Not strictly an ICT topic this but something I’ve been thinking a bit about recently. We get a lot of media students through our doors doing film making and magazine editing so it’s sort of on my radar.
A recent Guardian article pointed to the decline in literacy skills of new recruits to the media industry. I thought it was interesting that Skillset talks about competence with multiplatform media being important but that “traditional skills” like literacy and communication are part of that.
It struck me that studying media can be quite an attractive proposition for young people as its usually associated with technical skills like graphics, video, audio, web-design etc but all these things are basically empty containers for words.
Media studies is foremost an extension of creative writing. You can argue that choices about images, camera angles, film edits, sound design can be achieved without recourse to words buy they are all part of the narrative and so come under the creative writing banner.
The main question is “what is my message?”. Without any narrative substance then content is meaningless and will not survive (and so will not be paid for) and that has to come from words.
When I started this job 4 years ago I assumed that students were going to be quite media-savvy and be able critically read what they come across in the media, wrongly as it turned out. What the majority are good at is recycling cliches.
I reckon I’ve helped students produce around 70 short films for media and given the choice most of them choose to make a trailer for a horror movie. About 5 of those have been truly creative.
Considerng audience seems a minor point to most of them so they don’t ask “how can I tell this story in an interesting way?” or “how can I subvert this cliche to make it interesting” which is all about creativity.
The majority of the films our students make are technically competent and get good grades. I just wish that there was more of an emphasis placed on originality in the syllabus.
To finish with a quote from Gail Rebuck…
“To take advantage of the great opportunities to create and deliver compelling content to educate, engage and entertain readers, the industry needs a workforce capable of combining traditional skills with a new digital and technical capability underpinned by a renewed emphasis on creativity.”
Am I mispresenting this? Tell us your stories…
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