Three point lighting

How to make your shots look more professional with three point lighting. 

How to achieve a 'glow' effect in Photoshop.

 'Glow' effect for website images.

Storyboarding your video.

 Another 'Media Insider' video on storyboarding. Don't worry, yours doesn't have to look this sophisticated but it does provide good insight into the purpose of a storyboard. 

Music Video - tips

 This is an excellent video with good advice - especially editing style and also having a combination of narrative and performance.

Gauntlett - Identity

Please  click on the link below to see another video of Gauntlett talking about identity. It's quite long but it's useful in establishing how his theory applies to the exam. 

Gauntlett - Identity

Your mood board needs to have a selection of text (type of font, sizes and colour), colour themes and images that would help explain they style and concept of the magazine you want to make.

You could also use pictures you have taken yourself - this will make your mood board more relevant to what you're doing in your productions.

Coursework (NEA) examples

Click on the above link to see some examples of A Level coursework with moderator's comments (go to page 46 to see an example of a top band response!)

Minecraft - podcast/video

 This video covers a fair amount of what you need to know for the Minecraft section of the exam. It was made by two students.  You can endure or enjoy their 'banter' but the subject content should be helpful! 

Year 12s create their blogs!

Welcome, Year 12 Media Students, to your new blogs. Here are the addresses so we can all find them: https://ellascarfe2004.blogspot.com/ https://salinamedia.blogspot.com/ https://saachisharma18.blogspot.com/

Top Tip: How to embed a YouTube video into your blog

It's easy to embed a YouTube video into your blog, and it's much easier for your readers to then see and click on the link. Here's how:

Just below the video you want to embed from YouTube, click on 'share', then in the popup box, click on 'embed' and copy the long embed code.

Back on your blog, in edit mode, click on the pencil icon in the top left corner and select 'HTML view'.

In HTML view, paste your embed link where you would like the YouTube video to appear.

Finally, click back in that top left corner and select 'compose view'.

Click 'Publish' in the top right corner. You will then see your YouTube video embedded into your blog.

Media Theory Gold - David Gauntlett's Identity Theory

The advantage of one of your set theorists being still alive and working is that he's made a video explaining his own theory for A Level students! Watch Gauntlett's video at:

 

Update your Minecraft Knowledge!

 As Minecraft is one of the case studies on the A Level course, it's good to keep your knowledge updated beyond what's covered in the textbook. Some great articles to help with this:

Minecraft still incredibly popular as sales top 200 million and 126 million play monthly

Minecraft sales have officially topped 200 million, with 126 million people playing the game monthly. Microsoft is detailing the latest sales figures just as Mojang Studios celebrates 11 years since the first Minecraft alpha build was originally released.

Microsoft has also seen a big increase in Minecraft usage during the pandemic. Minecraft saw a 25 percent increase in new players last month and a 40 percent spike in multiplayer sessions.

Minecraft sales previously topped 100 million back in 2016, and the game hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down. A surge in interest from YouTubers and nostalgia-induced playing saw Minecraft remain king of YouTube viewership stats last year.

ONE OF MICROSOFT’S BEST ACQUISITIONS

Microsoft acquired Minecraft maker Mojang nearly six years ago for $2.5 billion, and at the time, it had sold more than 50 million copies across PC, Xbox 360, PS3, and other platforms. It was a smart purchase by Microsoft, and the incredible sales growth and momentum ever since has kept players returning to the game for years.

Minecraft started off life as a bedroom project, distributed initially as a Java applet on a web forum. The game quickly captured the imagination of thousands of gamers who loved the indie game’s concept of allowing players to shape an environment by crafting and building constructions out of blocks. It has spawned a giant community that creates replica objects and YouTube tips on how to play Minecraft that are regularly shared with millions of viewers.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262045/minecraft-sales-monthly-players-statistics-youtube

https://www.creativereview.co.uk/minecraft-coronavirus-lockdown-simulator/

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1cHMC5aKvYE" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Lots of Minecraft news from the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c1038wnx0glt/minecraft

https://www.edie.net/library/New-kids-on-the-block--How-Minecraft-is-shaping-the-next-generation-of-sustainability-workers/6976

http://extraincomeonyoutube.blogspot.com/2018/04/dantdm-worlds-richest-youtuber-bbc-news.html?spref=pi

The Big 6 Media Conglomerates

https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/the-6-companies-that-own-almost-all-media-infographic/

New to Media Studies? Welcome!

Media evolution from Sara Afonso

Week 1: Introduction to the Media

How much do you know about 'the media'. As a digital native, probably more than you think! See this brief history of the media to gain a broad understanding of how you got to being the media-savvy student you are today.

Theorists of the week:
Power and Media Industries – Curran and Seaton 

A political economy approach to the media – arguing that patterns of ownership and control are the most significant factors in how the media operate.

Media industries follow the normal capitalist pattern of increasing concentration of ownership in fewer and fewer hands. This leads to a narrowing of the range of opinions represented and a pursuit of profit at the expense of quality or creativity.

The internet does not represent a rupture with the past in that it does not offer a level playing field for diverse voices to be heard. It is constrained by nationalism and state censorship. News is still controlled by powerful news organisations, who have successfully defended their oligarchy.

Read their book 'Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain' (1997)

Key quotation: "The press and broadcasting exercise a massive power, but it is more than ever a power without responsibility."

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_puttnam_what_happens_when_the_media_s_priority_is_profit

See this TED Talk on Media power and responsibility.



Tasks To Complete on Representation

Representation: thinking points

1. Firstly, think about how you represent yourself! Make a list of all the different identities you have in your life: school pupil, daughter, sister, friend, babysitter, Tesco worker, dog walker... Then draw up a pie chart with each chunk representing how much you think of yourself as that identity.

To make a pie chart that represents your identity, follow these steps:

• Complete the sentence ‘I am…” ten times. 
• Put those in to a basic order of importance. 
• Give each ‘identity’ a score, relative to the others, based on how import this label is to your overall identity. 
• Use this information to make a pie chart. 

You can use the attached Excel sheet to help you make your chart – just put in the details and the numbers and the chart will do the rest.
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/document-preview.aspx?doc_id=122759157

Here's one drawn up for a media studies teacher:






2. Make a collage (either digitally or cutting and pasting pictures) of all the things that represent you as an individual. It might be pictures of hobbies, clothing, activities you enjoy, possessions that mean a lot to you, TV programmes that are important to you, people you admire (such as celebrities or bands)...


3. Think about the way you represent yourself to other people. Make a list of the different ways you communicate with people, particularly online: facebook, twitter, email (school and home), mobile phone - texts, bbm, Skype, letters, Youtube, MySpace, online games... Watch

The Onion's Lost Friendster Video



http://tinyurl.com/y939xk8.

How has communication changed since your parents' generation? Now watch Obama's advice about facebook.

Now watch James Cordon's reaction to Obama's new facebook page:


TASK: Make a presentation on the history of YOUR communications from the time you were a baby, entitled 'Me and the Online Age'. You can include found images and music, with captions.

PRODUCTION TASK:
Make a video which shows one person entering a room through the door, walking across the room, sitting down opposite another person and exchanging a couple of lines of dialogue.

In this video you should demonstrate three key concepts:

• match-on-action
• shot-reverse shot
• the 180 degree rule

Could Covid 19 Kill off Newspapers?

This article was summarised in 'The Week' 16 May 2020

Do newspapers matter in the digital age? TED talk - worth watching!

Coronavirus Lockdown Video

"These unprecedented times" have, naturally, led media-minded people to unleash their creativity. Here's a wonderfully entertaining video made by Jazmin Parker, who used last year's A* A Level Media skills to convince her colleagues working as entertainers at Legoland to dress up in their costumes and contribute to a wonderfully lip-synced video from their homes, set to (of course) "Everything's NOT Awesome" from 'The Lego Movie'.

"We never owned an iPad" - how the Media have changed since your parents grew up...

One of the exercises you do at the beginning of Year 12 is to think about how your own interaction with the Media has developed in your lifetime. The challenge is to make that into a video. Here's a fantastic example of that from someone who grew up in the 1970s and 80s - about the age of your parents...

Made me think about how we would have managed in lockdown 35 years ago...

"We didn't own an iPad"

Current Affairs Magazine Cover and Contents Analysis

NEA 2021 Useful Links

Current Year 12s, Dennis Publishing is the company you will be pitching your new current affairs magazine to for the 2021 coursework brief. Here is the link to the Dennis website:

https://www.dennis.co.uk/about/

and a link to its publication 'The Week':
https://www.dennis.co.uk/brands/current-affairs/the-week/

What Dennis say in their press kit about 'The Week':

The Week is the perfect antidote to modern media’s overkill. Its appeal is completely different from any other mainstream media. It seeks to simplify and explain the world, providing context and clarity to complex issues.

Globally, The Week is one of the fastest growing print magazines of the last decade. The print magazine’s success has been recently matched by the rapid growth of its award winning digital editions and daily news websites, www.theweek.co.uk and www.theweek.com and its digital advertising growth.

• * 74% of our readers do not read a daily newspaper (NRS)
• * Our daily news site, TheWeek.co.uk reaches 2.1m global unique users per month
• * The Week has won a range of awards including Consumer Magazine of the Year in 2012 and 2015
• * The Week Junior, The Week’s first paid for print extension launched in 2015, aimed at smart and curious 8-14 year olds 
• * 50% male, 50% female readership. 69% AB profile. The readership core is aged between 35-54, at the peak of their profession and earning power

A great website Roop found to use:

https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/gb/