This document outlines an assignment for students to research teen films. Students are instructed to watch the first 10 minutes of at least 5 teen films and answer questions about how each film defines itself as a teen movie, aims for a teenage audience, portrays teenagers and adults, features locations, and establishes mood. Students must blog their answers, supporting posts with still images and video clips from YouTube. Each film analyzed gets its own blog post. Completing this assignment will help students develop knowledge for their coursework and A-level studies.

1. AS Media Studies
Induction project – summer 2010
Assignment details
This assignment will help you to develop your knowledge of teen films. This
should help you to clarify your ideas on what you are producing and who you
are producing it for.
The assignment will also get you started with blogging – this will be the key
means of recording research and planning work for the coursework projects.
This will contribute to the marks for the Research & Planning component of your
coursework.
Teen movie conventions research
You need to watch extracts from films which focus on teenagers – you should
watch the first 10 minutes of at least 5 films, but you don’t need to look at
more than 10 films. For each text that you look at, you need to answer the
following questions:
1. Referring to the key elements of a teen movie section from the Donnie
Darko sheets, how is it possible to define this text as being a teen
movie?
2. How does this signal that it is aiming for a teenage audience?
3. How does this text portray teenagers and adults?
4. What type of locations feature within the text?
5. What type of mood is established and how is achieved?
For accessing films there are 3 options:
1. Watch teen films on TV
2. Watch teen films on DVD
3. Access youtube to watch clips
• Your answers should be pasted onto your blog and these answers should
be supported on the blog with still image files and moving image extracts
embedded from Youtube.
• Each film that you explore should have a seprate post on the blog and
there should be an appropriate header for each post, e.g – Film 1: Back to
the Future 3
• The knowledge and skill development that you will gain from this exercise
are vital to making a solid start to Year 12 AND will be vital to you for the
rest of the A-level.