The evaluation.
Your evaluation should be 1000 words long.
It should be word processed, and should be Arial font size 12.
Once again this is a rather artificial procedure, it is not simply an evaluation of good how good, bad or excellent your work is, rather it is a series of hoops that the Board would like you to jump through.
You are to offer a critique of the strengths and weaknesses of your project. You will generally say that the project went rather well and you will say that the focus group you employed to test it generally liked it. Of course this focus group may not have existed but you did show it to your mum and sometimes “you've gotta tell the truth even if you have to lie”.
Now obviously saying all went rather well, that you are very pleased with it is not what the Board want.
They want you to sound like an academic A-level media studies student.
You will be tentative in your self- praise and use media study terms at every possible opportunity because you will get marks for using them.
You will talk about the success of your project at a technical level referring in some detail to some of the actual technical conventions you employed. If you used slow motion or you used music to anchor the meaning or the mood of your documentary, if you used captions, if you used voiceover, if you used cutaways, you will say how you thought they were generally successful and gave your project a certain professional quality.
You will also say why you used these conventions and what effects you thought the use of those conventions would have on the audience. You could say, for instance, that your choice of music had the intended effect of making the images seem more serious and generally imparting an air of emotional caring.
Billboard people will talk about graphics, choice of fonts, connotations of fonts, use of space, location, use of logos, legibility, treatment of text, use of colour and constructing photographs.
The Key concepts.
The Board expect you to relate the Key concepts you study to the work you have done in your practical. If, for example, you have made a documentary it would be entirely appropriate to talk about representation as it affects your documentary. You might want to say things like this group of people are rarely adequately represented in mainstream media so making your documentary gave you a little opportunity to redress the imbalance of representation.
The board really love that kind of thing.
Clearly the concept of audience is important, and of course you the focus group were made up of people who might have come from your target audience. You will be talking therefore about the likely effects of your product on that target audience, how that audience might respond your work or indeed how your focus group actually did respond your product.
Genre is clearly very very important. If you made a documentary it is important that you say exactly what mode your documentary was. Was it an expository documentary? Or was it a hybrid of various documentary modes?
If you made a campaign suited to billboards you might want to talk about the current generic styles of work on the billboards across the nation. You might also want to talk about how it is important that billboards helped to make a media “fuss” thereby generating a lot of free extra publicity.
Language as it relates to your product will also be important. The language of documentary is clearly different from the language of billboards. This language will be a language that you had to learn, a language with its own rules and conventions, a language which had always been around, but it was only when you came to the making of your product that you began to get particularly keen insights into the way this language works. This would be a good time to offer some examples.
Ideology is massively important to the people who will be doing promotional campaigns because clearly you are trying to persuade people to think or feel or act. You will have to explain therefore exactly what strategies you used in terms of graphics and pictures to persuade your target audience or how your slogans were used to raise consciousness about the issues on your agenda. At this point you should be clearly relating your strategies to likely effects upon audiences. The people who made billboards will go into some detail as to choice of words and choice of images and likely effects.
Documentaries can also offer ideologies to audiences.
You should ask yourself therefore what exactly are the likely messages than audiences might take away from my documentary and how have the techniques that I have used constructed these messages?
It is most important that you tell the board exactly what you have learned from the procedures you have gone through.
By this I mean what insights you have garnered about the way documentaries are constructed, whether it was necessary to cheat, what forms of selection took place, what was left on the cutting room floor, what you discovered about the effects of music and, quite importantly, how to a certain extent using Adobe Premiere affected the final construction of your documentary.
You absolutely must relate everything that you say about your product quite specifically to the video or to the coloured/photographic sheets that the examiner has in her hand.
The fact is vague waffle will not do.
You must be self-critical, examiners like it.
Use stuff like: if I had more time perhaps I might have shot more footage, or some of the cutaways were not a subtle as they might have been, or you are still not entirely sure about your choice of music or some of the focus group said they were unhappy about X, or Y or even G.
Be tough on yourself, be modest.
If you worked in a group you should indicate
who did what, who was responsible for this or that. It is often better to suggest that you worked in an atmosphere of mutual harmony swapping the different roles, experimenting together, brainstorming and generally getting on in a highly creative atmosphere of your own making.
Those of your who did separate edits of the documentary will obviously want to point out how, despite having collectively got the same footage together, you nonetheless produced documentaries which were in many ways radically different from each other.
Remember close analysis is the Key to success.
Avoid being simply descriptive.
It is important that your evaluation and your brief be entirely error-free in terms of spelling and punctuation. If you make errors you will be penalised for them. Check your work therefore and use the computer's spell check.
Do a word count and include it at the text's end
(1141 words)
