Introductory Lessons

We had our first Advanced Level Media Studies class on Thursday and during that 3 hour class we discussed our major problems with relevance to the working environment of our class in Advanced Subsidiary Level and how it needs improvement and seriousness during this year. We talked about how our work was affected adversely due to time constraints which will be continuing this year too, however, with much efforts, we decided to come up with a timeline and work through it so that our time constraints are dealt with along our work that was cut out for us. We discussed our teams of two and how we all, as a team, will be fulfilling the requirements of our media product. Our media product requires four tools i.e research, writing, visuals and technical.The research dealt with a proper plan and structure of what, how and why we will be doing our media product and how did we select our media brief. Writing requires a a proper textual analysis and evaluation and the planning of how we will be going about our product. If you have good writing skills, you know exactly how you will be representing your media production process, its deconstruction and its reconstruction. Visuals was based purely on how we make our media product and how we use our creativity, our imagination and observations to install appropriate camera angles, shots, movements, effects, signifiers and how we iconograph it in terms of clothes, location, setting, lighting, props, etc to give it the desired effect. Lastly, technical knowledge was based on a proper understanding and usage of the various technological equipment and software available to us in order to add the desired effects to our media product. We all, as a class, were asked to rate ourselves with relevance to these four tools from a rank of 1-10 so that we could help ourselves choose the best person to coordinate our strengths with. I ranked myself as:
Research: 7
Writing: 7
Visuals: 5
Technical: 5
Therefore, I needed somebody who was good at technical knowledge and at visualising. The partner I chose was Dua Malik and we both chose each other out of mutual consent because while her strong point was visualising and the technical knowledge, mine was researching and writing textual analysis. While I could provide her with the written material and the various examples and applications and information required, she could decide how to convey it through the media tools available.

In my second Media Studies class, I learnt blogging. I understood the organisation of a blog and how we can make our blogs look neat and understandable for the readers. We researched several different media studies blogs and studied various works of students and realised how much of an attention blogs alone require. Secondly, we were asked to come up with workable ideas and were asked to decide our media products within our pairs as this will be a teamwork based product. Me and my partner, Dua, decided to do either a short film or a documentary depending upon our ideas and how we can execute them with a good background topic in mind. We were able to come up with a short film idea based on arts and how it affects a girl. Our story revolved around a passionate artist who is a student and is appreciated in terms of her paintings around the school. At a certain point in time, the girl starts getting too much of an appreciation and the teacher starts feeling insecure and to overcome this emotion she starts favouring other  girls over her and pretends to hate the girl's artwork on purpose and rewards those of her classmates who used to be uncompetitive and not so good when compared to the girls hard work. This girl, after noticing and having enough of her teacher, starts feeling demotivated and starts believing that she is not good enough at what she wants to do in the future. Her passion starts fading and so does her artwork. Her work looses quality and this demotivation leads to the downfall of what was to be her career and the road to her success. We discussed this idea with our teacher and he wanted us to think deeper as arts and downfalls related to it are always common ideas used by many students, previously. We have, now, been asked to come up with something more original, enthusing and interesting. So till the next class we still have some time to come up with something better and more to the point of  where our teacher wants us to be.