic part of my identity? In what ways was my idea of what constitutes an 'English life' or English pastimes (if there are such things) different to those of others'? My own memories of holidays, for example, were infused with very particular landscapes; the lush green-ness around Derwent Water or the flinty grey skies - and pebbles - of Angmering's beaches. It seemed to me that these landscapes formed an important part of my consciousness of who I am and how I 'remember' England."

Part of the exhibition featured photos which inspired his work for the project, many from the late 19th and early part of the 20th Century, such as this one of Margate beach(1890s)

His pictures, like this one of Skegness beach, go against a prevailing tradition of landscape photos without people to show a sense of the collective in their landscape.

Simon discusses his work in the project on Russia and the ideas behind 'We English' in this really interesting video interview

Simon Roberts: Lens Culture Conversations with Photographers from Jim Casper on Vimeo.

On his extensive blog about the project, there is a lot more background information and thoughtful discussion of the idea of Englishness, as well as links to other viewpoints. This would be a fantastic starting point for a study of englishness for the A2 exam, given the range of material available on the blog.

As the exhibition ends, so another text focussing on this collective identity begins, as channel 4 begin their four part series This is England 1986, in which director Shane Meadows takes the characters from his film set in 1982 and updates us on what has happened to them four years on. The trailer gives a bit away, but it looks 'not to be missed'!

The ShaneMeadows fansite gives you a lot more information and links to a good overview interview with Shane from The Independent.Lots of people used the original 'This is England' as a source text for the Collective Identity question in the June exam. I'd expect to see many more using the Tv series next summer, but it would be nice if some of them used simon Roberts' photos as a comparison.

This is England 86 is on tuesdays at 10 pm on Channel 4 from september 7th

Welcome to the new academic year

2010-09-03T23:48:00.000-07:00

Whether you are a new student of Media Studies at AS or someone coming back to start A2, welcome to the blog and good luck with your studies over the coming year. Each week this year, I shall try to post something of interest and potential relevance to your studies. I hope to meet some of you at the one day Media Magazine student conference on October 21 in London, where I shall be presenting a session on student production work and giving you some tips on how to get the most out of it. I shall also be chairing a session where creative media practitioners will be talking about and showing some of their work. Main speakers on the day include the distinguished writer and researcher David Buckingham, from the London Knowledge Lab, who will discuss the representation of Media Studies in the media, Annette Hill, professor from the University of Lund in Sweden, who will be talking about the TV audience's interest in the supernatural and Julian McDougall, who wrote the A level textbooks and will be presenting on the idea of convergenece between 'old' and 'new' media. We all look forward to seeing you there!

Another exam case study- Fans: WeMedia or Media in the online age

2010-06-12T08:14:00.000-07:00

In this post, I shall suggest ways in which the work of Henry Jenkins writing particularly in 'Convergence Culture' (2006) could be useful in the exam using fan videos as a case study.

The conventional image of the fan, as portrayed in fictional representations, is of a deranged fanatic, endangering the life of the fan's hero. Examples would be Robert De Niro as Rupert Pupkin in King of Comedy (1982) or Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes in Misery (1990).

Henry Jenkins' work on fan fiction challenges this view as simplistic; in Convergence Culture he looks at a number of case studies to suggest that fans are engaged in quite a range of cultural activity. His chapters consider:

Survivor and ‘spoilers’- the ways in which fan groups online collaborate to find out about upcoming episodes and circulate information about them or 'spoilers'; American Idol and ‘democracy’- the first US programme to use mass text voting, a way in which some would suggest that the audience participate in a form of limited democracy to choose their winner. The Matrix and ‘transmedia’ looks at the ways in which a text can be produced in a number of different forms- the films, animations, comic books, each of which adds a different element to the jigsaw of the story and which cannot be fully understood on their own. Star Wars and fan film production- of which there are many thousands on the net, some of massive technical prowess and Harry Potter- kids as writers and activists, where Jenkins looks at the ways in which young Potter fans have become involved in political movements based upon how they have interpreted the stories applying to real life issues.

Jenkins argues that the web has created ‘knowledge communities’ where fans meet together online to share interests and discuss them in depth. He sees fansites as having a sort of 'collective thinking' and sets of rules and credentials, where some things can and some things can't be said and where individuals can gain kudos for their knowledge as expert contributors in the same way as they would in the academic world- for example site admins or the most regular posters often have special status in fan groups and forums compared to newbies.

Jenkins' definition of convergence is wider than the generally used definition around technology and the digitalisation of media content, as he looks also at the ways in which the integration of media industries into conglomerates represents an economic convergence but perhaps most importantly how the online age creates a social and cultural convergence too- with audiences coming together socially online from all over the globe and start to make things which they share online.

This cultural production by fans of fiction that extends beyond the original text has been around since long before the web, but the distribution of it has become significantly easier since the online age began. If you want to use fan production as a case study in the exam, here are some starting points. have a look at the videos and click on the youtube link so you can see the user comments and also the videos to which they relate- other fan production. Some are examples of what I would call 'acting out', some involve extending the story, one is a celebration of other fan art to explore the relationship between characters in a story, some involve re-mixing and mashing them up, but all involve distribution of fan production and sharing amongst an online audience, often starting with a 'knowledge community'.

More revision blogs

2010-05-27T23:54:00.000-07:00

I'm going to post any revision blogs here that I think could be useful to students for either AS or A2 Media

Here is a start:

Dave's blog- collective identity for A2 but also useful for AS TV Drama
Nick's blog- music industry for As or for A2 online age

How to do an exam answer

2010-05-24T23:34:00.000-07:00

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

So there's the first part of the exam! Next is part B- media in the online age!

How to do an exam answer: Media in the online age

2010-05-24T02:46:00.000-07:00

Here are the January questions for this topic (click on image to enlarge)

At the top of the paper, for all topics, there is an instruction that you need to refer to the past, contemporary media and future possibilities and that you should use case study examples to support your arguments. You also need to have some reference to media theory and to refer to examples from at least two media areas. Since 20 of the marks are for explanation, argument and analysis (EAA), twenty are for use of examples (EG) and 10 are for use of terminology (T), you can see that this is not an easy task. In this post, I am going to try to show how you can make the most of your material (including examples from previous posts on this blog) to do a good answer.

So how would we go about answering these questions? Links refer to examples used previously on this blog so you can read more

Step 1: Identify what the question is about.

Exam questions are often written to a bit of a formula- 'to what extent...' 'how far...' '...discuss' - you'll see these a lot in G325. what they are all doing is asking you to consider a debate and to look at both sides of something, not just to prove a point. So when Q.8 asks for a discussion of whether the impact of the internet is revolutionary, it is not setting it as a statement of fact, but asking 'how far' this is true. Similarly, q.9, which refers to distribution and consumption, is asking whether the internet has made these things very different. So there are similarities between the two questions, though the second one gives you more to tie your answer to, where the first one is quite open. In both cases, though, what you use for case studies is really open to your choice!

Step 2: decide which of the two questions to do

Step 3: note down a plan, with the main points you want to cover and the examples you want to use. Break this down so you cover all the areas needed

Examples
Media areas x2 or more
Which theory/critics to reference- it just means whose ideas do you want to mention
Main arguments
Past?
Present?
Future?
terminology

If you run out of time, the examiner can at least give you credit for where you would have gone.
remember, you could answer this section before you do 1a and 1b if you want.

Step 4 Write an Intro

keep it short and simple. for example- 'In this essay I shall consider how far web microseries and internet memes demonstrate the changing nature of distribution and consumption of the media'

This intro already uses two bits of terminology (microseries and memes) and shows you are going to address the question (distribution and consumption).

If you know that you are going to use the ideas of contemporary critics, you could go on to say 'I shall refer to the ideas of David Gauntlett and Michael Wesch to consider whether the arguments they make about Web 2.0 really do suggest that the media has changed dramatically.'

Step 5 get on with it: case study 1

this is where you discuss your first example- microseries. First define the term. Second, outline some examples and show what their conventions are (episode length, typical content, how distributed, type and size of audience). Third, start to suggest why this might be something different from TV (no scheduling, small budget, no big institution making it- sometimes, watch anytime, chance to comment or even interact) for the audience. Draw upon Gauntlett to contrast this kind of production with conventional Tv production/distribution. Maybe note that actually some of this stuff is made by big companies anyway...Note that in drawing comparisons with TV you have addressed your second media area, the web being your first.

Step 6 case study 2

your second example- internet memes. Define the term, outline some examples and how they spread (via social networking, youtube, viral e-mail etc). talk about how they evolve as other people make new versions of them (see the coppercab videos and click on various links on youtube to see this evolution in action). Bring in Wesch's ideas about how these spread (the first five minutes of his video talk about numa numa guy as an example).

Step 7 pull your ideas together, preparing for conclusions

... an attempt to ensure that you explicitly address past, present and future and that you argue with the critics rather than just accepting their view.

make some points about the audience changing - we spend more time online, informal distribution of media is growing via social networks and e-mail, maybe some of us make stuff ourselves to distribute (as Gauntlett and Wesch suggest). Maybe speculate that this could grow even further in the future. But... the sting in the tail is that Tv is still going strong, these online communities we belong to are still owned by big companies and much of what is being consumed is actually just transferred from one medium to another; Wesch argues that it is all getting more democratic, but is contributing to memes really democracy in action or just a form of play with no wider significance? Gauntlett's 'the media were like Gods..' - has that really changed? were audiences ever as passive as his model characterises them? Are they really that much more active now? isn't it just a tiny percentage who actually make stuff to put online?

This essay model just uses stuff from a few of my posts. You could take a totally different approach, using other posts as a starting point- for example talking about collaborative texts as a new role for audiences or about the changes to the music industry illustrated here and in much more detail here. Or you could answer the question about revolutionary change by reference to technology and consider whether it makes any difference at all.

Remember- your choice of case studies is up to you. What you know about them and how you are able to relate them to ideas is where the marks come in!

Theories and theorists part 2

2010-03-07T11:55:00.000-08:00

Angela McRobbie, Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her work focusses on Youth Culture and particularly the role of gender, with a special focus on girls' culture in magazines, dress and music. Her ideas would be particularly useful for looking at the Media and Collective Identity, though any study of audiences in relation to any of the topics might find her work useful.

Professor Sonia Livingstone is Head of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics. Her research on television audiences and more recently on children's use of the internet would be very useful for both Media in the online age and Regulation as topics for the exam.

Charles Leadbetter

"More people than ever can participate in culture, contributing their ideas, views, information.

The web allows them not just to publish but to share and connect, to collaborate and when the conditions are right, to create, together, at scale.

That is why the web is a platform for mass creativity and innovation." Leadbetter's book 'we think' explores these notions, with contributions from many early readers of drafts which appeared online.

Stuart Hall

Now professor at the Open University, Hall was a key figure in the development of thinking about how the media do not simply reflect reality, but actively construct our understanding of it. His ideas about how different meanings may be taken by different types of readers from media texts are well worth applying to examples for exam topics.

Media and Collective identity

2010-03-06T12:39:00.001-08:00

The main text slides and some pictures from a presentation I recently gave at Rich Mix. Video material will be linked in forthcoming posts.

Collective Identity

View more presentations from petefrasers.

The quotes from Buckingham and Gauntlett both come from the A2 textbook and raise the issue of how identity relates to use of the media. In my view, a study of collective identity cannot simply be about how texts represent different groups but must also consider how people interpret those representations and how they construct a representation of their own identity, particularly online. Throughout the presentation, I try to make this point.

I have set out here what the basic needs for the exam would be and towards the end attempt to show how the areas we consider in the presentation might be used to answer the January 2010 exam questions on the topic. I have also tried to summarise how the work of particular critics might be useful towards an answer.

Jenkins' idea of cultural convergence is illustrated by the Bert and Bin Laden example, where an image done in photoshop in someone's bedroom took on a new resonance when it was picked up in Pakistan and posters were made which were then used in a demonstration reported in the `western media.

The presentation goes on to consider issues around the construction of identity online- such as false identity and the end of privacy that the online age has brought about, before moving to case studies of the construction of collective identity around the thmes of youth in particular case studies, such as 'Skins' and 'the Wire'.

We also looked at a current meme- 'coppercab' whose angry rant about 'ginger people having souls' attacks an episode of South park and some subsequent responses. His video, made in january, has had over 3m hits and been parodied on numerous occasions.

The presentation also looks at the way that a deviant image of youth around moral panics is often constructed by news media and the ways in which facebook can be used to construct a collective identity and the homogenising impact it appears to have on profile photos and other elements of a user profile.

theories and theorists- Part 1

2010-02-01T03:36:00.001-08:00

People often ask how much theory is expected in the exam; do students need to quote theories and the names of critics/theorists? The answer is yes, you are expected to know some RELEVANT theory and to be able to apply it to examples, particularly to access the higher marks. You are also expected to be able to accurately cite the names of critics/researchers and theorists and to set out their position- but you certainly don't have to agree with them! In fact, there are more marks for people who can argue effectively with someone else's ideas.

So whose work is it useful to know about?

David Gauntlett

http://www.theory.org.uk/david/

Media Studies 2.0

In 2007, Gauntlett published online the article Media Studies 2.0, arguing that we need to recognise the changing media landscape in which the categories of 'audiences' and 'producers' blur together. He argues that there is a shift from a 'sit-back-and-be-told culture' to a 'making-and-doing culture'. His video is essential viewing!

Henry Jenkins

Jenkins has written about fan cultures for many years and the ways in which fans ‘re-write’ media texts for their own purposes. In his recent book ‘Convergence culture’ he looks at how the convergence of different media forms should be understood less in terms of technology and more in terms of what people are doing with them.

Michael Wesch
http://mediatedcultures.net/about.htm

Wesch is assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. Wesch is interested in ‘digital ethnography’, where he studies the effect of new media on human interaction. He created a short video, "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us." and put it on youtube in early 2007. His later videos, made collaboratively with his students are all really interesting reflections on how people use the web.

Chris Anderson

Anderson came up with the concept of ‘The Long Tail’ an idea about retailing, describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. Amazon.com is a good example.

“The distribution and inventory costs of businesses successfully applying this strategy allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The total sales of this large number of "non-hit items" is called the Long Tail” (Wikipedia).

This concept might also be seen to apply in social networks (e.g., crowdsourcing, peer-to-peer), and viral marketing . Overall, it is dependent on the online age and could not have easily existed in earlier society.

Don Tapscott

Don's influential books 'Wikinomics' and 'Grown up digital' look at how the business model of the web and the generation that has grown up with the web are changing the economy.

Martin Barker

Any study of Media regulation or fans ought to take account of the work of Martin Barker, currently at Aberystwyth University. He has written and researched extensively on comics, films and their audiences, as well as moral panics about the media, such as the Video nasties 'scare' of the mid 1980s and the Childs play 3 panic of the mid 1990s.

the iPad!: media in the online age

2010-01-30T11:24:00.000-08:00

Steve Jobs' annual presentation at Apple is always hotly anticipated with rumours of new product using flying around for months beforehand. This week, it was widely known that Apple would be unveiling some kind of portable screen device or tablet- trailed by some as the iSlate. In the end, it was called the iPad, but did what was expected- acted as a big 'reader'. Some would say it is just an iPod touch too big to fit in your pocket, or a laptop without the ability to multitask onscreen. But that won't bother Steve Jobs or Apple, who have confidently trashed rivals in recent years with the iPod and then the iPhone. Next up iPad.

It won't be released until the end of March in the USA and possibly not till june in the Uk, but what is it going to do that will make it yet another big selling success for Apple? Well many pundits are suggesting that it will almost certainly kill off the Kindle- the book reader which Amazon sell. In setting up iBooks, Apple hopes to corner the electronic book market in the same way that it captured the market for MP3 downloads with iTunes.

Set alongside the Kindle, with it's 9.7 inch screen compared to a 6 incher, it immediately looks impressive. Although it will retail at almost twice the price for the most basic model, that is still considerably cheaper than the Macbook.

But as with all new Apple products, the backlash started almost before the product was announced. On Twitter there were endless comments dismissing its capability. More interesting though the web parodies began as soon as the announcement was made. The product name caused some mirth due to its connotations for women (sanitary pads), with the term 'iTampon' quickly trending on Twitter and an old clip from US TV re-emerged on youtube which had sent up the iTunes ads at the time.

There's a link from it to a sendup of Steve Jobs' original presentation where he goes online

And the inevitable meme from Downfall (actually a whole load of them- this is one without swearing)

There's even some spoofs of Jobs himself

The launch coincided with Obama's 'State of the Union' address, which is reflected in this spoof

There's even one made in Machinima here

So what does all this tell us? originally I was going to blog about the significance of the iPad, but as soon as I saw all the spoofs, like most people surfing Youtube, I got caught up with those instead. Once again, looking at these videos- and who knows, by the time you are reading this there may be hundreds more- it is very striking how quickly any news event or cultural occurrence is re-worked and re-made, given new meaning and then viewed by thousands of people in a very short space of time.

oh and if you do want some serious points about the iPad, try Stephen Fry in The Guardian, witty and knowledgeable as always and the video on the Apple site.

Creativity: G325 Questions on production work

2010-01-30T06:12:00.000-08:00

One of the possible areas you could be asked about in the exam is creativity. The projects you have undertaken will hopefully have felt like an opportunity to display your creativity, but you will need the chance to discuss what you understand by creativity and what it might mean to be creative.

The assignment options at AS and A2 all offer constraints for your work, whether it be making pages for a music magazine, the opening of a film or the packaging for an album; one of the reasons why you aren't offered total free choice is because people often find that working within constraints gives them something to exercise their creativity, whereas total freedom can sometimes make it really difficult to know where to start. It's why genre can be interesting- how has something been created which fits with certain structures and rules but plays around with them to give us something a little bit different?

The word 'creative' has many meanings- the most democratic meaning would really suggest that any act of making something (even making an idea) might be seen as a creative act. In more elitist versions of the term, it is reserved for those who are seen as highly skilled or original (famous artists, musicians, film-makers etc). an interesting third alternative is to think about how creativity can be an unconscious, random or collaborative act that becomes more than the sum of its parts.

An example would be the surrealist/dadaist game 'the exquisite corpse' which you may have played as 'consequences'. In this game, a group of five people each contribute a line to a sort of semi-random poem. There is a structure or set of rules, which each contributor has to follow.

The first contributor writes down 'The' plus an adjective, such as 'Exquisite', then folds over the paper to hide their contribution.
(the game is quite useful for learning parts of speech too if you'd never been taught formal grammar)
The second contributor writes a noun such as 'corpse' and folds over their bit, so each successive contributor has no idea what was written before.
The third writes a verb, such as 'drinks', then folds it over
The fourth gives the game another 'the' and an adjective such as 'new'
And the fifth writes another noun.

The paper then goes back to the first person who unfolds it to reveal the full one sentence poem.
Thus in the first ever version of the game; 'the exquisite corpse drinks the new wine'. This collection of words can make sense, can be bizarre, can be anything! It has a structure, from the rules, but is essentially random from the choices of a group of collaborators who are unaware of what each other is doing. Hopefully, if you worked in a group on productions, it wasn't like that, as your products did have to make sense; though it might be possible, for example to make a music video from a combination of random contributions from collaborators.

When I tried the game with a group of teachers recently, we had some interesting results:

The cold book exploded the magic beach
The furry tooth crawls the fabulous cake
the dynamic basket rolls the pretty television
The stupendous dog ate the minute tree
The glamorous monkey strikes the old heaven
the lovely traffic cone shook the coconutish pupil
the phenomenal raisin sucks the shiny tiger
the exploding statue juggles the foolish house

I'm willing to bet if you google any of them as a full line, they will not appear in their entirety anywhere else, showing that even a short sentence can be unique- probably never uttered or written down before.

The web has offered far more opportunities for such random art work however. If we take that set of lines and drop them into the engine at wordle.net, it will make a picture out of them, for which I can alter the shape and the colours. Here goes:

Notice how it has eliminated all 'the' without me asking it to do so. No effort on my part, so is it creative? hmmmm there's a question.

A great shared site for creative random art with some effort is on Flickr with the shared CD meme pool. This is a game where you create a CD cover for an imaginary band and upload it to Flickr; the trick is you have to create it from 'found' materials, again following a set of rules.

1. Generate a name for your band by using WikiPedia's random page selector tool, and using the first article title on whichever page pops up. No matter how weird or lame that band name sounds.

2. Generate an album title by cutting and pasting the last four words of the final quote on whichever page appears when you click on the quotationspage's random quote selector tool. No matter what those four words turn out to be.

3. Finally, visit Flickr's Most Interesting page -- a random selection of some of the interesting things discovered on Flickr within the last 7 days -- and download the third picture on that page. (Even better: Click on this link to get a Flickr photo that's licensed under Creative Commons.) Again -- no cheating! You must use the photo, no matter how you feel about it.

4. Using Photoshop (or whatever method you prefer), put all of these elements together and create your very own CD cover, then upload it to the CD memepool

Here's my one!

The teachers who wrote the lines above finished their day by making a video made up of post-it notes- a collaborative task where they had to write or draw what they would take away and use from the day. We then filmed it live on an iPhone. How creative do you think they are?

Wordle of this blog!

2010-01-28T07:21:00.001-08:00

If you go to http://www.wordle.net/ you can have a go at producing instant artwork from your own words...

Media in the online age: Virtual Revolution

2010-01-25T14:59:00.000-08:00

I am ashamed to say that I only discovered this project about a week ago and then only by the kind of accident that can only happen on the web! Some of our students had posted a message on facebook asking if any new bands would be prepared to let them use their music for the titles of their video. they heard back from a band called Kids love lies, whose video here was directed by Barry Pilling. I was quite impressed with his stopmotion style, so I clicked on his youtube profile and found this mashup:

In turn, my curiosity took me on to the source of the material, the tremendous BBC Digital Revolutions site. Here I discovered a treasure trove of information and potential activity for Media in the online age...

The BBC has been making a series of programmes about the digital age over the last few months; should be interesting... and they start this saturday on BBC2 at 8.30. But this site offers something much more interesting- all the raw footage from interviews, locations and graphics can be downloaded and re-used by anyone to make anything. The BBC asks you to agree to their version of Creative Commons and to say that if you re-upload something you have mashed up from this footage you will put a link to the source, but what it puts in your hands is some amazing stuff.

All kinds of web experts and pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee (WWW) and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) offer insights into the extent of the changes that the 'digital revolution' has brought about and you can take this footage and shape it in new ways. It seems to me that just playing around with it and making something new from it would probably help you remember some of the things that they talk about and would certainly give you the chance to play around with the meaning of the material. The makers set up a competition in the autumn where you were asked to create a short film or trailer for the series. Take a look at Cassetteboy's work:

Anyway, it starts this weekend on Tv, so don't miss it- essential viewing for the A2 exam topics of Media in the Online Age and WeMedia (and all the others!) plus...you could have some fun with the footage. Just go to Digital Revolution.

Just started watching the first episode...wow ! Absolutely fantastic in every respect. Record it, keep it, re-watch it and revise from it. Download it from iPlayer, stick it on your iPhone. This is your no.1 resource for G325!

Media in the online age; Microseries on the web

2010-01-09T06:35:00.000-08:00

A really interesting phenomenon which the web has enabled is the microseries or online little TV series either on dedicated websites or on channels within youtube or other video sites. Early examples were often single character, even pretending to be the webcams of real amateurs online, which in many cases were later 'outed' as actors, such as 'lonelygirl15', discussed in detail here in Wikipedia. An early episode can be viewed here.

Other examples include the tales of Kate Modern which ran for a year on Bebo and was from the same company as LG15, this time involving the audience in choices about the development of the story and making full use of the opportunities afforded by social networking. Again, Wikipedia is a good starting point for finding out about it.

Many microseries are built around comedy, frequently with an appeal to a niche audience, using lots of in-jokes, both visual and verbal. Online gamers are a particularly fruitful source, as can be seen in 'The Guild' much of which takes place in front of the computer screen. A whole set of characters has been developed , taking the programme through a number of series with quickfire wit and lots of gamer gags. As can be seen on the programme's main site, there is a range of merchandise for fans to buy and the programme has even been made available on DVD.

'Pure Pwnage' about the life of a pro-gamer, is another example; shot in handheld 'video diary' style, the programme again relies on in-jokes and the fan knowledge of its viewers. Again a look at the programme's website gives us a pretty clear idea of the audience and shows the interactive potential- there is even an opportunity (if you were in Toronto in November) to appear as an extra in the show.

Episode 1 can be viewed here

A lot of the comedy microseries are aimed at the male audience; 'We Need Girlfriends' tells the tale of three dumped males and their embarrassing efforts to get back into relationships. Their site provides a link to a behind the scenes blog about the making of the show, as well as T-shirt sales and the episodes in a variety of formats. Here is the very funny episode 1 on youtube.

Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager tells the story of the less charismatic younger brother of Darth, who works in a supermarket and can’t quite handle the difference between life in the store and the problems faced by the empire.

in the first episode, these difficulties become very apparent:

British short film makers have tried their hand at creating microseries too. Last year there was a lot of coverage of a controversial comedy set in Bradford about a cell of bungling potential Islamic terrorists. This time the comedy is around a mixture of popular myths about terror plots from the news and in-jokes from young muslims' own culture. The five episodes of 'Living with the Infidels' were released gradually over a period of weeks to a fairly small audience,given the controversy. The youtube channel figures show 14,000 for the first episode gradually slipping to 2,000 by the last one. Have a look and judge for yourself.

In this clip from one of the episodes, they argue over what should be the style of a suicide video.

Microseries would be a good focus for an answer on Media in the online age in the final exam. Have a look around to see whether you can find some more. You might even try making your own. Oh and look out for these two competing series which start over the next couple of weeks...

Detention Deficit
Lines

...if their makers get their acts together!