Hi,

I hear that you are planning on taking media studies at A level, what a great choice! 

Media studies is a subject that you will not regret taking and will help you within all aspects of life by learning and improving your technical, transferable and creative skills over the next two years. 

Over the next two years you will create many pieces of work which will be compiled together in a blog. Each piece of work will be an individual blog post where you will describe the steps you have taken in detail to create the certain piece of work. This can range from a photoshoot plan or research task to a page in a magazine or a photoshop editing task. 

Here are some examples of the Transferable, technical and creative skills that you will gain over the course of the next two years. You will learn to understand the key terms that are widely used such as; branding, genre, conventions, star image, font and journalism. These terms will be used within your analyses and any blog post which you will make. You will also learn to correctly use terms such as connote and denote when talking about certain conventions of your genre  

 

Within my coursework and throughout the year i have learnt many creative, technical and transferable skills such as how to use key terms, research, blogging, photography, camera skills, how to use flash photography and how to use certain camera settings, shoot planning, color coordination, makeup, costume and how to tie all of this into the connotations of your chosen genre. 

When I was first starting media studies we were tasked with creating a music poster for a random genre which we were given. This piece of work was difficult as I didn’t know the specific skills that I needed in order to make a high quality piece of work. After researching the skills and using the blog in order to research the different skills i was able to improve my work and make a high level piece so in order to create high level work i had to use all of the technical, creative and transferable skills which are listed within this letter 

In this section i used skills such as photoshop, camera settings, indesign, bridge, canva and flash photography 

You will learn many technical production skills in media studies, For example you will learn how to coordinate a shoot from coordinating models, makeup, booking rooms and how to use different flash photography techniques. You will also learn how to use many industry standard programs such as photoshop and Indesign where you will cut out, edit and put together your music magazine which will include a front cover, contents page and a double page spread with an article on your artist. When using a DSLR camera you will learn terms such as focus, aperture, ISO, shutter speed and exposure. These terms will help you whenever you are doing shoots or taking photographs outside of media studies 

When we were out on a location shoot at castle cornet there were many different light levels and situations where I had to change the aperture and  ISO in order to allow enough light to get into the lens so that any detail on my model would be seen. You also have to make sure that there is not too much light getting in so that the picture is not over exposed, without the knowledge of changing these settings then I would not have been able to produce images at the level that I did 

Before I started media studies I did not know how to use photoshop or indesign after we had a few lessons on how to use it. I can now confidently cut out and edit a model from a background and put together a magazine. Without taking media i would have no idea how to create such pieces of work and within an ever growing tech society photoshop and indesign are highly used in most jobs that revolve around media or marketing 

When using photoshop I learned how to sharpen up and tweak certain features of the model such as using the sharpen tool on the models jewelry in order to make it pop and convey a certain amount of wealth and status which an emotional rap star would have.  

Within the creative process i used skills such as planning a shoot, choosing a location nd vibe to fit the genre, choosing and directing models and costumes also learning how to use colour to convey emotions and the conventions of your genre 

In media studies you will learn many creative production skills such as coordinating models, costumes and planning a shoot which will convey the genre you have chosen by using costume, makeup, jewelry and lighting 

When I was planning my shoot I made a group chat on snapchat where I coordinated my models on what they would need to wear and bring to the shoot in order to create the best images possible. I had to make sure the clothes that they were going to wear would fit the dark and crazy vibes that my genre of Emo rap requires. This is why the group chat was important as without it the models would have not known what props and clothes to bring. 

 You will have to look at conventions and narrative of your genre such as what clothes, jewelry and makeup the artist wears and get your models to recreate the aesthetic of the genre to the audience. 

There was a lot of pink within my genre on the album covers and magazines and the models would wear black and crazy coats and jewelry so i made sure to dress my models in those types of clothes in order to keep to the conventions of the genre and convey the appropriate star image 

 Some other transferable skills you will learn are communication, collaboration, writing, reading and listening skills which will all help you in the world of work whether you choose to pursue a career in the field of media or not

Transferable skills you will learn are planning skills such as doing research and creating your own style and being able to transfer that from paper to an actual shoot. This will help you in life as having a strong plan which you can actually follow will help you in any job not just in the field of media.   

 

I used a transferable skill when I was planning for a photography field trip and I used the same production meeting agenda that I used in the media in order to meticulously plan my shoot. This allowed me to plan for exactly what I needed to do and resulted in a more professional and high quality shoot giving my project the extra pop that it needed.

I also used specific literacy skills such as article writing in order to complete my magazine and any articles for the blog I also had to use different letter and textual analysis skills. 

 

So good luck with media studies….you will learn all kinds of skills and in particular various production skills which you will be able to use in all walks of life.