Revision Advice

Let's face it, there's no realistic way of revising for a task based on an unseen passage. All you can really do is practice. With that in mind, here are few things you might try:

• Familiarise Yourself

Watch lots of TV drama programmes. As many as you can, of different subgenres. But don't just passively watch them as entertainment, look for the stereotypes. Create a checklist of the groups you may be asked to write about; remember, they are:

Gender: male and female

Age: young and old
Ethnicity: white, black, Asian, or any other racial stereotype
Sexuality: straight or gay
Class and status: upper, middle, or working class
Physical ability/disability: characters who may be deaf, blind, physically or mentally disabled.
Regional identity: northerners, southerners, Scots, Welsh, Irish etc
See how many are shown in the programme you are watching. For each one, it is the simplest question in the world: is this character being shown as a stereotype?

• Test Your Vocabulary

Go to Quizlet and test yourself on the technical terms of textual analysis.

Yet More Examination Practice

Watch the clip below and answer the question which follows:

How is the representation of disability constructed in this extract from "The Street"?

Before you watch it, read the following instructions carefully:

A. Divide a piece of paper into 4 squares, one each for mise-en-scene, camfam, sound, and editing.

B. Watch the extract four times:

1. Watch it without making any notes. In your head, think: what are society's expectations of disabled people? Am I seeing stereotypical disabled figures or not?
2. Watch it a second time, looking for examples of mise-en-scene and camera framing/angle/movement which support your ideas. Give yourself one minute only to make notes.
3. Watch it a third time, listening for examples of sound - especially dialogue - which support your ideas. Again, give yourself one minute only to make notes.
4. Watch it a fourth and final time, this time making notes about editing; whose side does it position the viewer on?

C. You then have 45 minutes to write this essay. Remember that it should have 5 paragraphs:

1. Introduction: describe the representations/stereotypes shown
2. Mise-en-scene
3. Camera framing/angle/movement
4. Soundtrack
5. Editing

 

Past Paper Examination Practice

The following extract is from Summer 2010. The question is:
How is the representation of gender constructed in this extract from 'Primeval'?'

Before you watch it, read the following instructions carefully:

 
A. Divide a piece of paper into 4 squares, one each for mise-en-scene, camfam, sound, and editing.
B. Watch the extract four times:

1. Watch it without making any notes; in you head, think: am I seeing stereotypical male/female figures or not?
2. Watch it a second time, looking for examples of mise-en-scene and camera framing/angle/movement which support your ideas. Give yourself two minutes only to make notes.
3. Watch it a third time, listening for examples of sound - especially dialogue - which support your ideas. Again, give yourself two minutes only to make notes.
4. Watch it a fourth and final time, this time making notes about editing; whose side does it position the viewer on?

C. You then have 45 minutes to write this essay. Remember that it should have 5 paragraphs:

1. Introduction: describe the representations/stereotypes shown
2. Mise-en-scene
3. Camera framing/angle/movement
4. Soundtrack
5. Editing

Editing: Slow-motion

Editing: Crosscutting

Editing: The Jump Cut

A jump cut is an editing transition which cuts between different moments in the same scene, missing out some bits of the action and thereby creating discontinuity. For example, have a look at these jump cuts in a scene from 'Erin Brockovich':



The effect of this is to create a sense of the character's emotional turmoil and choatic state of mind. The editing reflects what is happening to the character psychologically.

Editing and Representations of Ethnicity

Editing: What Do Editors Do?

The following two clips are from a documentary about film editors - they contain a wealth of information about the hitsory, techniques and effects of editing, and you should definitely watch them.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

Soundtrack: Incidental Music

Incidental music can indicate to the audience a scene's atmosphere and give them a clue about how they should react emotionally, as well as communincating information about the characters within the scene. For example, listen to the music in this clip from the end of "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly":



It's a classic western showdown between several alpha males, communicating values of stereotypically dominant masculinity.

Now watch the first 10 seconds of the Dr Who clip again and listen very closely to the incidental music playing in the background as Martha Jones enters.

The use of the same 'spaghetti wastern' style of music tells the audience that this is going to be an old-fashioned good-vs-evil showdown, but the protagonist in this case is female, which runs counter to received ideas about femininity. We are not suggesting that Martha Jones is masculine, but rather that the scene as a whole shows women as being capable of the same strength and determination which is typically expected of men.

The same thing is used here at the start of Torchwood (S2E1; "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang"), where the spaghetti-western-style incidental music creates expectations of a violent, masculine showdown. The really interesting question in this clip is, how does the passionate kiss between the two men challenge the stereotypes of both straight and gay men?

Camera Framing, Angle and Movement

Start by watching this tutorial about camera shot types. It's not sexy, but it's as clear and straightforward as you could want.

This next one is about camera angles:

And finally, a thrilling exposition of camera movements:

You can download a chart showing most of these HERE.

Mise-en-Scene

Mise-en-scene means 'everything in the scene'. Once you have watched the clip and identified the stereotypes being represented, your first task is to find examples from the mise-en-scene which prove it.

For our purposes, mise-en-scene includes the following:

1. Costume (and everything about a character's appearance including height, hair colour, makeup etc)
2. Body Language
3. Props
4. Location
5. Set Design
6. Lighting

Remember that everything you see has connotations - that is, messages or values which are communicated beyond the literal object being shown. For example, if a character wears glasses it carries connotations of intelligence, cleverness, or possible geekiness. Even colours have connotations - at its simplest level, black=evil and white=good.

You are looking for connotations which have something to do with gender, or age, or disability etc...
Exercise: Watch the clip below, from 'Life on Mars' (Episode 1:1) up to 4min 45sec, and write two paragraphs:

Paragraph 1: What representations of gender can you see in this clip?
Paragraph 2: What details of mise-en-scene can you find to support your ideas?

Answering the Question: In Summary

Everything up until now basically is all about writing just the first paragraph of your essay. That first paragraph is where you really go into detail about the characters in the extract and what the audience is encouraged to think about them. It's no good starting off with something bland and wishy-washy like "this extract presents women in a very stereotypical way" unless you go into detail about which characters you're talking about, and what those stereotypes are.

So: what kinds of prejudices does the programme assume, and is it supporting those prejudices and stereotypes or is it challenging/subverting them? Make a bold, confident, detailed statement.

Here is how I would start an essay about the representation of gender in the Dr Who clip below ( it was the question in Summer 2009)

In this clip from Dr Who gender is represented along mostly very stereotypical lines, despite there being one or two moments where the expected power relationships are subverted. The main dramatic conflict between Martha Jones and the Master is very much that of dominant male vs subordinate female. In fact, all the female characters in the scene - whether they are 'evil' like the Master's wife on the balcony or 'good' like Martha's mother - are largely passive. When the tide turns and good begins to triumph, it becomes a battle between two alpha males - the Doctor and the Master, and the female characters are relegated very firmly to the sidelines as expectant bystanders. In all, then, this clip confirms males as figures of power, and females, at best, as supportive sidekicks.

The rest of the essay is about proving what you've just asserted.

You prove it by writing the next four paragraphs about:

1. camera framing, angle and movement
2. editing
3. soundtrack
4. mise-en-scene

Let's go through these one by one.

Answering the Question 3: The Importance of Binary Oppositions

There can be no Drama without conflict, and those conflicts are usually between two opposite things: male vs female, young vs old, rich vs poor etc. These are called binary oppositions (BINARY = two things).

Ask yourself: which characters in the extract seem to be the main participants in this conflict?

This will help you to avoid spending too much time writing about minor characters.

For more notes and an explanation of the theory of binary oppositions, go HERE.

Answering the Question 2: Who Am I Seeing?

Get focussed!

Now that you know what you're looking for, you need to ask 'What characters am I being shown in this extract?' but it's got to be relevant to the question.

For example, in the extract from Monarch of the Glen, there's no point saying 'I'm being shown a Scottish woman' because that's nothing to do with age; it's ethinicity and gender.

You need to say to yourself: 'I'm being shown an OLD Scottish woman and a YOUNG Scottish woman,' because the focus of that question is AGE.

Or again, in the Doctor Who extract, there's no point identifying the fact that one of the main characters is black and the other is white unless you can see that one is a black WOMAN and the other is a white MAN - because in that question GENDER is the focus.

Get focussed!

Answering the Question 1: Interpreting the Question

The question for the TV Drama section of the examination paper will be worded along these lines (three examples follow):

From January 2009: "How is the representation of age constructed in this extract?"


From Summer 2009: "How is the representation of gender constructed in this extract?"


From January 2010: "How is the representation of ethnicity constructed in this extract?"



In other words, the question is identical each year; "How is the representation of SOMETHING constructed in this extract?" There are really only two differences:

1. The actual clip, obviously.
2. What that SOMETHING is. You may be asked to write about any one from the following list:

Gender
Age
Ethnicity
Sexuality
Class and status
Physical ability/disability
Regional identity

So your first job when making your notes in the exam is to write down in big letters at the top of the page: GENDER, or AGE, or ETHNICITY or whatever...

Special Media Magazine Issue

There is an issue of Media Magazine devoted entirely to Drama, with some excellent articles on representations in Television Drama. Go to the MediaMagazine subscribers'site (ask your teacher or the librarian for the username and password) and hunt for Issue 29. Download a copy for yourself.

Why Audiences Love Drama Programmes

Drama programmes are popular because they show the audience themselves. In other words, they RE-PRESENT an image of what they think they are or would like to be. It helps to reinforce people's sense of their own identity, and their sense of belonging to a particular group of people with shared values and interests. The extent to which an audience identifies with a character depends on how the programme uses stereotypes of:

Gender
Age
Ethnicity
Sexuality
Class and status
Physical ability/disability
Regional identity

The concept of representation is explained in more detail by Stuart Hall, an influential media theorist, HERE.

So, TV programmes represent certain groups of people on screen, and that representation may or may not be what those people are actually like. The point is that society has ideas about what people should be like, and that set of ideas is what we call IDEOLOGY. There are other definitions of what ideology means if you're studying, say, Politics, but for our purposes, it is the system of stereotypes which society collectively holds about certain groups.

The consequence of this is that ideology is also about POWER. Who has power in society? Who gets to make the rules? Who is acceptable and who isn't? You may believe that because we live in a liberal democracy everybody is equal and nobody is more powerful than anybody else, but it's not the case. It's what we would like to believe about our society but it simply isn't true.

If you find this hard to accept, think about the following questions:

• How would your friends react if you came out and said you were gay? (Especially if you are sporty.)
• Does your Mum earn more money than your Dad?
• Who stayed at home to look after you when you were a baby?
• How many black or asian Prime Ministers have there been?
• If you were in a wheelchair, how easy would it be to get into the Media classroom?

TV Drama programmes which show representations of people who conform to expected social stereotypes also reinforce entrenched power structures in which white, middle-class, heterosexual men are the most privileged group.

TV Drama in Broadcaster's Schedules

To get some idea of how important the genre of TV drama is to broadcasters, do a quick bit of research.

Go to the BARB website. BARB is the Broadcasters Audience Research Board, and it compiles charts and statistics of what people watch on TV.

Go to the “Top 10s”
From the alphabetic list of all available channels, select BBC1, and click on the “View Figures” button at the bottom.
Now examine the list of the top 10 programmes watched on this channel. How many of them would you classify as drama?
Now repeat this exercise for BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Channel 5. You may want to do this in a group to save time.
What percentage of the top-rated television programmes on terrestrial television are drama?
Does any one particular sub-genre dominate the ratings?
What conclusions can you draw about the importance of TV Drama to broadcasters?

Hopefully you'll see that drama programmes are incredibly popular with audiences. It is therefore important to study exactly what kinds of images these programmes are presenting to us about ourselves, and how this is done.

TV Drama Genres

Genre means a ‘kind’ or ‘type’ and is a way of categorising films and TV programmes. Before you start studying TV drama, a broad television genre, you need to think about the role genre plays in broadcasters’ and television producers’ thinking as well as in audiences’ viewing. This will help put into context your detailed work on the TV drama genre.

Think about your own television viewing:
What did you watch over Christmas?
Do you normally watch these programmes during the rest of the year?
What are some of your favourite TV programmes?
Why do you like them?
Are you aware that you are looking at a programme in a particular genre?

Genres can be HYBRIDS.
(A hybrid genre is a mixture of two or more different genres.)
Genres can be divided into SUBGENRES.
(A subgenre is a very specialist form of the genre with its own particular forms and conventions.)

Introduction

The purpose of this unit is to assess your ability to analyse a media text, as well as your understanding of the concept of representation using a short unseen moving image extract. In this case, an extract from a television drama programme.

Secondly, it will assess your knowledge and understanding of the British film industry - its production processes, distribution strategies, use of technologies and related issues concerning audience reception and consumption of media texts.

The examination is two hours (including 30 minutes for viewing and making notes on the moving image extract) and you have to answer two compulsory questions. The unit is marked out of a total of 100, with each question marked out of 50.

There are two sections to this paper:
Section A: Textual Analysis and Representation (TV Drama) = 50 marks.
Section B: Institutions and Audiences (The British Film industry) = 50 marks