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Year 13D Session log: September
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Med 5: Independent Research
As a library re-orientation exercise, the class pored over shelves and books today to compile challenging quiz questions. The quiz will follow... |
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Med 4 Genre: Dracula
We opened by discovering that everyone in the class had a shared vision of who Dracula is and where he lives, even though few had ever seen a Dracula film. This was a useful prelude to screening the film, as it established the power of this film in particular to lay down a generic template.
We then screened Tod Browning's Dracula (1931). |
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Homework: |
Read the extract from Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, and the background mythology on the character. |
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Med 4: Representation and You(th)
The class had fun putting words in the mouths of un-named teenagers in various poses (from a newspaper article), using what we ahd revised about non-verbal communication and semiotics. We then considered rival representations of a day in the life of a university student, and the class wrote their own. These two activities generated a useful discussion about the purposes of representations, where they come from and who they are for. I took photographs of the class as they constructed their own representations using body language, and we will return to those in a future class.
In the second part of the lesson I introduced Richard Dyer's Typography of Representation. |
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Homework: |
- Read and study the newspaper article you were given in class, and identify positive and negative representations within. Semiotically, how are these created, and by whom?
- Use the four main points of Dyer's Typography to analyse the This Is My Youth supplement.
- Re-read the AS booklet on Representation.
DUE: Friday September 21 |
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Independent Essay: Med 5
In an unexciting but necessary session, I reviewed the key elements of a successful Med 5 essay with the class and answered their questions, |
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Homework: |
Devise two or three alternative possible questions to address in a Med 5 essay.
DUE: Tuesday September 25 |
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Med 4: What is Genre
We reintroduced ourselves to the concept of Genre today, refreshing our memories about the Repertoire of Elements (and adding one: style) and exploring other criteria we can use to categorise films. We considered, for example, Andrew Collins' classification of Films to suit your Mood, and students added their own suggestions to his list.
Finally we had some fun with narratives in genre: each pair of students used a broad story outline to pitch their own film proposal based on a genre I specified. This made it clear that a) students could apply and interpret the repertoire of elements with confidence and b) stock narrative scenarios can be applied to almost any genre! |
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Homework: |
Read and annotate the introduction to genre theory, What is Genre?, and write your own bullet-point summary of the key points.
Analyse the opening few minutes of a film of your choice and explore how its genre is establised (500 words).
Make sure you use the appropriate terminology - think genre and media language especially. Use your AS notes to help you.
DUE: Monday September 17 |
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What is Representation?
Although we've studied Representation before, as a Key Concept, this year we will be studying it as a topic. Today we began with a revision/re-cap on Semiotics, discussing the contributions that Ferdinand Saussure, Roland Barthes and CS Peirce made to our understanding of the linguistic construction of meaning. We applied some of what we had learned to an image of four women, which turned out to offer an unexpcted representation. And we defined Mediation as " |
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Homework: |
Read pages 5-13 and 131-132 of Lacey's Image and Representation. Then, taking a single page from one newspaper, select one person and write a short paragraph on how they are being represented. Consider signs, codes and non-verbal cues in your response.
DUE: Friday Sept 14 |
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