It's the final week of the (academic) year! Sorry it's not a week long party, but for the vast majority of you, this week should be WAY more relaxed now your music video has been submitted!
Here are some things you need to complete before you go on holiday...
1 - Aims and intentions first draft
This is this week's BIG TASK. The Aims and Intentions essay is a short but important bit of writing where you explain how you met the restrictions of the brief, and why you made the decisions you made.
You can find everything you need to know about aims and intentions in your coursework workbook, which you worked on when I was off having a baby.
Basically, you need to answer these five questions, so copypaste them in to a word doc and get going:
- How and why will you use media language in your cross-media production? (remember, use the textual analysis toolkit!)
- How and why will you construct representations of individuals, groups and issues/events? (which group were you representing? Why?)
- How will you target your intended audience? (16-25 year olds)
- How will your production conform to its industry context? (How is this music video going to ensure the artist's financial success? How is your music video appropriate to a major label context, for example, does it have high production values and star appeal?)
- How will your cross-media production demonstrate digital convergence? (I'll need to explain this one a bit)
- A cross-media production for a new artist or band in a genre (or sub-genre/ hybrid) of your choice.
- Create an original music video and associated print material to promote the same artist or band.
- You should create a cross-media production for a major record label (such as Atlantic Records or Capitol Records) targeting a wide, mainstream audience of 16-25 year-olds.
- The song you select for your music video cannot have an official music video already
- You will create a new and exciting artist/singer/band/DJ with a clear brand identity
- You should write the A&I essay in the future tense (I'm going to, I shall, etc)
- You can use as many bullet points etc as you want!
Here are some examples of what an aims and intentions essay could look like, BUT remember the spec and brief changes every year, so the instructions are always slightly different! Proceed with caution...
2 - Music video extension
You all will have submitted a music video. But it may or may not be up to your standards. Perhaps you've had issues and need more time. Or maybe you want to dump more crazy effects on it. This is something you may be able to do this week. But please remember: this will be on a case-by-case basis.
3 - End of year self-assessment
This is important too.
You can find the questions you need to answer by clicking here.
All will be explained there. Please make sure you publish this to your blog, it will be checked and used to help write your UCAS reference!
4 - Magazine research
Your next coursework task is to complete a magazine front cover and double page spread. It must be a mainstream magazine, by which I mean "it could conceivably be sold in Tesco". Mainstream has a very broad meaning, so don't worry too much: pretty much every magazine genre is mainstream. But you need to research magazine covers. What do they look like? What conventions do they have? Where does everything go?? This is what you are marked on!
5 - Flatplans
Flatplans are sketched out drafts of a media product, in this case a magazine. What you will quickly learn when making a magazine is that you must be as conventional as possible otherwise your product will not look like a magazine. I cannot stress this enough: you will need to ape every convention of a magazine (creatively and in a beautiful manner...) in order to make sure your magazine actually looks like a magazine and not... somkazine actually looks like a magazine and not... something else...