Burnside High School 2010
Year 13 Media Studies
“Develop a concept and treatment for a media product”
Student Instructions Sheet
Date Due: Friday 11th June
Students will have class time and homework time.
Brief:
You are working towards an end-of-year student film festival to be played to a public audience. Places in the festival are limited due to the number of entries, so you must be able to convince the organising committee (your teachers and peers) that your film will be worthy of exhibition.
You must come up with a concept and treatment for a film and submit this to the organising committee for consideration.
You must include in your film the following:
The line or statement ‘This is not gonna work”
A spanner
A hoodie
In order to come up with an idea read the instructions on “Justify a Concept and Treatment.doc”. on the Burnside13 Media Production Blog
Target Audience:
The festival will be attended by school students, family members, friends and members of the general public.
Overview:
Design and plan a concept and treatment for a short film aimed at the film festival audience of 3–10 minutes duration.
Justify the concept and treatment in detail.
Present your concept to the organising committee of the film festival for consideration.
Achievement Criteria
Achievement Achievement with Merit Achievement with Excellence
• Complete and justify a concept and treatment for a short film that satisfies the requirements of a given brief. • Complete and justify a well-developed concept and treatment for a short film that satisfies the requirements of a given brief. • Complete and justify a well-developed, integrated concept and treatment for a short film that satisfies the requirements of a given brief.
Explanatory Notes
1 Treatment is how the concept is to be realised. This may include discussion of narrative, genre, characterisation, setting, mood, and technical elements such as lighting, sound and SFX etc.
2 A given brief is a summary of expectations for a media product provided for the students and could include:
• target audience
• size or duration
• exhibition or presentation context
• genre
• content or theme
• format
• purpose
• cost parameters
4 Definitions
• Justify means to give reasons and evidence explaining why the concept and treatment is appropriate.
• Well-developed means a thorough and convincing coverage of all aspects.
• Integrated means the elements of concept and treatment that work together towards the creation of an outstanding media product.
National Moderators Report 2007 (2008 report endorsed this)
It is important that work submitted for this standard gives a clear idea of the scope of the product for which the material has been developed.
For achievement, the concept needs to give a clear idea of the proposed genre, content, story and/or ideas, target audience, appeal and purpose. The treatment needs to detail use of significant appropriate conventions that will ‘realise’ the concept, and give a clear description of the specific style to be used. In practice this means that all description of conventions should be linked to an explanation of the intended effect of those conventions that helps to realise the concept.
It is important that conventions chosen are significant and that specific detail is given; for example, it would not be sufficient to describe use of the close-up in a film treatment unless significant numbers of close-ups were necessary to realise the concept. In a thriller, close-ups might be used to limit the audience’s access to information, or to intensify the fear a character feels. But a discussion of close-ups explaining that their use is to ‘show the character’s emotions’ would not be sufficient; almost all films use close-ups in this way. For the explanation to be sufficient, it must be linked to the specific concept.
There were some difficulties in determining what a polished or integrated concept/treatment might be. It is worth considering the following.
For merit the concept/treatment needs to be well developed (thorough and convincing). Excessive detail is not necessary. What is vital is that the concept/treatment is convincing on a variety of levels. Using the example above, the following might contribute to a ‘well developed’ or convincing concept/treatment: discussion of why it is important to limit the audience’s access to information, what kind of information is being withheld, and what kind of emotional journey/story will the use of close-ups be communicating (and why), with all comments linked to realisation of the concept.
For excellence, the assessor has to be satisfied that the media product, if made as specified, will be an ‘outstanding’ one.
It is recommended that the learner be justifying their decisions as they develop their concept/treatment. It is not necessary to have a separate ‘justification’ section as long as the learner is explaining why they have made decisions in the concept/treatment sections.
