Media Studies Details

The WJEC syllabus we use encourages creative work to enable you to develop your knowledge and understanding of the media through your own productions and to develop your own production skills. At AS, you could be asked to plan and to make a horror film trailer, or a new magazine front cover and feature article, a CD or music video. The AS exam will require you to demonstrate skills of textual analysis from an unseen moving image or print extract; to analyse how people and issues are represented in the media and to explore the values, attitudes and beliefs that underpin them; to think about how texts are targeted at different audiences, to analyse the pleasures of the text and to examine how different people may respond to the same text in different ways. For coursework at A Level you will produce three independent pieces of work, again worth 50%. For example, you may choose to research the genre of TV crime drama, and then you write an essay on your findings: what are the generic conventions of TV crime drama? You then apply your findings in a short extract of a new TV Crime Drama, that you write, film and edit yourself and write and evaluation of the completed artefact. The A Level exam will be based on three essays on three different media industries and their products - for example, British film, television and the music industry.