This series of podcasts on radio and radio production is in three parts: Levels One, Two & Three. Level One is the most basic and Level Three is the most complex. This is Level One and is the simplest. Annette Rizzo is a professional voice artist and agent. In the 25 years she’s spent in the industry she has worked in the following capacities:

• Lecturer at University of Winchester
• Freelance Producer
• Presenter
• Reporter at BBC, UK Commercial Radio...

The catch word for the digital world of new media is convergence. Convergence is the coming together of everything digital.

Definition

Any digital media can be transmitted by any suitable digital medium, such as a wifi broadband connection or mobile phone, so that all communications, text, audio, graphics, video, and broadcasting can be accessed instantly.

The iPhone, Blackberry or computer becomes a two-way communications module with access...

Brief Definition:

Image analysis is the way in which an audience ‘reads’ the meaning of a media text image.

One of the ways image analysis works is to look for meaning through signs and symbols suggested by the way a scene is set up and filmed.

Signs and symbols in media texts are polysemic which means they are open to many interpretations. The different possible meanings in media texts depend on two things. The first is the way the...

Finally in Year One you should start the class thinking about the topic for the B question in the exam. The current topic is TV comedy.

Individuals need to make their own study of this topic depending on their own consumption of the many varieties of TV comedy, so that they have a thorough knowledge of at least two different texts and preferably three. Gervais in Extras might be a way of looking at postmodern comedy

ACTIVITIES

INSTITUTIONS...

Documentary means different things to different people. A documentary aims to be concerned with truthful reporting. Documentaries have a reputation for being serious, reliable and objective in their reporting, with a commitment to truthfulness. There are documentary programmes with elements of comedy, or drama, and the modern documentary uses elements from entertainment programming to attract an audience and be entertaining.

The British...

In Media Studies we see iconography as part of genre, and particularly film genre. Students need to know the term and how it is used. It is quite a complex concept, that informs image analysis and the deconstruction of genre. Iconography originates from the study of art.

In Europe in the15th & 16th centuries artists creating work of a Christian nature would look up reference books to check the colours, composition, hand gestures, poses and...

What is it?

The concept is one which has become increasingly useful in the analysis and understanding of contemporary media culture but unfortunately is not a simple one to define.

It is at once a sociological condition which it is argued that the western world has moved in to over the last 30 years or so, a way of working (i.e. we can talk of a pomo film/book/work of art, etc.) and a set of philosophical ideas about the nature of reality; and...

Tell the world

What do you want to tell the world? It’s a good idea to have something you want to talk about or discuss with the world. This is not the frustration you get on the bus when you have to stand all the way again, and you really do want to tell someone something. That could make a reasonable item for a short comedy sketch, but it will not make a film or television programme. You may just want to tell the world that you can write...

Media Studies isn’t easy to describe. It’s a living concept that continues to change just as technology and our experience with technology change. The purpose of Media Studies is to provide audiences with access to information no matter how it is experienced and allow people to adopt diverse critical positions.

Media Studies is desirable because its curriculum is inclusive; it recognises that the form of delivery as well as the content to be...

Why Radio?

Radio is a great medium to work in. Radio is a great way to listen to music, and radio is a great friend on a long journey or just at home.

At one time radio was the only way to hear the latest pop songs, and albums and to keep up to date with the top selling singles in the charts.

Before music television (MTV began in America on August 1st 1981) young people listened to the radio, and bought singles after they had heard them on...

Talent, Technology And Teenagers

The Story of British Pop Music

British popular music is a great success story both as a business and as a cultural enterprise.

In the last half of the twentieth century British talent became the soundtrack to the lives of young people throughout the world.

It’s extraordinary that rock n’roll, blues, rhythm and blues, dance music and even the concept of the 3 minute popular song emerged from largely black...

The new Government report Digital Britain would make a good starting point for a case study on the impact of digital media. The report provides recommendations to promote and protect talent and innovation in British creative industries, to modernise TV and radio frameworks and support local news, and introduces policies to maximise the social and economic benefits from digital technologies. The Report is one of the central policy commitments in...

Click on the link below to view Rob McMinn’s excellent collection of Sildeshare presentations for Media Studies.

http://www.slideshare.net/mcmrbt

Rob also has an active blog you might like to keep an eye on: http://westudymedia.wordpress.com/.

Music magazines of the Noughties - The Wire, Smash Hits, Terrorizer, NME, Q and Muzik –Smash Hits and Muzik have since closed

Music Magazines in the Noughties

KEY THEMES: PROLIFERATION OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY, INCREASED NICHE MARKETING AND SUBCULTURAL BRAND VALUES ARE MORE MARKETABLE.

Useful Terminology

Plugs: Information about the contents of a magazine given on the front cover.
Issue Number: The number of the issue
Masthead: Title of the...

In theory, the proliferation of web 2.0 user- generated content and the appropriation of creative technologies by media audiences challenges the role of the media professional. In a very real sense it would seem that YouTube, Blogs and Myspace etc, not to mention the affordability of digital editing software and other home studio facilities, embody the collapse of the distinction between the real and the...

Pete Wall and Charlie Evans from HarperCollins have kindly agreed to share their latest series of podcasts with Mediaedu.co.uk Please click on the hyperlink immediately below to download and listen to an invaluable introduction to this year’s AQA GCSE Media Studies Controlled Test.

Quiz Shows Podcasts

Take a Quick Quiz on Quiz Shows

Quiz Shows Quiz

Quiz Show Intro Letter

‘The focus of this examination is institutional/ scheduling issues and audience pleasures. These pages on sit-com provide a background only to the topic. The specific issues of institution/scheduling and audience pleasures in relation to sit-com will need to be taught separately.’

Brief Definition

The British TV sitcom is a television series that derives humour from the same characters in a fixed location exploring a variety of comic...

Creating a television quiz show is one of the best ways of exploring televisual techniques in a television studio. It is difficult to make a television quiz show without a multi camera set up.

A Further Education College came up with the idea of a 20 minute quiz show, called What Do You Know Quiz Show? Further down the page is how they made it.

The class was divided into two teams of 12 people in each. Each team produced a 10 minute quiz...

BBC Competitions

BBC Film Network - Short Films

British Animation Awards

Channel4 Talent Schemes

Film Education Be Creative Competition

Mediaedu Competition

City in Motion Short Film Competition

Promax UK Student Award Competition

Schools Computer Animation Competition

UCreative Awards
2 Days Later Short Film Competition

We Study Media by Rob McMinn

The Student Room & Media Studies

Setting up a Radio Station on Mediaed.org.uk

Modern Mechanix: examples of vintage advertising

Technorati on Ideology

Ideology for Kids: Decoding the Kremlin’s Website

The End of Cyberspace

Kinoeye on Media Studies

Bluegrass Film Society

Kids Gobble Up Interactive Junk Food Marketing

Continental Philosophy: Key Notes on Theorists

Dr. Mabuse’s Kaledio-scope: Four Models of...

Foundation Portfolio in Media

This is a coursework unit where candidates produce two paired media artefacts from a series of briefs.

This process involves progression from a pre-production, preliminary exercise to a more fully realised piece.

The briefs offered are: print, video, audio and website.

This unit is internally assessed and externally moderated.

click on this hyperlink to find out more

Media Concepts (TV Drama)

This paper...

Exhibitions in London

http://www.allinlondon.co.uk/whats-on.php?type=exhibition

A-Z of London Museums

http://www.londonnet.co.uk/ln/guide/about/museums.html

London Galleries

http://www.allinlondon.co.uk/gallery.php

Blackburn Rovers Community Trust

http://www.brfctrust.co.uk/Trust/index.php/education/downloads/category/27-brochures?download=15:secondary-and-post-16-education-brochure

They have an education centre where you can take...

2000

PlayStation 2 - Sony launches the PS2 in the US for $299.99 (£150). With a built-in DVD player and back compatibility with PS1 games, every one of the 500,000 consoles produced sells out on the first day.

PlayStation 2 would eventually become the most successful games console of all time with 127 million units sold worldwide. Famous games include the Gran Turismo series (Polyphony 2001-2005), Ratchet and Clank series (High Impact...

1990

Final Fantasy - A game created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, Final Fantasy (Square Enix) was released in the US in 1990.

It tells the story of four orphaned youths who find a crystal, that restores balance to the world.

The game spawned thirteen sequels (so far) making it the most successful role-playing series of all time.

The Final Fantasy series is also famous for its lushly-scored orchestral music composed by Nobuo Uematsu.

1991

Super...

1980

Pac Man - Toru Iwatani, a programmer at the Japanese company Namco created an arcade game that was so popular that it even spawned its own TV show in the US. The arcade version of Pac Man eventually sold 300,000 cabinets, becoming the best selling arcade game of all time.

Battlezone – Famous for being the first truly 3-D game, Battlezone (Atari) featured a virtual battlefield considered to be so realistic at the time that a...

1971

Computer Space – The co-inventor of Computer Space, Nolan Bushnell, saw the commercial potential of Space War when he played a version of it while a student at the University of Utah in the 1960s.

With his business partner, Ted Dabney, Bushnell built his own version in Dabney’s daughter’s bedroom (she had to sleep in the living room). Computer Space was not a great success, but Bushnell and Dabney would co-found the company Atari...

1949

OXO - A single-player version of the pencil and paper game ‘noughts and crosses,’ written by Alexander Douglas for his PhD on human-computer interaction.

Douglas programmed the game on a proto-type computer known as EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator).

Only one EDSAC machine was ever built, so few people knew of the game’s existence.

1958

Tennis for Two - A simple tennis game played on an oscilloscope...

Associated Resources

Have a look at the following resources on MediaEdu:

Web Design Tutorials

The Internet and World Wide Web

Studying The Internet

Deconstructing Web Pages

History of the Internet 1 | The Computer

The history of the internet is not a straight-forward narrative since it was not invented by one person or any group of people. The internet emerged out of the combination of three distinct inventions: computers, networks and...

In this section we will look at some of the ways the internet can be studied. The first part looks at some of the impacts the internet has had on society, the second part examines some of the metaphors that have been used to make sense of what the internet is, and the third part looks at three ways in which the internet may be analysed through institutions, audiences and textual analysis.

Associated Resources

Have a look at the following...

Television and film crime/cop drama is very popular with a wide audience. Crime dramas seek to anchor the representations of all types of police officers, criminals and victims as ‘believable’ characters, with ‘realistic’ plot lines, set in urban locations.The genre has been taken up in the US under the heading of American Quality Televsion (AQT) - see under heading AQT.

Codes and conventions

Crime dramas:

• are constructed realities
...

Associated Resources

Have a look at the following resources on MediaEdu:

Web Design Tutorials

Studying The Internet

History of The Internet

A History of Online Social Networking

Deconstructing Web Pages

Definition

The above picture may look like an exploding galaxy or a human cell magnified many thousands of times but it is actually a map of the internet. The internet (short for interconnected network) can be...

Keith Langton, an experienced GCSE Media Studies teacher, has kindly agreed to begin developing this new area on MediaEdu.

The Cover Zone will contain one-off lessons and activities which can be used by non-specialist Media staff during periods of absence and for students who need independent and educational tasks to get on with if they have been isolated for any reason.

We will add these one-off activities below, when we receive new...

Script Exemplars

The Beano

‘Badminton’

LITTLE PLUM

1. Plum points to Chiefy and Chief of Um Puttyfeet playing badminton on court with net strung between two totem poles.

“Instead of fighting, our tribe are playing um nice game of badminton against members of um Puttyfoot tribe.”

2. Puttyfoot Chief smashes shuttle which jams on Chiefy’s nose.

PUTTYFOOT CHIEF “I win! Next match please!”

3. Plum pulls shuttle from Chiefy’s nose.

Firstly, you need to decide on computers. The software you get will depend on whether you get PCs or Macs. Personally I prefer Mac but our school uses PC’s as they wanted them on the network. The PCs work fine but the network causes hundreds of problems. If you go Mac they do educational discounts ordering direct from Apple.

You need to have at least 1 GB of RAM, a decent graphics and sound card. You will manage with the standard ones...

Digital camcorders are now very good value and you can buy one for about £150. Important considerations:

1. At present (January 2009) the most user friendly format for students to use is still mini DV tape.

Camcorders which use flash type memory cards work well, but downloading to some computer video editing software can cause problems.

This will probably be sorted...

About The Author

I used to work as an IT consultant and marketing manager for Jigsaw Systems Ltd, who are the UK’s largest Apple dealer. (http://www.jigsaw24.com). I recommend you speak to them if you want a site visit or need to get a quotation.

It was my job to introduce Jigsaw into the video/audio markets, so I did about 18 months research into music production, sound for video, video production, as well as dealing with Jigsaw’s...

Most exam boards have an option to design a CD cover as part of course work for both GCSE and A level. Some boards now require pieces of work in at least two mediums, and a CD cover is a good supplementary piece of work to support a music video or other course work.

Designing the cover of a CD is a great way to be creative in the visual arts.

Context

The album cover became an art form in the 1960s like so much else to do with popular music....

Adams, A.A. & McCrindle, R.J. (2008). Pandora’s box: social and professional issues of the information age. Chichester: John Wiley.

Acquisti, A., & Gross, R. (2006). ‘Imagined communities: Awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the Facebook.’ In P. Golle & G. Danezis (Eds.), Proceedings of 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (pp. 36-58). Cambridge, UK: Robinson College.

Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities. Revised...

What is News?

News is an integral part of daily life. We use news to frame our daily events. A plane crashes at Heathrow, in a remarkably short space of time everyone knows about it. We might wake up to it in the morning on the radio or TV. We may go to sleep with it, and we may hear it during the day, or see a live TV screen with rolling news. We may read a newspaper. At its heart, news is about people doing things. People’s activity is...

Introduction

The UK media regulator Ofcom recently called Britain a nation of social networkers, noting that Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are all in the top ten internet sites in terms of the amount of time people spend there (Ofcom 2007). One in four UK citizens log onto a social network site at least 23 times each month, making the UK the most enthusiastic online social networking nation in Europe and second only to Canada in the...

Animation - Making Your Own Film

Anyone aspiring to be taken seriously as an animator would be well advised to first learn how to draw and then to learn the animation basics.

No matter if you are interested in doing 3d computer animation or stylised 2d drawings if you can’t draw you are at a disadvantage. Drawing is best learned from doing life drawing lessons, from studying other people’s work who can draw and from just practising.

The Digital Era

The 90’s Disney Boom

While the British features stumbled in and out of the cinemas Disney stormed ahead with their animation revival which had began with Roger Rabbit. In the two decades since Walt Disney’s death their feature output had become decidedly patchy. Some high points had been ‘The Aristocats’ (1967) and ‘The Rescuers’ (1977) and by the time of ‘The Fox and the Hound’ (1979) the ‘Nine Old Men of...

The Fading Lightbox

Terry Gilliam and Monty Python

Gilliam was born in Minneapolis and studied political science before finding his way into being a writer and cartoonist. When work dried up in the USA he came to London, worked, or tried to work, at various animation studios (Bob Godfrey’s Movie Emporium turned him away for being ‘too good’!), then through John Cleese got some sketches on the children’s comedy ‘Do Not Adjust your Set...[ read full article ] »

Post War Animation - The TV Age

‘Animaland’: David Hand and Gaumont British Animation Studios

In 1945, David Hand, the director of Disney’s ‘Snow White’ was hired by the great British film producer J. Arthur Rank (more rhyming slang?) to come to Britain to set up a Disney type animation studio here. They chose not to locate in London or another of Britain’s bombed out cities, but in the picturesque Moor Hall in the village of...

The Rise Of Disney and The First Sound Cartoons

In 1927 the first ‘talking’ motion picture was released, The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolsen, which helped to popularize sound in films. Many cinemas now fitted the sound technology to show the new films.

Walt Disney

In 1928 Walt Disney rushed out ‘Steamboat Wille’ the first widely distributed synchronised sound cartoon, ‘Steamboat Wille’ (synchronised or sync, means when the sound...

The beginnings of animation can perhaps be traced back to a paper published by Peter Roget in 1824 for The British Royal Society called ‘The persistence of vision with regard to moving objects’. Following this came the invention of such devices as the phenakitstoscope (1831), the zoetrope (1834) and the praxinoscope (1892), all variations of the idea of sequence of images viewed on a rotating drum, although these were all somewhat preceded...

Windsor McCay and The Silent Animation Boom

Windsor McCay

In New York Windsor McCay was a successful newspaper cartoonist of the time, his most popular strip being ‘Little Nemo in Slumberland’, a brilliantly designed and illustrated full page colour comic strip. He spent four years turning this into a cartoon ‘Little Nemo’ (1911) which was met with much success and followed this with ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ (1913) which became a...

British Animation 100 Years at The Cutting Edge

The United Kingdom has had a rather underrated part to play in the history of animation. As is often the case though, a lot of the important ideas and inventions in the development of animation came from British minds but were often better exploited elsewhere.

This exporting of innovation however has always attracted, and been balanced by, an influx of talent from abroad. Some of the great names...

Advertising is the business of selling a product, service or idea to an audience. Huge advertising agencies make vast amounts of money creating adverts for companies and then distributing or broadcasting them. One of the largest advertising corporations is Saatchi & Saatchi.

Brief definition

Advertising is a persuasive way of communicating a message to a large number of people, known as a mass audience. For a communication to be advertising...

Media Studies isn’t easy to describe. It’s a living concept that continues to change just as technology and our experience with technology change. The purpose of Media Studies is to provide audiences with access to information no matter how it is experienced and allow people to adopt diverse critical positions.

Media Studies is desirable because its curriculum is inclusive; it recognises that the form of...

Click on the link below to view Rob McMinn’s excellent collection of Sildeshare presentations for Media Studies.

http://www.slideshare.net/mcmrbt

Rob also has an active blog you might like to keep an eye on: http://westudymedia.wordpress.com/.

Exhibitions in London

http://www.allinlondon.co.uk/whats-on.php?type=exhibition

A-Z of London Museums

http://www.londonnet.co.uk/ln/guide/about/museums.html

London Galleries

http://www.allinlondon.co.uk/gallery.php

Blackburn Rovers Community Trust

http://www.brfctrust.co.uk/Trust/index.php/education/downloads/category/27-brochures?download=15:secondary-and-post-16-education-brochure

They have an...

Adams, A.A. & McCrindle, R.J. (2008). Pandora’s box: social and professional issues of the information age. Chichester: John Wiley.

Acquisti, A., & Gross, R. (2006). ‘Imagined communities: Awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the Facebook.’ In P. Golle & G. Danezis (Eds.), Proceedings of 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (pp. 36-58). Cambridge, UK: Robinson College.

Anderson, B....