Looking At Your Grades

Many of you should be looking to go up a grade from your result this year. Please look at the marks you got and then the information below so you get a good idea of how much harder you will need to work this year in order to achieve this.

Media Dictionary

Media Dictionary

A2 Deadlines

Here are the deadlines - Task: please print off and add to your exam folders if you don't already have a copy. Note - the exam is 5th June in the morning. Please add this information to your print out.

There is a lot more work at A2 than at AS so all coursework and homework deadlines will need to be adhered to. You will be graded for the work you produce on the date of the deadline - if no work is handed in, you won't get a grade.
 The lessons relate to the order of the posts on this blog. The titles given in this lesson plan will match the titles on the posts.

A2 Lesson Plans

Audit of AS Work

 As part of your exam paper for Section A Question 1a, you will be expected to evaluate the coursework you did at AS and A2. Whilst it is still fresh in your mind it would be important to evaluate your AS work so that you can refer back to this later in the year when you have to do mock exam papers on this. OCR summarise this exam task as:

Section A – Question 1a: Theoretical Evaluation of Production

Describe and evaluate your skills development over the course of your production work, from Foundation Portfolio (AS) to Advanced Portfolio (A2). The focus of this evaluation must be on skills development, and the question will require you to adapt this to one or two specific production practices. For example, Creativity is often tied in with one of the other topics e.g digital technology or production.The list of practices to which questions will relate is as follows:

•Digital Technology

•Creativity

•Research and planning

•Post-production

•Using conventions from real media texts

Task: Create 5 posts called ‘ Audit of AS skills followed by one of the 5 bullet points listed above’. Evaluate each of these in terms of the Research and planning/Production/Post production. Create subheadings for each post (R&P, Production, PP) so it is clear which stage of the film making process you are discussing. 

Print off your 5 posts and put in your exam folder under Section A: Question 1a

Explanation of A2 Course

Task: Summarise the A2 syllabus into your own blog so you can easily refer back to it and constantly remain informed about what you will be doing.

Definition of a Music Video

Task: Write down the definition of a music video and add the quote below from Goodwin (a theorist we shall often be referring to).

Definition
A music video is a short moving image product that is shot for the express purpose of accompanying a pre-existing music track. This is done to encourage sales of the music in another media format. 
Hence Goodwin’s quote:

"Music video is not primarily a commodity form but a promotional one."

Andrew Goodwin 1992

It could be argued that music videos are also:

·    1. Part of the construction of the image of a particular band or performer (part of the    
         process of constructing stardom).
2. A creative artefact of interest in itself.   
     3. The raison d’etre for music channel videos.
     4. Marketing for other media products, for example film.    


     Pop music deals with popular culture - it forms the way people dress, talk, how they wear their hair, and, possibly, other behaviour such as violence and drug use. It is the expression of the here and now, it’s how artists feel about current affairs and issues, and as such can be used as a cultural measure to describe the times: the protest songs of the 1960s, the punk of the late 1970s, hip hop today. When advertisers or movie producers want to create nostalgia for a specific place or era, they immediately go to a pop soundtrack. Popular music can be the essence of the zeitgeist, especially when it is created and performed by artists who have strong political feelings. It can radicalise and empower the youth — and can also be blamed for "the problem with young people nowadays". Pop music has caused numerous moral panics during the past few decades.

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The History of Music Videos

Task: Create your own timeline of the history of music videos. Write more extensively about the key moments in time. Important items to include in the timeline would be:

The Invention of the gramophone

The first film with sound

MGM musicals

Elvis Presley

The first ever UK music TV programme ‘Ready Steady Go’

Top of the Pops

Queen: Bohemian Rapsody

The launch of MTV

Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’

MTV Europe

VH1

Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ by the influential director David Fincher

REM with ‘Everybody Hurts’, directed by Jake Scott, wins best director award

Fatboy Slim with ‘Praise You’ wins best director award for the influential Spike Jonze

EMAP (music magazine publisher) launches 4 music channels – more channels follow (BskyB, Channel U, The Vault and Chart Show FM, Classic FM and nine channels from Viacom who developed MTV and Zee music. .

This amount of channels created fragmentation resulting in MTV getting sponsorship to launch their own programmes.