OCR G325A2 Media Studies
Time allowed – 2 hrs.
Answer Section A: Question 1 – Parts (a) AND (b) and choose ONE question from Section B
Section A: Theoretical Evaluation of Production
In question 1 (a) you need to write about your work for the Foundation Portfolio and Advanced Portfolio units and you may refer to other media production work you have undertaken.
1(a)
Describe the range of creative decisions that you made in post-production and how these decisions made a difference to the final outcomes. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time.
(25 Marks)
One of the key ways in which meaning is encoded, as Stuart Hallargued is through editing as part of post production ensuring a dominant preferred meaning is decoded by audiences. In my Foundation and Advanced Portfolio we had the opportunity to develop post-production skills in audio-visual media – it is important not to attempt a production unless you are competent with the equipment and I believe my creativity markedly improved from my G321 video project through to our G324 TV documentary extract, double page spread article and newspaper advertpromoting the project.
In our Foundation Portfolio I felt I understood the basics of single camera set up and using a Sony HD Camcorder with built in microphonefor the preliminary exercise filmed and edited a continuity task that involved a fellow student opening an office door (we asked permission to use one of the Head of Year’s office), walking towards the camera and sitting down opposite an older actor we used who was sitting behind a desk. The point of the this task was to, during the process of filming and editing evidencematch on action, shot/reverse shot and the 180-degree rule.
I used Apple iMovies on a MAC OS X Lion to edit and I felt that my initial attempts during the preliminary task lacked narrative continuity and even during the main task which was filming and editing the titles and opening of a new thrillerI felt the transitions were a little clumsy. I sought the help of our media technician who enabled me to understand more fluidly how to split clips and edit in additional material but the final outcome lacked the creativity I believe I demonstrated in my Advanced Portfolio. Some aspects of post-production I was pleased with however – I was able to grab footage easily as AVCHD files that had been recorded onto the SD memory card and work with a high ratio of 7:1 footage to edit down to the final, just under 2 minute extract. I used a fade to black at the beginning of the sequence and a black and white colour palette but found I could not manipulate the font to the style of text I was looking for in iMovies. I used the cross dissolve and cross blur to signify the enigmatic conventions of the thriller – characters were introduced mysteriously at the beginning of the sequence and each blurred into the other, deliberately limiting audience understanding.
For my Foundation Portfolio I imported a soundtrack I had obtained copyright permission to use (Angel by Massive Attack) and manipulated the speed of the editing (I slowed it down in some frames to 4 seconds which seemed a long time) to allow for a long, drawn out introduction to characters and location – the whole idea was to present the central protagonist as a car mechanic who is trying to rid himself of his dark past as a drug dealer, with the transitions representing the people in his life who he was trying to walk away from. The problem I found using iMovies was that every time I wanted to make a cut I had to right click, highlight the whole section and split the clip which was time consuming. I had existing thrillers such as Fight Club, Se7en and The Talented Mr Ripley as intertextual references in mind but this did not come though as manifestly as I was hoping for in the final edit.
In my Advanced Portfolio I felt I understood more clearly how to edit to genre conventions and also used a different software editing package, Final Cut Pro X which although more involved than iMovies allowed me to develop my creativity in terms of final outcome. I was able to edit to precision, particularly using the cutting tool not built in to iMovies. I enabled Final Cut Pro X to automatically sort imported footage into shot groups (close ups, medium shots, long shots and two shots) but interestingly wished I had used this software to edit my Foundation Portfolio thriller where I was hoping to experiment with a range of transitions. Some Television documentaries like Panorama often use a range of graphics and transitions to anchor the narrative voice over and talking heads but others like Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends have a simple single camera set up which makes editing again less complicated – ours borrowed from this tradition.
I used the magnetic timeline to edit footage into the investigative narrative storylines about participants’ employment experiences after leaving Media Studies HE University courses – using the magnetic timeline had the advantage of not knocking the other clips and audio out of place at other points in the timeline. As I moved one clip the others moved in sync with it which was an advantage for some of the time – I changed a 30 second section to sepia to reflect the historical passage of time which although needingrendering in Final Cut Pro X (which is one criticism of the software) ensured the rhythm of editingand intercutting was seamless between the interviews and this time period. I ensured that notions of realism were maintained through intercutting with key scenes to support existing footage – I found that editing was one of the ways that we could construct our own dominant preferred meaning through the selection and construction of footage, hence evidencing creative development. By ensuring long takes during interviews e.g. with Media Studies teachers I built tension and edited in zooms during pertinent questions to focus on a particular section of the narrative. Sound levels were crucial as most of the sound was diegetic and in this regard I believe there was more sophisticated narrative continuity apparent than in my Foundation Portfolio projects.
For my Advanced Portfolio ancillary task we constructed a double page spread for a listings magazine and a newspaper advert using Adobe InDesignand edited images and text using Adobe Premiere CS6. I appreciated the fact that, like Final Cut Pro X both packages were industry standard and I also found that my existing understanding of layout and design complimented my existing IT skills – I found both enabled be to be experimental and creative in promoting our Documentary. Within the double page spread I used borders to make the documentary stand out as the main, inset image and edited in a header font from to develop the pages to make them seem more creative, more like fashion or culture magazinessuch asi-D or Dazed and Confused rather than make it seem like it is just a listings magazine e.g.Radio Times.
I use shadows in the newspaper advert and black and white importing a still from the documentary as the main image. I found the crop and lasso tool particularly helpful in transforming the image to size to fit the page and ensuring that the high ratio of photography to text was maintained – analmost reverse convention to double page magazine spreads where I had to ensure the pages were split into appropriate columns to ensure authenticity with a much higher ratio of text. One of the original images I imported in from a photo-shoot I had organised had the back of a car disappearing to the left of the frame and I found the clone tool useful in removing this, painting in the same canvas colour from behind the actor. I ensured the main image bled over the spine of the double page spread, again a convention but that the text did not.
Clear progression has been evidenced from my Foundation into my Advanced Portfolio and the creative decisions I made in post-production were fundamental to encoding meaning for audiences. As David Gauntlett would describe, I am now a ‘Prosumer’ who understands, up to a point the extent of creative development that is required to produce creative media artefacts.
1(b)
Analyse narrative in one of your coursework productions.
(25 Marks)
Narrative is a broad area of study and I intend to analyse my G324 Advanced Portfolio main task, a TV documentary extract focusing my response on narrative structure, encoded narrative themes and issues, applying existing narrative theory and studying narrative enigma and audience responses to my production.
Hand held camera was used for purposes of realism with a narrative voice over pointing audience towards a dominant preferred meaning – many documentaries like ITV’s Exposure have subjective narratives while others claim documentary objectivity. We chose to make our perspective clear for audiences as part of the narrative point of view that Media Studies HE courses are in many cases highly valued where students graduate with a broad ranging media production skillset and a formidable understanding of theory and debate not necessarily reflected by progression on to employment.
The tone of the narrative voice over made intertextual links toexpository television documentaries like 7/7 One day in London and Baka: A Cry from the Rainforest only in its ability to position audiences into a shared reading - intercutting between classroom footage, archive footage and vox pop interviews of unemployed Media Studies graduated helped to achieve this while tight hand held close ups ensured an investigative narrative anchored by long takes. The film extract relied on a certain degree of audience cultural capital to fully understand the narrative but regardless of this, the narrative themes of frustration, alienation and notions of ‘the outsider’ were manifest. Establishing shots set the scene for audiences while slow paced editing built up an investigative narrative whose purpose was to evidence some form of documentary realism – while the purpose of many hybridised documentaries is to entertain, ours was to inform and educate.
In terms of narrative structure our documentary was linear but with a significant asynchronous aspect – use of flashback. We obtained archive footage by permission and intercut this with the vox pops and limited use of graphics. As is common to the genre the narrative was single stranded in that it explored one storyline and the opening sequence set up a classic act 1 in a narrative 3-act structure, or using Todorov’s 4-act structure in that characters, setting and problem (or subject) are introduced early on. It is suggested by our extract that the despite this 3-act structure there will be no obvious resolution and the ending will be open ended, another common convention to the genre. The grainy, realist mise-en-scene authenticates again this deliberate attempt to move away from documentary hybridisation, common to the Reality TV genre but also to Documentary itself to widen audience appeal.
The narrative itself has a number of narrativeenigmasthat although are in contradiction with the above statement, serve to engage audience interest in that we hope they (the audience) want to find out more about this subject, perhaps challenging cultural stereotypes conversely. It is again with this in mind that unlike many mainstream documentaries ours resists the temptation to encode Levi-Strauss’ binary oppositions for purposes of entertainment values. Barthes’ narrative codes however can apply with occasional enigmatic non-diegetic sound supporting the visual images (interviews) applying the semantic code. Symbolically the narrative is asking audiences to challenge their preconceptions of Media Studies and suspend this until narrative closure. Barthes’ Hermeneutic code has been discussed under enigma while culturally there are issues of location, accents and dialogue and dress code that some audiences would interpellate using Althusser’s theoretical ideological framework.
Using Stuart Hall there is the potential for a negotiated or even an oppositional reading to the narrative content of the documentary – the subject potentially academically splits an audience and one reading of our documentary investigation could be very different from another. There has potentially been a deliberate attempt to provoke a reaction from an audience but this could be seen as one of the purposes of the documentary genre and certainly through technical, narrative and symbolic codes I believe we have achieved this.
Section B: Contemporary Media Issues
Contemporary Media Regulation(MediaEdu choice from 6 topics –an alternative exemplar response, extended articles and analysis of Postmodern Media, Collective Media Identity and Media in the Online Age are also available on MediaEdu).
2. “We need stricter regulation.” Discuss.
(50 Marks)
3. To what extent is contemporary media regulation more or less effective than in previous times?
(50 Marks)
To what extent is contemporary media regulation more or less effective than in previous times?
Regulation arguably exists to prevent vulnerable audiencesbecoming victims of passive consumption but the concept of regulation evolves and changes – this reflects changes in technology, societal values, cultural competences and legislation.David Gauntlettin ‘Moving Experiences: Media Effects and Beyond’ (2005) would argue that the effects debate that constantly rages relating to media regulationis far less relevantnow because of the above changes stating: “It is clearly the arguments about violence on screen which tend to dominate the mass media coverage”. There is a past, present and a future that must be referenced and explored in attempting to answer this question on notions of effectiveness and I will be focussing on two media, film and print and specifically on the roles of regulatory bodies the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) and the Press Complaints Commission (PCC). In conflict with Gauntlett’s observations there is a suggestion that a greater media effects debate still exists currently in the media in the guise of obsessive media examination ofthe idea of statutory press regulation, post Leveson.
Digital technology in particular has dramatically changed what we perceive as ‘media’ and how this in turn has opened up debate on the concept of regulation – in previous times, even 10-20 years ago and certainly going back much further to the first acknowledged media artefacts the media was subject to much tighter regulation and censorship. This is to the point that many contemporary films like the Sawfranchise simply would not have received a certificate – we have moved into an era of desensitisation however where audiences are saturated with media from a very early age and are far less shocked or effected (so the argument goes) by what they see and hear. The institutional result of this is that media regulatory bodies like Ofcom, the ASA, BBFC and the PCC have recognised this social and cultural shift and have responded with the concept of deregulation; moving away from the cultural straightjacket of media regulations, the relaxation of codes of practice and the liberalisation of approaches to regulation the media.
Whether this suggests that media regulation is less effective now than in previous times is a related issue – the idea of regulation is different now and this potentially means it is not as effective because it is not as controlling (it is worth referencing cultural regulation here as in some countries regulation is much more liberal, and much more tougher than in the UK). The internet is associated with the concept of cultural regulation as the internet technically has no borders and no global regulatory body; most of the world is free from global censorship and communicating regularly to audiences with billions of pages of content which cannot be subject to traditional gatekeeping mechanisms (parental control yes but only up to a point).Gauntlett of course does not oppose the idea of parental control but opposes the stereotype that regulation seeks to protect young people in society – he would suggest young people are more media literate. Ironically in 2013 ex-Bond Pierce Brosnan spoke out suggesting society is being damaged by violence in films and computer games while Mediawatch-UK campaign against the publication and broadcast of what they see as harmful media content such as violence, profanity, sex, homosexuality and blasphemy. In 2009 their Director John Beyer describing the video game MadWorldstated: “I hope the BBFC will view this with concern and decide it should not be granted a classification………we need to make sure that modern and civilised values take priority rather than killing and maiming people”.
The BBFC has responded to cultural change in the first instance by now publishing new guidelines every 5 years reflecting the speed of this change – there has been a move towards liberalisation in terms of certification but there is an argument that U films are still subject to the same high degree of monitoring and regulation. The organisation itself has streamlined in recent years reflecting change e.g. the regulation of computer and video games is now undertaken by PEGI but they (the BBFC) are still seen as an effective body providing certification for over 700 films yearly receiving a theatrical release, 1500 DVDs and BluRay films and over 2000 trailers. Films are exchanged by audiences in an increasing number or formats including on television, streaming via Netflix and LOVEFILM, on tablets and Smartphones, on consoles such as PS 360 and at cinemas where attendance is still commercially healthy – every format requires a BBFC certificate but Richard Berger argued in 2010 that the BBFC may in the future struggle to survive as an organisation with focus more on video games and interactive media with the potential for the government body Ofcom to take over their role.