Approaching Question 1a

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 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 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 do you understand by postproduction in your work

This one, Ill 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.

Creativity
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.

real media conventions

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.

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!

How to prepare for question 1b

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 herehow 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 youve 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 films 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 films 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, heres 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 audiencewhat 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:

Media Language
A lot of people have assumed this is going to be the most difficult concept to apply, but I dont 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, Id 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

representation
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?

 paragraph 1 Intro: which of your projects are you going to write about? briefly describe it paragraph 2: what are some of the key features of the concept you are being asked to apply? maybe outline some of the theories briefly paragraph 3: start to apply the concept, making close reference to your production paragraph 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 paragrpah 5; conclusion

collective identity
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

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 presentcontemporary 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.