Media Paper 1 mock exam - Learner response

1) Type up any feedback in full (you do not need to write mark/grade if you do not wish to).

WWW: Rubana, Fairly strong response for the stereotypes of youth Q on Ghost Town CSP Q.

Your Q7 response is clear and approaches the focus of the Q well. 

EBI: Ensure you link genre to your analysis of the unseen Q1.

Your approach to Q4 (Hall's) Theory Q - does not fully address the Q. Revise textual Poaching. 

Now read through the genuine AQA mark scheme. This is vital as the paper was an official exam paper and therefore the mark scheme tells us a lot about what AQA are expecting us to produce.

2) Write a question-by-question analysis of your performance. For each question, write how many marks you got from the number available and identify any points that you missed by carefully studying the AQA indicative content in the mark scheme:

Additional points: didn't mention enough about genre theory e.g. Neale repetition and difference. Could have added more about use of Daniel Craig (star) and James Bond (character) alongside references to spy/action genre. Could discuss Bond as its own genre due to longevity of franchise and the appeal of this to the watch company. 

Question 1: 

• This advertisement makes heavy use of what Neale describes as ‘instances of repetition’, where familiar tropes and imagery are used to engage with audience expectations around media products. The advert works by explicitly connecting the watch to these well-worn ideas with the notion of ‘difference’ perhaps coming from the unusual foregrounding of the watch in the image which is presumably a new model for the audience to desire.
• Heavy focus on genres of order – the advert depicts the idea of the conflict being generated ‘from without’ and Bond represents the ultimate vanguard of British military intelligence, keeping Britain safe from those who would wish to harm it. 

Question 2: 

• Both products can be seen as simulated versions of reality featuring self-consciously stylised hyper-masculine constructions, presenting the audience (to a greater or lesser extent) with role models. 
• In this way, it can also be regarded as symbolic of a cultural climate where gender norms were represented in the media in terms of a more simplistic ‘heteronormative’ approach – an advert made for men (presumably) by men ( SCORE) 
• this advert was published at the height of the Second Wave of Feminism and can be read as a parodic ‘what if’ in relation to the political demands of the Women’s Liberation Movement. That, alongside the sense of hyper-masculine sexuality (one woman is not enough!) perhaps as a response to the idea that heteronormativity had been undermined by the passing of the Sexual Offences act which decriminalised homosexuality. 

Question 3 :

• for the majority of the video, the band members are shown driving aimlessly (and at times rather recklessly) around the deserted streets of a city, lip-synching to the song lyrics which reference ideas of political alienation and despair, eg ‘can’t go on no more’
• the car is filled with young men who appear to be on some kind of all-night ‘urban safari’ culminating in the images of them throwing stones into a river near a run-down industrial setting; conforming to the negative stereotype that youth ‘lack direction and purpose’
• the rather formal-looking clothes (black ties and suits) worn by some of the band members in the video are emblematic of the Jamaican ska music sub-culture

Question 4 :

• Both texts offer plenty of examples of oppositional relationships which are adding to the ‘performance’ of each text. It is very likely that reference will be made to some of these:

In relation to Score

• The man provides a focus for a number of oppositions: male-female, masculine-feminine, clothed-unclothed, dominant-dependent, top-bottom.
• The setting extends this a little by emphasising the natural-artificial, civilised-wild, controlled-uncontrolled.

In relation to Sephora 

• The film itself offers colour-monochrome, moving image-still image, sound-silence, new stock-archive, past-present.
• The content is founded on Black-White, freedom-constraint, dominance-dependency, straight-kinked, natural-artificial, superficial-profound, individual-collective, untouched-cosmetic, exotic-mundane, professional-home-made, individual-collective.

Question 5.1: 

Question  5.2:  ‘textual poaching’: • memes ,fan fiction ,parody images / video etc.

Question 6 : 

• theatrical trailers of varying lengths were also released with a PG certificate to make them widely available to a range of potential audiences globally
• after the initial theatrical run, the producers of the film were also able to make further profits from sales to streaming services, airlines, TV providers as well as DVD/Blu Ray and download sales directly to consumers - highlighting that a film’s profitability is no longer measured by takings at the box office alone
• newspaper and magazine critic reviews eg the Guardian newspaper review which called the film a ‘buoyant but uneven crowd-pleaser.’ Some of the best reviews with their accompanying star ratings were displayed in the later phase of the trailer and the poster campaigns as ‘proof’ of the film's quality in an attempt to create an economic niche for the product which was ultimately marketed as a ‘quirky, and well-written, independent British film’.

Question 7: 

Newsbeat

• Newsbeat might function as a perfect demonstration of the centrality of the notion of ‘target audience’ for media production. 
• Newsbeat is said to offer a succinct and accessible news service suitably packaged for a ‘young’ audience aged between 16–35 years.
• Newsbeat was originally created to adhere to the BBC’s (rather patrician) ethos that a public service broadcaster has a responsibility to provide a ‘high-quality’ and ‘trustworthy’ news service to all sections of society. The content is now ‘simulcast’ (as a result of budget cuts) to niche audiences listening on Radio 1Xtra and BBC Asian network as well as Radio 1.
• This is still essentially a traditional news product based around the (gatekeeping) model of producers selecting and presenting appropriate content for their audiences.

The War of the Worlds

• This seems a very different kind of relationship with an audience more vaguely ‘targeted’. 
• The War of the Worlds as both a genre piece and a novel adaptation is a very different kind of product: more of a ‘one off’! 
• Its residual audience was typically tuning in to hear what producers had made for them rather than actively participating in the process. 
• That said, audience reaction to the product did show that there was a degree of expectation which was ‘ruptured’.
• There was clearly an audience expectation: people who listened to radio at the time arguably expected to be entertained or informed by content and placed trust in the producers to provide programming for a specific purpose which adhered to certain standards and conventions.

3) Look at Question 4 - a 20-mark essay evaluating Levi-Strauss's binary opposition theory. Write an essay plan for this question using the indicative content in the mark scheme and with enough content to meet the criteria for Level 4 (top level). This will be somewhere between 3-4 well-developed paragraphs plus an introduction answering the question planned in some detail.

Thesis: Judgements and conclusions regarding the validity of Lévi-Strauss’ ideas

Both texts offer plenty of examples of oppositional relationships which are adding to the ‘performance’ of each text. It is very likely that reference will be made to some of these:

Paragraphs:  perceptive and fully supported with detailed reference to specific aspects of the marketing and advertising CSPs.

Score: The man provides a focus for a number of oppositions: male-female, masculine-feminine, clothed-unclothed, dominant-dependent, top-bottom.

Sephora : The content is founded on Black-White, freedom-constraint, dominance-dependency, straight-kinked, natural-artificial, superficial-profound, individual-collective, untouched-cosmetic, exotic-mundane, professional-home-made, individual-collective.

Conclusion: Address how far these contemporary myths  represented in the two products are Constituted  by these binaries. Structuralism as a theoretical approach

• Structuralists suggests that culture can be ‘read’ like a language this is about encoding and decoding, the very process of signification and ultimately the ‘practice’ of ideology
• Progress up the mark scheme is NOT achieved by spotting more clashing pairs but by exploring the degree to which they define the texture of the product as it becomes text (‘text’ comes from a word meaning something woven)
• This is about meaning-making and offers a clear range of levels of response from simple lists to sophisticated explorations of culture itself.

4) Based on the whole of your Paper 1 learner response, plan FIVE topics / concepts / CSPs / theories that you will prioritise in your summer exam Media revision timetable.

Levi Strauss , terminology ( textual poaching), Curran and Seaton.