GCSE Work

GCSE Work 

When choosing my options for GCSE it didn't even occur to me not to take media, it was imperative that I pursued what I love to do. The lessons were fascinating and really grabbed my attention into further studying the media world.
Through years 10 and 11, the course was fairly expansive as we played around and learnt about Photoshop and editing films through the editing station, I-Movie. We studied film conventions, such as the use of sound to build tension, and stereotypes of the horror genre by which you'll often find a blonde woman that always dies.
My horror video took a twist off a hit game called 'The Scary Maze Game'. This game and the film involved a creature jumping out of a screen and scaring you. Obviously due to a lack of know-how and editing resources, we couldn't attempt CGI (computer generated imagery) to create the jumping out so we just used a sudden cut to black after seeing the monster appear for a second.

We also studied the various music styles. For example, it's clear that rap is revolved around sex and crime whereas rock is much more focused on the musical talent. This part of the course lead to the use of Photoshop when developing our own music CD covers, specifically made to fit the conventions of the music world and what we expect to see from an artist.
My Cover consisted of a real action photograph on the front cover and a computer drawn image at the back. I did that to show off my media skills and show to my target audience of teenagers that my artist is modern.
 
This little taster of what I could learn to do was just what I needed to know what I really wanted to do later on in life, eventually leading me to study media as an A-Level.