Pete Fraser's main focus is the philosophy of media education, he is the Chief Examiner for OCR Media Studies at A level. He spoke to us about what is expected when it comes to our blogs being graded, and what we had to do to achieve high marks. Fraser had produced a slideshare presentation (below), explaining each point as he went through it. From this, the most valuable thing I learned was that, I should keep up to date with my everything I do to help achieve the best marks and give myself a substantial amount of time to complete everything asked of me as a media student.
Jake Wynne is a director and editor based in London. We watched several of his critically acclaimed music videos. He gave us information on how they were produced and ideas we could glean from them. First we watched "Outer Space Girls" by the Spice Girls which was the first full music video he edited.
We then watched the first music video which he directed which was for a band called Nojahoda. Wynne didn't have a large budget for this music video, so he used previously built-up favours he'd gathered throughout his time in the music industry and created the video below.
Then we finally watched Geri Halliwell's "It's Raining Men." I learned that Halliwell's record company insisted that certain "beauty" shots be implemented, which were made through the illumination of Halliwell's face using a specially made light. The record company felt that it was necessary for the artist to be portrayed in a beautiful perspective.
Wynne then gave us individual feedback on our video ideas. He thought that our group's music video idea was really good and gave us some tips. He suggested that we should "build up" to a climatic ending rather than use all of our tricks in one go, so as to provide for an entertaining and immersive viewing experience for the audience throughout. He suggested that rather than revealing the idea of being buried alive straight away, we should infer aspects of being buried alive before revealing this at the end, such as mud being tossed into the air etc. I personally felt as if his ideas were useful and I'll use them when working in my group to produce our music video.
