Media: should I choose it?

Media representations

Media forms in production

Australian stories

Narrative, style and genre

Narratives in production

Media and change

Unit 3, AOS 1 — Narratives and their contexts

You study one media narrative closely — a film, a television series, a podcast, a game, a photographic series — and learn to take it apart. The building blocks are media codes (symbolic, technical, written and audio) and narrative conventions (story and plot, structure, character, setting, point of view), which are distinct concepts in VCE Media and are marked as such. On top of that sits the construction of representations, and how those representations reflect or challenge the views and values held in the society that produced the narrative. The second half of the area of study turns outward to context: the social, historical, institutional, cultural, economic and political circumstances of production, and the way audiences located in different contexts engage with, consume and read the same narrative differently. Everything is expressed in precise media language rather than everyday description.

Unit 3, AOS 2 — Research, development and experimentation

This area of study is the bridge between analysing other people's work and making your own. You generate and test ideas for a media production, then research a media form and the products and practitioners working in it, studying how producers use codes and conventions to convey meaning and engage audiences. From there the work becomes hands-on: you research and experiment to develop specific skills in the equipment, technologies and processes your chosen form requires, and you record, document and evaluate that exploration as you go. The documentation is not a formality — the study design treats recording and evaluating research as examinable key knowledge in its own right, and the assessment expects you to describe an experiment with variables you can actually test, not a list of things you did.

Unit 3, AOS 3 — Pre-production planning

Here you commit. You document the intention of your proposed production and specify the audience it is for, then document the narrative itself, then produce the written and visual planning documents the industry actually uses for your selected form — scripts, treatments, storyboards, shot lists, layouts, floor plans — along with production and post-production roles, tasks and timelines. The codes, conventions, technologies and processes you apply must be appropriate to the form, the audience and the narrative you have chosen, and the plan you produce here is the one you have to realise in Unit 4. This area of study is assessed at school through the School-assessed Task as well as being examinable, so the planning documents you build are doing double duty.

Unit 4, AOS 1 — Media production

Unit 4 opens by turning the Unit 3 plan into a finished product. You work through the production and post-production processes your form requires, operating the equipment, materials and technologies involved, and applying media codes and conventions to construct meaning for your specified audience. Two things distinguish this area of study from simply making something: the study design requires you to use reflection and structured feedback to refine and resolve the product, and it requires you to document that development, refinement and resolution as you go. The product is then distributed to the audience it was designed for. Together with Unit 3 AOS 2 and AOS 3 this is the School-assessed Task, worth 40 per cent of the study score on its own.

Unit 4, AOS 2 — Agency and control in the media

The theory half of Unit 4, and the second Section B essay. You examine the changing relationship between the media and audiences, and argue about influence in both directions — the media's influence over audiences, and the agency audiences exercise through user-generated content, sharing, organising and platform participation. You study how globalised media institutions, governments and individuals use the media, and you assemble contemporary arguments, evidence and ideas rather than assertions. The second half is regulation: how media and audiences are regulated in Australia through legislation, regulatory bodies, classification and industry self-regulation and codes of practice; the issues and challenges that regulation runs into, particularly across borders; and the ethical and legal issues in play — privacy, data harvesting, surveillance capitalism, copyright and defamation.

Unit 1 — Media forms, representations and Australian stories (not examinable, foundational)

Unit 1 builds the vocabulary the Units 3 and 4 examination assumes you own. Area of Study 1, Media representations, establishes how representations are constructed across different products, forms and contexts, and how audiences engage with, consume and read them. Area of Study 2, Media forms in production, puts you through the media production process for the first time, designing and producing media representations for specified audiences in a range of forms. Area of Study 3, Australian stories, analyses the structural features of Australian fictional and non-fictional narratives in two or more media forms — narratives that must be by Australian creators with primarily Australian content, at least one of them from an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander creator or producer.

Unit 2 — Narrative across media forms (not examinable, foundational)

Unit 2 does the same preparatory work for narrative and for the contemporary landscape. Area of Study 1, Narrative, style and genre, analyses the style of media creators and producers and how narratives influence audiences across different media forms — the direct ancestor of Unit 3 Area of Study 1. Area of Study 2, Narratives in production, applies the media production process to create, develop and construct narratives, which is where the practical skills the School-assessed Task depends on are first built. Area of Study 3, Media and change, discusses the influence of new media technologies on society, audiences, individuals, media industries and institutions, and is the groundwork for the agency, influence and regulation arguments of Unit 4 Area of Study 2.