This is for students who know the whole film well, but who need to carefully prepare a few key scenes for the exam. This resource focuses on the Specialist Study Area of Narrative, and takes students through the structure of the sequence and the 5 elements of film. There is an essay title at the end, and a couple of sample paragraphs to show how they might tackle it. There is nothing on Ideology in this resource as I tend to teach that separately. It’s an electronic resource with boxes that expand as students type in them, but you could easily enlarge the boxes yourself, print it off and get them to write in it by hand.

We don’t offer Film at GCSE at my school, but we do at A Level, so we have decided to include some short units in English in Years 9-11 to familiarise the pupils with the subject. Here is what we will be doing with Year 9 for the last couple of weeks of the summer term. The unit starts with the students researching the 5 elements of film which the Eduqas A Level covers: cinematography, mise-en-scene, sound, editing and performance. They then explore a (totally non-violent) scene from early in 28 Days Later, using these new terms. This will take a couple of lessons. There is then a longer section where the pupils explore the beach scene in Jaws in several different ways. This culminates in a task which could be a written piece, a group presentation or a podcast. It’s up to you. The final section contains two silent clips from live action and animated movies. The students then create their own Foley sound for one of those clips. All the clips the links needed are embedded into the ppt. The PowerPoint SoW is accompanied by a 12 side pupil booklet they can use for making notes and writing their responses.