GCSE MEDIA STUDIES /Unit 4 Responding to a Media Brief Report on the Examination June Version: 1.0

Transcription

1 GCSE MEDIA STUDIES 48104/Unit 4 Responding to a Media Brief Report on the Examination 4810 June 2014 Version: 1.0

2 Further copies of this Report are available from aqa.org.uk Copyright 2014 AQA and its licensors. All rights reserved. AQA retains the copyright on all its publications. However, registered schools/colleges for AQA are permitted to copy material from this booklet for their own internal use, with the following important exception: AQA cannot give permission to schools/colleges to photocopy any material that is acknowledged to a third party even for internal use within the school and college.

3 Overview The Double Award specification is now well embedded in some schools and colleges, although others are still adopting it as new. The moderation team have been pleased to see some excellent student work this year, characterising the best of what we would hope for from this unit independent work centred around the brief and specific target audiences, based firmly in the students local area. There are now many schools and colleges that have a secure understanding of the requirements of the unit. Not all schools and colleges, however, have accessed the advice available to them through a variety of means controlled assessment advisers, Standardisation meetings, the Teacher Guidance notes on e-aqa, previous reports and the specification - and there are still some issues evident. The Brief This year s brief, Watch This Space on behalf of the Regeneration organisation, focused on involving the local community in a regeneration project. The resulting folders showed that although generally students had engaged well with this brief, some students had spent too long deciding on the regeneration project itself, to the detriment of the campaign they needed to build to attract and engage their local community. Teachers should ensure that students get to the ideas behind the campaign itself fairly early in the process, and certainly before they make their presentation to the client. Some schools focused the brief by outlining the building or area to be regenerated, which enabled students to focus on the campaign itself. Others left a choice of area to be regenerated, which sometimes gave students more ownership of the project. The brief gave rise to a real engagement with the students local areas, which was pleasing to see. More students than in previous years used their own imagery in their practical work, and the brief gave students a clear focus for questionnaires for their target audience and for local research. Moving image work was also clearly filmed on location in most cases, as the students were often easily able to travel to the site of their proposed project. Some schools and colleges took whole classes to their proposed regeneration sites, enabling all students to film or photograph on location. As with previous years, the branding of the campaign was an issue. There were some students who did not mention regeneration at all within their media products. Although in many cases the related planning showed how the products linked to a regeneration project, the media products themselves unfortunately could not be said to meet the needs of the brief without this inherent link. If students at least used the name of the organisation within the brief this problem would be overcome. As in previous years, some schools worked with a local client, often from the council. Their feedback to students was, in these cases, well documented and it is obvious that students benefited from it in their later work. It also gave students a very realistic experience within this simulated professional brief. Research, Presentation and Planning Portfolios It is clear that schools and colleges have, on the whole, developed their practice based on the advice they have received, and more schools and colleges are covering the whole range of required aspects of the RPP portfolio. As in previous years, it is worth pointing out that this portfolio is worth 50% of the marks for this unit, and a substantial body of work is expected. Students 3 of 7

4 submitting all of the required aspects submit anything from 20 to 80 pages of work. A wide range of presentation formats is evident, from A4 treasury-tagged pages through A3 sketchbooks to online blogs. It is important that what is submitted to the moderator is exactly what has been marked by the teacher (except for the inclusion of multiple copies of questionnaires), as there have been some cases where the folders appear to have been edited so moderators are not seeing all the work that was produced. It is very difficult to uphold school and college marks where the full range of work is not seen by moderators. The brief includes five bullet points for the RPP, each of which can be teased out further, and most schools and colleges had made sure that their students addressed all of these: your research into the issue of getting people involved in looking after public spaces, including a focus on your local region, area or community pre-production materials, based on your research, detailing information about the content of the campaign, its target audience and how the production work will be organised and scheduled one idea and treatment for each of the two media forms you choose to work in a presentation of your ideas to the client prior to production to gather feedback detailed pre-production work for each of the two linked media products that form your campaign. There was also an increase in the number of schools and colleges encouraging students to divide their submission folders into clearly delineated sections, often with section headings that naturally led to the inclusion of all the required aspects. Having said this, there are still students whose research into the issue is limited to pages printed from the internet with no annotation or other comment to explain what the student has learnt from these. In such cases, the material is also often without citation of its source. An aspect of research that many students would benefit from covering in more depth is the way in which previous professional media campaigns have been constructed to target specific audiences. From such a study students could learn better how to shape their own campaign material. It was pleasing, though, to see the majority of students specifying particular audience groups, and clearly considering these while planning their media products. Almost all schools and colleges now are including evidence of a presentation to the client, although in some cases this is still not being done at the most beneficial point to students. It is intended that students present their ideas for their campaign to their client for discussion, allowing for final amendments to be made before production. This would be a key meeting in a professional context and is included in the unit to emulate industry practice. Too many students are not including evidence of the feedback from the client (who could be the teacher themselves) and therefore not showing how they have responded to that feedback. A very small number of schools and colleges included no evidence of planning for the media products, but a slightly higher number showed very little link between the research and the planning. It should be evident in each student s folder how the research into the issue, the audience and previous campaigns has fed into the ideas being pursued for the student s own campaign. The strongest folders included evidence of a planning process, encompassing several stages of planning for both media products within a linked campaign, from initial ideas to final mock-ups, scripts, storyboards etc. 4 of 7

5 Production In the production section of the unit, there were far fewer schools and colleges submitting work with rubric errors. Most schools and colleges correctly submitted work by all students in two different media forms, or had taken this into account in their marking where an individual student had worked only in one medium. There were a small number of schools and colleges, however, where two different forms of print work were submitted, which does not fit the brief, and so cannot be credited as doing so. There were also a handful of schools and colleges where, although groups had produced two media products, individual students had only worked on one of these. Again, this is in breach of the rubric as each student must work in two distinct media forms. There was an increase this year in good quality website design and radio work, which was very pleasing to see. There was also much more likely to be a strong sense of campaign across the two media forms presented, even where different audiences were targeted in the various products. Some students who create websites, however, still copy and paste some or even most of the content from other websites. Teachers need to be wary of this, and ensure that students are aware of the concept of plagiarism and its possible consequences. Schools and colleges should also remember that websites should be fully functioning, so that they can be viewed on a standard webbrowser with working page links, rather than presented as print-outs. If websites are submitted online rather than on disk, the website address should be given on the candidate record form there is a specific space for this. Much of the radio work heard this year used professional conventions very well, with some students having a lively and realistic presentation technique, and good attention to detail. There were other examples, however, that had a great deal of background noise or little editing, even of obvious mistakes by the presenters. Students should be encouraged to find quiet spaces to record, and to edit their work, using sound beds, jingles and so on. As stated earlier, more moving image work was filmed on location this year, and the quality of some moving image work was excellent, with detailed attention paid to professional codes and conventions. There were some very effective local TV news features and Country File style excerpts. In some other cases, moving image work was hard to recognise as a specific product, often being advert/documentary hybrids. More detailed research earlier in the unit into the conventions of specific products would have paid off at this stage. Print work is usually well handled, and many students used their own imagery as is expected. There are still some students who use all or almost all found images, and such students can rarely be given marks in the higher grade bands as they have contributed little original material to the posters themselves. Evaluation Evaluations have always been handled well in comparison to the other two sections of the unit. Although there are still some students handing in evaluations beyond the word limit, most students are able to work within the word limit specified. In the best evaluations, the students concentrate on evaluating how their campaign meets the needs of the brief and the target audience, rather than on the process they have undertaken from the start of the unit. They have been able to put their work into context, showing how their decisions related to audience needs are vindicated by their research. 5 of 7

6 Presentation of work for moderation Folders are on the whole well organised, with more schools and colleges using section headings, contents pages and/or introductory pages putting the work into context. Such organisation can really assist moderators in finding evidence to support schools and colleges marks. Some schools and colleges submit digital work on individual disks for each student, and some submit such work on shared disks. Both are acceptable, but in both cases, disks need to be well labelled with both school and college and student numbers, and individual files need to be easy to find, labelled by candidate number for every student involved. If joint disks are used, these should be easy to find within the school and college s package of work, rather than being placed within an individual student s folder. Moderators do not necessarily have access to specialist equipment, and media products should not be submitted as files readable only in the originating software. For example videos should be submitted on DVDs playable in domestic DVD players, rather than as.wmv or other hardware- or software-specific formats. Best practice In the best schools and colleges moderators saw: well organised folders engaged and lively work independent thinking and creativity clear analysis of conventions used in professional work detailed research into local places and the needs of local communities presentations of ideas to external clients who then gave useful feedback students adapting their work in light of that feedback the choice of media platforms cogently argued by the students detailed evidence of the planning process from first ideas to final plans media production work that attracts the attention of the target audience the students own imagery used in print and website work attentive use of media conventions a good balance of skills between the two media productions creative use of ICT cogent and focused evaluations students who have clearly engaged with the brief and who have been able to explain their choices and decisions throughout the unit. 6 of 7

7 Mark Ranges and Award of Grades Grade boundaries and cumulative percentage grades are available on the Results Statistics page of the AQA Website. Converting Marks into UMS marks Convert raw marks into Uniform Mark Scale (UMS) marks by using the link below. UMS conversion calculator 7 of 7