Check out this great blog with advice from the chief examiner!

http://petesmediablog.blogspot.com/

Good Luck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Good luck with the exams everybody
Come and see Mr Thornton, Mr Adams, Miss Martin or myself when on study leave for any help!

Mr Oswick

The Matrix detailed analysis

http://postmoderndays.blogspot.com/2005/04/baudrillard-and-matrix-trilogy.html

Postmodern Concepts - Year 13

OCR Website

Please check link below for examiner's reports, student exemplar essays etc:

http://www.ocr.org.uk/qualifications/type/gce/amlw/media_studies/documents/index.html

Section B Institutions and Audiences Key Areas

Section B: Institutions and Audiences

Candidates should be prepared to understand and discuss the processes of production, distribution, marketing and exchange as they relate to contemporary media institutions, as well as the nature of audience consumption and the relationships between audiences and institutions. In addition, candidates should be familiar with:
• the issues raised by media ownership in contemporary media practice
• the importance of cross media convergence and synergy in production, distribution and marketing
• the technologies that have been introduced in recent years at the levels of production, distribution, marketing and exchange
• the significance of proliferation in hardware and content for institutions and audiences
• the importance of technological convergence for institutions and audiences
• the issues raised in the targeting of national and local audiences (specifically, British) by international or global institutions
• the ways in which the candidates’ own experiences of media consumption illustrate wider patterns and trends of audience behaviour

This unit should be approached through contemporary examples in the form of case studies based upon one of the specified media areas. Examples may include the following:

Film
A study of a specific studio or production company within a contemporary film industry that targets a British audience (eg Hollywood, Bollywood, UK film), including its patterns of production, distribution, exhibition and consumption by audiences. This should be accompanied by study of contemporary film distribution practices (digital cinemas, DVD, HD-DVD, downloads, etc) and their impact upon production, marketing and consumption.




Revise:
Film Production
Distribution
Exhibition
Consumption
Working Title and The Boat That Rocked
Film 4 and Slumdog Millionaire
Warner Bros and The Dark Knight
20th Century Fox and Avatar
3D And Impact
IMAX Technology
HD And Impact
DVD And Impact
BluRay/BD Live And Impact
Hardware Proliferation
Viral Marketing
Cross Media Convergence
Technological Convergence
Synergy
Piracy
DSN (Digital Screen Network)
UK Film Council
UK and Global Audience Targeting
Audience Patterns (Cinema etc)
British Film Industry
Hollywood Film Industry

January 2009 Exam Question

Discuss the ways in which media products are produced and distributed to audiences, within a media area, which you have studied.
Candidates must choose to focus on one of the following media areas though you may make reference to other media where relevant to your answer.
• Film
• Music
• Newspapers
• Radio
• Magazines
• Video games

June 2009 Exam Question

How important is technological convergence for institutions and audiences within a media area which you have studied?

Candidates focus on ONE of the following media areas though you may make reference to other media where relevant to your answer.
• Film
• Music
• Newspapers
• Radio
• Magazines
• Video games

January 2010 Exam Question

“Media production is dominated by global institutions, which sell their products and services to national audiences”. To what extent do you agree with this statement?
Candidate focus on one of the following media areas, though they may make reference to other media areas, which they have studied:
• Film
• Music
• Newspapers
• Radio
• Magazines
• Video Games

Key TV Drama Vocabulary Year 12

Candidates should be prepared to analyse and discuss the following: technical aspects of the language and conventions of the moving image medium, in relation to the unseen moving image extract, as appropriate to TV Drama and the extract specified, in order to discuss the sequence’s representation of individuals, groups, events or places:

Camera Shots, Angle, Movement and Composition
• Shots: establishing shot, master shot, close-up, mid-shot, long shot, wide shot, two-shot, aerial shot, point of view shot, over the shoulder shot, and variations of these.
• Angle: high angle, low angle, canted angle.
• Movement: pan, tilt, track, dolly, crane, steadicam, hand-held, zoom, reverse zoom.
• Composition: framing, rule of thirds, depth of field – deep and shallow focus, focus pulls.
Editing
Includes transition of image and sound – continuity and non-continuity systems.
• Cutting: shot/reverse shot, eyeline match, graphic match, action match, jump cut, crosscutting, parallel editing, cutaway; insert.
• Other transitions, dissolve, fade-in, fade-out, wipe, superimposition, long take, short take, slow motion, ellipsis and expansion of time, post-production, visual effects.
Sound
• Diegetic and non-diegetic sound; synchronous/asynchronous sound; sound effects; sound motif, sound bridge, dialogue, voiceover, mode of address/direct address, sound mixing, sound perspective.
• Soundtrack: score, incidental music, themes and stings, ambient sound.
Mise-en-Scène
• Production design: location, studio, set design, costume and make-up, properties.
• Lighting; colour design.

Postmodernism Key Areas Year 13

Key Theorists
Francois Lyotard: A polyphony of voices with none worth more than any other (Meta narratives etc)
Jean Baudrillard: Reality has been replaced with simulated worlds, or simulacra
Reception theory: (Dominant, Negotiated, Oppositional)

Key Terminology
Dystopia: A pessimistic, dysfunctional view of a world gone wrong
Hyperreality: A sense of reality constructed by simulated environments (theme parks, Avatar etc)
Simulacra: Any stage where the distinction between reality and its image has been broken down
Hybrid Genre: A cross between two or more film genres
Immersion: A more realistic experience in consuming media e.g. 3D films
Meta narratives: Big stories or big debates that postmodernists argue have little meaning in a personal and fragmented world
Mini narratives: Small practices, storylines, events
Kitsch: An inferior or tasteless copy of a text of recognised value
Fragmented Identity: Fixed gender roles are more fluid and people are changeable
Decentred texts: The margins of a text are more important than the centre.
Retro: Culturally outdated but retro style has become fashionable
Simulated realty: (e.g. avatars)
Eclecticism: A wide range of influences, contributions and techniques.
Intertextuality: An author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text.
Parody: A satirical imitation of a text.
Pastiche: A media text made up of pieces of other texts or imitation of other styles.
Homage: Where a director pays tribute to another by including images, scenes or stylistic features as an acknowledgement of their influence or importance
Bricolage: A technique where works are constructed from various materials available.
Acts against modernism: Postmodernism embodies scepticism towards the ideas and ideals of the modern era, especially the ideas of progress, objectivity, reason, certainty, personal identity and grand narrative.
Nostalgic: Celebrates the past and its glory.
Narcissistic: Fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity.
Active audience: The assertion that meaning and experience can only be created by the individual, and cannot be made objective by an author or narrator. Assumes an intelligent and active audience.
Hyper-conscious: Aware of itself.

Film
Bladerunner (1982)
The Matrix (1999)
Pleasantville (1998)
Inglorious Basterds (2009)
Scream (1996)
Scary Movie (2000)
Kill Bill (2003)

TV
Top Gear (1977 – present)
Reality TV (Big Brother, Nick and Jessica, The Hills, The Family)
The Office (2001 – 2005)
Extras (2005 – 2007)
The Mighty Boosh (1998 – present)
Life on Mars (2006 – 2007)
Doctor Who (1963 – present)

General Postmodern Issues
The internet (Media 2.0)
Social Networking (Facebook, Myspace)
Youtube
Video games (Grand Theft Auto etc)
Advertising (Cadbury’s Gorilla etc)
Digital renaissance
Personal experiences and response is vital

Key Exam Areas
What are the different versions of post-modernism (historical period, style, theoretical approach)?

What are the arguments for and against understanding some forms of media as post-modern?

How do post-modern media texts challenge traditional text-reader relations and the concept of representation?

In what ways do media audiences and industries operate differently in a post-modern world?

January 2010 Questions
• What is meant by ‘postmodern media’?
Or
• Explain why the idea of ‘postmodern media’ might be considered controversial.

Slumdog article

Freedom from Hollywood – Slumdog Millionaire (Mediamag)

Tiny budget, unknown cast, no Americans – and massive critical, commercial and Oscar success. Austin McHale explains how Slumdog Millionaire thrived on its freedom from Hollywood.
London. February. Slumdog Millionaire has just swooped through the grey slush of the West End in a blaze of colour and sound to scoop seven BAFTA awards, including Best Film and Best Director and an extraordinary eight Oscars. Yet this film does not fit the template of Hollywood success. There are no American accents, few special effects and no big stars. It is the antithesis of glamour – a climactic sequence involves the hero, a Mumbai slum kid, diving through a cesspit and emerging covered in very realistic excrement (in fact peanut butter and chocolate), all to get a signed photograph of a Bollywood actor. Yet it has achieved the Holy Grail of cinema – made cheaply, it appeals to many different audiences, has become a critical and popular success and is set to make huge profits. How has a low budget British film reconciled these opposites without selling its soul? Perhaps our old friend MIGRAIN, inducer of headaches to generations of Media Students, can offer us a way in.
Media language
The media language of the film is indicated in the poster, a kaleidoscope of energy and colour. Against an impressionistic cityscape of blurred neon lighting, a boy and a girl burst through the darkness, both in motion but facing opposite ways. Anxiety but also hope is clear in their tense expressions. The lettering of the title is ragged, uneven, lowercase, progressing from the red of danger to the yellow of hope. In the foreground is the familiar graphic design of a question from the quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? doubling as the tag line, ‘What does it take to find a lost love?’. The theme and narrative are outlined, the fragmented urban, visual style powerfully established.
The cinematography of the film is unusual for an Oscar contender. The Mumbai street scenes are filmed with a kinetic energy and a gritty realism which recalls documentary rather than Hollywood – or Bollywood – studio glamour. This look is achieved through the use of small, very manoeuvrable digital video cameras and on occasion the stuttering images of still cameras at 11 frames per second, far slower than normal film camera speed. This key artistic decision was to some extent forced on the film crew. The influence of mainstream Indian cinema is so pervasive in Mumbai that filming in the slums with traditional large cameras would have encouraged stylised Bollywood moves rather than realistic behaviour, so the film-makers had to disguise themselves as tourists and film unobserved to achieve the naturalism that they wanted.
Sound – non-Bollywood style
Another significant aspect of media language is sound, 70% of the impact of a film according to director Danny Boyle. As with visual language, creative decisions in this area involved a radical departure from the Bollywood norm. Bollywood films are made largely on sound stages, with music and ambient noise dubbed on at a later stage, because Mumbai streets are so loud. However, to Danny Boyle Mumbai street sounds were essential signifiers of the slums, so the diegetic sounds stayed. The non-diegetic musical score was just as important, aiming at a fusion of styles to engage Western as well as Indian audiences. The basic soundtrack was composed by the famous Bollywood musician A.R. Rahman, but it was overlaid by an urban Hip-Hop and Rap track prominently featuring the British Sri-Lankan MIA, reflecting the eclectic ‘masala’ mixture both of Mumbai and of Western cities.
Institutional perspectives
Institutionally Slumdog Millionaire is a fascinating case study. It was made for 13 million dollars, a tiny sum compared with the 167 million dollars of Oscar rival The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, largely raised via the French and British production companies Pathé and Film4. For a film with an almost entirely Indian cast and no stars apart from the Bollywood Indian actor Anil Kapoor, even this budget would have been a challenge to raise without Boyle’s track record as the director of a series of low budget, profitable and critically successful films such as Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Millions. Casting threw up an unusual problem. Boyle was committed to casting locally, but every actor with Bollywood ambitions was implausibly ‘buff’ for a slumdog, having worked out every day in the approved Bollywood manner. Boyle discussed this with his 17-year-old daughter one evening and received the following piece of succinct advice, ‘If you want a loser, have a look at Skins!’ Hence the inspired casting of Dev Patel, who can project vulnerability as well as determination, and whose slow, shy smile is one of the delights of the film.
Slumdog Millionaire, like all Danny Boyle’s films, is difficult to pigeonhole in generic terms. It is a hybrid of gritty realism and aspiration, of drama documentary and love story. ‘Feelgood’, with its connotations of cliché and stereotype, is a description understandably resisted by Boyle, but despite the poverty, the child torture and the prostitution, it is indisputably an uplifting film.
Genre connections
Slumdog Millionaire’s representation of Mumbai is starkly different from two familiar though opposite stereotypes. One is the glamorous dreamworld of Bollywood, in which no-one is poor (for long, at least) and in which characters more likely to be seen dancing on a Swiss mountain or a Scottish glen than in a Mumbai railway station. The other is the English tabloid newspaper nightmare of teeming, unsanitary ghettoes populated by passive recipients of Western charity, where the only growth industries are begging, prostitution and terrorism. By contrast the slumdogs of the film are resourceful, energetic and independent citizens of one of the world’s great cities – 20 million and growing. This positive ideology, that poverty and apathy can be conquered by communal celebration, is exemplified in the film’s final sequence. As the credits roll, Dev Patel and co-star Frieda Pinto are joined by what appears to be the whole of Mumbai in an exuberant dance number. The location is the city’s main railway station, the Chapatri Shivaji Terminus, host to a thriving sub-culture of recent rural immigrants, the main artery of Mumbai. It was also one of the sites of a murderous terrorist attack last November which made headlines internationally. Despite the film sequence being shot many months before, it is being seen in India as a positive counterbalance to the images of a burning, blood-soaked Mumbai which led the TV news bulletins worldwide.
Audience and ideology
This iconic sequence appeals to many different audiences. It can be seen as the film’s one major concession to Bollywood, an explosion of sound and spectacle which is likely to attract a mainstream Indian audience. The energy of the youthful dancers, the frequent close-ups of the familiar face of Dev Patel and the Hip-Hop/Bollywood fusion of the soundtrack will hold a Western audience, particularly the sought-after demographic of 16-25 with its high level of disposable income. Finally the aspirational ideology, the community’s refusal to be defined by the squalor of the slums, their commitment to celebration, growth and change, intersects with the narrative arc of classic Hollywood cinema, in which seemingly impossible obstacles are overcome in order to fulfil a dream. This is attractive to mainstream Western media outlets.
Narrative structure
This dream, however, is not the traditional American Dream. Comfort and wealth are apparently promised by the film’s narrative structure, cleverly built around the cumulative questions of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? which, remarkably, all relate to incidents in Jamal Malik’s (Dev Patel’s) life. However, this apparent endorsement of a crudely materialist ideology is skilfully undercut, both by the corruption of Anil Kapoor’s quizmaster and by Jamal’s motivation for success, which it would be unfair to reveal. It can in fact be read as a sly critique of the system of values in our status-obsessed society, which prioritises uncontextualised academic knowledge over the real human experience acquired painfully by Jamal in the slums of Mumbai.
Much publicity has recently been given to more negative views of the film. It has been accused of poverty porn, implying that the harsh life of the slums is merely a picturesque travelogue catering for Western audiences, who remain distanced from and uninvolved in the events they see. The slum dwellers, it is said, are patronised and stereotyped. Most bizarrely, Slumdog Millionaire is said to be a derogatory term implying that Mumbai citizens are less than human, when Danny Boyle’s preferred meaning is clearly intended to be an echo of ‘underdog’, evoking connotations of bravery, resilience and moral justification. To me, these spectacular misreadings are travesties of the film’s ideological standpoints. Indeed, cynical observers have seen them as evidence of a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign, orchestrated by unscrupulous publicists of rival films in the run-up to the Oscars. Large amounts of money have been invested, for example, in the effects-laden Brangelina vehicle The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (five years in the making and 13 times the cost of Slumdog Millionaire), and of course the best short-cut to recouping costs and making a sizeable profit is via Oscar success. Why should a cheap British film, entirely shot in India without one American star, win a competition devised by Hollywood studios for Hollywood studios? Perhaps for the same reason that a Mumbai ‘charwallah’ (teaboy) from the slums should win a competition devised by the Indian elite for the Indian elite – to expose prejudice and celebrate our common humanity. After the film’s spectacular success at the Oscars, we now know that the slumdog can become a millionaire twice over.

Media Studies OCR
Therfield School
Centre: 64145
All students have preliminary tasks, main tasks and ancillary tasks on their blogs. Some students have included copies of main tasks on discs included. Links to each blog below and on the latest post on the following central blog:
http://therfieldmediastudies.blogspot.com

Spec/Unit: G321/01 - Foundation Portfolio in Media
Blog addresses:
4178; SHAW, ALANA MARIE
http://hannahlauraalana.blogspot.com
4053; DAVISON, MATT JOHN FREDERICK
http://mattdsmedia.blogspot.com
4138; MILLS, ALEC ROBERT GEORGE
http://stephlucy.blogspot.com
4025; BOSWELL, THOMAS JAMES SEATON
http://tomboswell123.blogspot.com
4205; WHITEHEAD, STEPHANIE CHRISTINA
http://stephlucy.blogspot.com
4185; STEWART, AMY LOUISE
http://amymediawork.blogspot.com
4099; HORLEY, BENJAMIN NICHOLAS
http://ben-mcdb.blogspot.com
4027; BOUCHARD, DAVID JOHN
http://racingtycoon12992.blogspot.com
4167; REES-BUTT, ROHAN GEOFFREY KENNETH
http://media-is-cool.blogspot.com
4200; WAY, LAURA-JAYNE REBECCA
http://hannahlauraalana.blogspot.com

Spec/Unit: G324/01 - Advanced Portfolio in Media
Blog addresses:
3218; STOCK, NICOLA ANNE
http://rlnh.blogspot.com
3072; CHAPMAN DE ALMEIDA, JOSHUA STEPHEN
http://darkemodouche.blogspot.com
3110; HARROP, MATTHEW PAUL
http://kt22-productions.blogspot.com
3266; STAPLEHURST, RUBY RAE
http://abbiegregnileshruby.blogspot.com
3066; COX, ALEXANDER JAMES
http://kt22-productions.blogspot.com
3051; CLARK, ANDREW JAMES
http://mitpatarpot.blogspot.com
3002; ALLEN, NAOMI RUTH
http://nemi-nem.blogspot.com/
3172; PATEL, NILESH JAMES
http://abbiegregnileshruby.blogspot.com
3113; HAWKINS, ABBIE LOUISE
http://abbiegregnileshruby.blogspot.com
3170; PATEL, JINESH
http://mitpatarpot.blogspot.com