Learning in Media Arts

Learning in Media Arts involves students learning to engage with communications technologies and cross-disciplinary art forms to design, produce, distribute and interact with a range of print, audio, screen-based or hybrid artworks. Students explore, view, analyse and participate in media culture from a range of viewpoints and contexts. They acquire skills and processes to work in a range of forms and styles. Students learn to reflect critically on their own and others’ media arts experiences and evaluate media artworks, cultures and contexts. They express, conceptualise and communicate through their media artworks with increasing complexity and aesthetic understanding.

Making in Media Arts involves using communications technologies to design, produce and distribute media artworks.

Responding in Media Arts involves students learning to explore, view, analyse and participate in media culture.

In making and responding students engage with the key concepts, story principles and elements of media (technical and symbolic). The five interrelated key concepts provide a framework for students to create and analyse media artworks. They develop understanding of how the five key concepts explore media artworks representations – that is, constructed realities – of the world, communicated through languages and technology for an audience in community and institutional contexts.

Knowledge and skills of Media Arts

In Media Arts, students learn to clarify, intensify and interpret human experience through representations in images, sounds and text. By creating media artworks they engage the senses, the imagination and the intellect, and they learn to express and challenge constructs of the world. Through creative and critical use of language and technology, students develop aesthetic control that allows them to communicate with clarity and impact through the media they create and consume.

In Media Arts, technical and symbolic elements work together within established and emerging media conventions and technologies to inform, persuade, entertain and educate through story structures and ideas.

In the experience of making and responding to media artworks, students develop identity and learn to understand themselves and others through aesthetic processes that promote critical perception, personal expression and collaboration. Designing and creating media artworks involves the development of technical, physical and communication skills.

The development of aesthetic knowledge in Media Arts rewards students’ curiosity and creative exploits. This development increases their engagement with and understanding of how images, sounds and text create experiences consumers recognise and respond to physically, emotionally and intellectually.

The information below outlines the knowledge and skills that students need to develop in Media Arts. Terms specific to this curriculum are defined in the glossary and a hyperlink to examples of band-appropriate knowledge and skills is provided with the content descriptions.

Knowledge

Students discover and explore the key concepts and elements of media arts, applying story principles and making and responding to media arts in various forms.

Key concepts

Students develop knowledge and understanding of five key concepts: the media languages used to tell stories; the technologies which are essential for producing, accessing and distributing media; the various institutions that enable and constrain media production and use; the audiences for whom media arts products are made and who respond as consumers, citizens and creative individuals; and the constructed representations of the world, which rely on shared social values and beliefs.

The elements of media arts (technical and symbolic elements)

The technical and symbolic elements of media arts, including composition, space, time, movement, sound and lighting, work together to create meaning in different contexts and forms for different purposes.

Story principles

The elements of media arts are combined and shaped using story principles of structure, intent, characters, settings, points of view and genre conventions.

Viewpoints

In making and responding, students learn that meanings can be generated from different viewpoints and that these shift according to different world encounters. As students make, investigate or critique media artworks as producers and consumers of media arts, they may ask and answer questions to interrogate the producers’ meanings and the consumers’ interpretations. Meanings and interpretations are informed by contexts of societies, cultures and histories, and an understanding of how elements, materials, skills and processes are used. These questions provide the basis for making informed critical judgements about their own media artworks and the media artworks they see, hear, interact with and consume as audiences. The complexity and sophistication of such questions will change across Foundation to Year 10. In the later years, students will consider the interests and concerns of artists and audiences regarding philosophies and ideologies, critical theories, institutions and psychology.

Forms

As they learn in Media Arts, students create and analyse forms such as film, news report, documentary, advertisement, music video, animation, video games and/or a combination of these. From contemporary and personal experiences of media culture they learn how forms, styles and contexts of media artworks are shaped by histories, purpose, traditions and communications technologies. Students explore stylistic forms from local and global contexts including those from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Asian cultures. They produce artworks in narrative and non-narrative forms that reach audiences through specific media contexts that include radio, print, cinema, television, internet, mobile devices or new and emerging contexts.

Skills, techniques and processes

The skills, techniques and processes to create media artworks are developed through the three stages of production: pre-production (including scriptwriting, storyboarding, sketching designs, planning, research); production (including capturing, recording, directing); and post-production (including mixing, editing, assembling, laying out, distributing). Students learn through critical thinking and creative processes in media arts practice. They learn to collaborate in creative teams and analytically respond to, and interact with, context and audience. Students learn to apply key concepts, story principles, and elements of media (symbolic and technical) as they design, produce, distribute and analyse media artworks. Students learn and use the established and emerging techniques and practices (media conventions) for creating within different media forms.

As students’ learning progresses, they learn about safe practice in media arts and develop digital citizenship through processes that respect rights, responsibilities and protocols in the creating of their media artworks.

Materials

In developing knowledge and skills in media arts, students use images, sounds and text and the technologies used to create them. Students may also use equipment, props, costumes and sets during production, depending on what is suitable to the form of the media artwork and the intention of the artist.