Section 4 - Media Production
In a sense, media production is still related to media literacy, as it forms the ‘writing’ half of that literacy. However, production is a distinct field of practice, with its own history, problems, successes and debates, so it deserves its own section.
Media production is the often-neglected part of media literacy and media education. The English National Curriculum follows the practice of media education in many countries by constructing media literacy as a purely analytical practice - it is situated within the Reading part of the curriculum, so while it is mandatory for children in England and Wales to ‘read’ the media, the same is not true for ‘writing’ the media.
By far the best way for student teachers to explore production work is to undertake it themselves. The most obvious projects would consist of making a short media text, popular choices being to make:
- a 30 second TV ad
- a 30 second trailer for a film, using digitised footage from the film
- a trailer for a new radio soap opera or music programme
- a proposal for a new computer game (a story, character designs, a description of gameplay, a map, a sample screenshot)
- a homepage of a website
- the front page of a new comic
- the front page of a new newspaper
Obviously an issue here is what is manageable, both in terms of time and technology. This judgment can only be made by individual tutors, of course. However, a little-known software which allows a degree of computer game design, the least developed of the digital design areas, is a cheap and easy-to-use commercial package called The 3-D Game-maker , which will allow students (and children) to author their own simple computer games, and play each others’.
 
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