MS1 requirements.

MS1 (Written Exam) requirements.

This unit is marked against the following assessment objectives:

AO1 Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of media concepts, contexts and critical debates.

A02 Apply knowledge and understanding when analysing media products and processes, and when evaluating their own practical work, to show how meanings and responses are created.

Candidates will be required to study how media texts are constructed and how audiences and users respond to and interpret them using the following framework:

(a) Texts

• genre conventions
• narrative construction
• technical codes such as camerawork, lighting, editing and sound for audio-visual media and graphic design elements for print-based and interactive media
• language used and mode of address.

(b) Representations

• the role of selection, construction and anchorage in creating representations
• how the media uses representations
• the points of view, messages and values underlying those representations.

Candidates will be expected to have studied a range of representations of:

• gender
• ethnicity
• age
• issues
• events
• regional and national identities.

(c) Audience Responses
Candidates will need to consider the ways in which different audiences can
respond to the same text in different ways. This will involve studying:

• the ways in which audiences can be categorised (e.g., gender, age, ethnicity, social & cultural background, advertisers' classifications)
• how media producers and texts construct audiences and users
• how audiences and users are positioned (including preferred, negotiated and oppositional responses to that positioning).

Any media can be explored but the media texts used in the examination will
be selected from the following:

• advertisements
• DVD covers
• CD covers
• newspaper front pages
• magazines (including comics)
• radio sequences
• film extracts
• television sequences
• music videos
• websites (if selected for examination, websites will be reproduced in
• print-based format)
• computer game extracts.

A look at exemplar work.