Resources for WJEC A Level Film Studies on MediaEdu

This page should provide you with an index to the information we have on MediaEdu which relates directly to WJEC A Level Film Studies.

This page also contains external links to support materials on the WJEC site.

Cinematic New Waves

Studying Tsotsi

Further Reading & Support

The primary source for authoritative information & support is the WJEC Film Studies website.

WJEC Film Studies GCE...

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...

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
...

Denotation and Connotation

These are two important words concerned with the way an audience understands the meaning of a media text. These can also be called the signs and signified meaning, or the micro and macro features.

Denotation / sign / micro feature is the basic, literal meaning of what is in the picture or scene.

Connotation / signified meaning / macro feature means different interpretations suggested by the text, often associated...

There are a few scenarios under which you may find yourself using the film Tsotsi in an examination or assessment. You, or your teacher may perhaps choose the film when given an open ended assignment in a GCSE film assignment for media studies but the most likely circumstance under which you will be using the film is for the WJEC GCSE Film Studies Paper 2, titled ‘Films From Outside Hollywood’ where the film is currently one of the focus...

Associated Resources

Using Tsotsi in Examinations and Assessments

This guide is aimed at WJEC Film Studies students who are studying Tsotsi for their focus film on Paper 2 (Exploring Films Ouside Hollywood)in the GCSE examination.

Tsotsi was made in 2005 and is based upon Athol Fugard’s novel of the same name and was directed by Gavin Hood. With the dialogue a mixture of Zulu, Xhosa and Afrikaans, the film won the Oscar for Best Foreign...

The films which tend to be classed as new wave fall out of most film audience’s natural comfort zone and may not be their films of choice for watching. This helps to define the term cinematic new wave and to place a new wave movement into a context relative to other films.

A new wave film is by definition different to the other films which are normally produced, or to put it another way, new wave film movements are distinct from those films...

Functions of the Title Sequence

The functions of the title sequence in a film may seem to be fairly obvious. They are designed to tell the audience the names of the people and organisations involved with the making of the film and in this respect they do the job well.

Irrespective of the genre, there is a conventional way of presenting this information in the credit sequence. This information and the order in which it is presented follows a...

Click on the link below to download a PDF booklet you can print out.

Film Genre - Thrillers.pdf

Click on the link below to download a frame for analysing the opening of the film ‘Children of Men’.

Film-Opening-Children-Of-Men.doc

‘It’s just an idea for group work deconstructing an interesting text (especially because, unusually, this one starts in the middle of the disequilibrium, rather than establishing an equilibrium first of all, so is good for narrative theory.  Also, our “hero” is rather unheroic (he doesn’t return to the...

Andrew Moore / Universalteacher.org.uk Studying Feature Films

BFI or British Film Institute. An excellent site which incorporates an online media glossary.

BFI / BT Screenonline Archive Interactives

BFI Screenonline Tours

BFI Film and Media Schemes of Work

BFI Film and Media Studies Resources for Teachers and Students

BFI on Using Film in the Classroom

Cinemaspace - University of California, Berkeley

Film Underground

Film Analysis...

A typical A Level exam production task is to create a trailer for a film.

This is the type of task you will be asked to do:

Make a 3 minute trailer for a 15 rated film in a genre of your choice suitable for a teenage audience with a budget of about £10 million (the approximate budget for Slumdog Millionaire).

Before making your trailer you need to fully understand what a film trailer is, how it works and what it aims to do.

Definition

A...

Click on the link below to download a frame for analysing the opening of the film ‘Children of Men’.

Film-Opening-Children-Of-Men.doc

‘It’s just an idea for group work deconstructing an interesting text (especially because, unusually, this one starts in the middle of the disequilibrium, rather than establishing an equilibrium first of all, so is good for narrative theory.  Also, our “hero” is rather...