Article Draft 1

This is the first draft of my article for the newspaper.

Taking any exam can be a stressful experience. This article will give you an idea of what the exam is about and how you might go about answering it. The exam is split into two sections. The first half being Theoretical Evaluation of Production. The second half is Contemporary Media Issues. Each section is worth fifty marks, with the total number of one hundred marks being available to you in the exam.

The exam lasts two hours, so it is advised you spend at least one hour on each section. If you overrun in the first hour, you must start the second section. If you finish that early, go back to your first question and finish it off. It has been known to happen that you spend the entirety of your time working on just the one section and have no time for the second section. This means that the number of marks you can get is fifty, only half the number of marks available to you.

Theoretical Evaluation of Production

For the first part of the exam, you will need to write about a project you have worked on. This could be about your thriller opening sequence, short film, music magazine, your A2 music video, film trailer or just a project you may have worked on in the past. Remember, it needs to be something you can write about at length, so it’s not a wise idea to write about a happy slapping video you made back when you were twelve.

There are a range of different topics that could come up in the exam. They are as follows:

1) Digital Technology -
2) Creativity -
3) Research and planning - The original concept and the ideas you come up with.
4) Post-production - From the edit to the final cut of your work.
5) Using conventions from real media texts -

The exam question used in the January 2010 paper, is as follows:
‘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.’ The total number of marks available to you in this question are twenty-five, a quarter of the final marks.

For this question, you will need to write about a number of things. I am doing this in relation to the thriller opening sequence. Firstly:

1) Your original idea – what was it?
2) Thriller Opening Sequences – Did you analayse different thriller opening sequences? What were their typical conventions?
3) Different sources of inspiration – what films, TV programmes, books or games did you look at that inspired you? What ideas did they give you?
4) How your idea developed from this – did it stay the same or did you change it after this?
5) How did you plan the project? – from choosing the correct theme, location, storyboarding, risk assessment
6) You’ll need an overall conclusion linking all these different elements together – how do you think your skills progressed over time?

For the second part of the question, there will be a question regarding your piece of work. They could be part of the following topics:

1) Genre
2) Narrative - The story pushing your work forward
3) Representation
4) Audience
5) Media language

The question that came up in the January exam paper is as follows: ‘Analyse media representation in one of your coursework productions.’ Again, I will use the thriller opening sequence as a starting point on answering this question.

What are the gender representations in your work? Are the characters entirely male or female? In which way are these characters portrayed as week or strong? Also, what are the social representations in your work? Are the characters Scene, Emo or Chav? How do they fit in with today’s society? Are they stereotypical with any clear characteristics or motives? Those are the sort of things you need to think about.

Contemporary Media Issues

By the time you reach this section in the exam, you will be halfway through it.