Useful reading, books, viewing

Screenshot of links list/RSS from here

You could buy books on general media theory (or a specific area of this), or even semiotics, if you wish, though the main recommendation would be to do some wider reading on the film industry, and especially British cinema ... and viewing (scroll to the end for viewing tips and links).

SUGGESTED READING

Your exam board, CIE, base the syllabus on the UK OCR syllabus, and you can buy a guide book on the AS OCR course.

There are journals you could consider too: Sight and Sound (university level) and also Media Magazine (which St G's subscribes to).

The Guardian is a centre-left UK broadsheet or 'quality' newspaper; its Media section is the most comprehensive of any paper, and you'll learn a lot by regularly dipping into it (I use the free Android app to download new articles automatically overnight, and read this daily). The film section is obviously especially useful! Furthermore, there are weekly UK/US/world box office reports, with a lot of great information on audiences, film companies and marketing, with insights into distribution and how cinema companies operate too. You can find links over on my British Cinema blog, plus RSS feeds for specific topics like NBC-Universal!

KEY LINKS:

• Film Guardian: Fortnightly USA (Jeremy Kay)

• Film Guardian: Weekly Global (Phil Hoad)

• Film Guardian: Weekly UK (Charles Gant)
• Film Guardian main site
• BLOG: AS Coursework Film Openings
• BLOG: British Cinema
• BLOG: Student coursework blogs
• BLOG: Browse all Mr Burrowes' blogs
• YOUTUBE: IGS Media (past student work + playlists)
• BOOKS: 'British cinema' search on Amazon

Gant columns from June 2016

The top two results from the simple 'british cinema' search below are especially recommended. The British Cinema Book [Amazon] is hefty and very long, but is organised into reasonably short chapters. New British Cinema from Submarine... is an interesting read (and Submarine is from Warp, one of our two core case studies).



There are a great many books on the British film industry, and on issues of representation within this, but there are also many books on film generally. Jill Helmes' Introduction to Film Studies is very student-friendly [amazon].

(At A2 we will look at film censorship - Julian Petley's Film and Video Censorship in Modern Britain is a great read [amazon]; Behind the Scenes at the BBFC is very useful [amazon]).

Try this search.

The Cinema Book is also hefty, but a great overview of cinema [Amazon].

VIEWING PAST STUDENT WORK
You can access past student coursework blogs here. From 2016, Sophie's was an especially good example.
Here's the 2016 AS final cuts:




VIEWING WARP AND WORKING TITLE FILMS
We closely examine two British production companies, and explore how they attempt to gain an audience for their output in a global context: Working Title (a subsidiary of big six conglomerate NBC-Universal) and Warp Films (an Indie). Therefore viewing trailers, interviews, behind-the-scenes, openings or full films are all useful, as is any reading on the companies and their films. I have blogged a lot on both, with some very detailed posts in the British Cinema blog.

We have built up a sizeable collection of Warp/WT DVDs in the StG Library.

To help identify their films, you can access the Working Title Wiki or IMDB, plus the-numbers.com partial list of budgets and box office, and the Warp Wiki or IMDB, plus the short, partial the-numbers.com list of budgets and box office.

You can see part of the WT list below. You can also access my playlists of WT and Warp trailers etc:

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