Eduqas A Level Sample Student Workbook

Edusites units are a three tiered learning approach including Online Lesson-by-Lesson Slides and the Teacher Scheme of Learning and Student workbook which are interlinked – each are dependent on the other and should be used together to provide students and teachers with an in depth learning experience.

Lesson 15: Straight Outta Compton

The Straight Outta Compton set product requires awareness of the developments in film promotion and the methods by which they construct their audience. The nature of film marketing and the increasing exploitation of social media and convergence in the 21st Century are key elements for your own individual and group research. Useful research for you is the Studio system that has emerged from the collapse of the old Hollywood major studios and the re-shaping of the film industry from the early 1990s with the move to integration into vast media institutions and Universal as part of a global media conglomerate. Audience theories of market segmentation would also be rich in ideas as is the theoretical models explored elsewhere in this unit such as Fandom and the models of Silverstone and Livingston & Lunt.

The music industry of the period was dominated by mainstream acts and the decision-making of a small number of powerful vertically organized record companies.

In an era, pre-the internet, record sales – mainly vinyl, tape and CD – drove careers and the music charts were the key indicator of success. Despite punk, the idea of performers becoming successful without a record deal and the backing of a major label was unheard of.

The era was also dominated by the growing power of MTV, which for many years was thought to be discriminatory in the limited range of ethnic representation in its video programming. MTV argued that this was simply a matter of which artists sold the most records and the result of commercial decisions as to the artists and musical styles that their audience wanted to see. The break-through of Michael Jackson with the videos for Billie-Jean and later Thriller had made some challenge to this claim, but the period the film is set in can be seen as one of immense significance for modern popular culture and the later breakthrough and establishment of Rap as a mainstream musical form.

• Conventional film marketing usually refers to trailers, teaser posters, theatrical posters, billboards, magazine features.
• Press Marketing - allowing the press access to your set or pre-made images of characters etc., will encourage them to make the main feature from a film or even a cover.
• Websites for the film are usually some interactive content with links to social media for additional spread of the film.
• Since 2008 and the presence of Twitter and Facebook, Social Marketing has been deployed with ideas such as creating social media pages for characters etc.
• Viral Marketing – intends to set up a word of mouth spread by creating pages that appear to be ‘real – the most famous is that of the Blair witch – where a website made the myth appear real and one that was currently being investigated.
• Fandom – fans construct websites, forums, twitter feeds or Facebook pages.

Influencer marketing is where focus is placed on gaining and then using the opinion of influential people rather than the larger target market. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential consumers, and shapes marketing activities around persuading these influencers whose recommendations are known to shape the behaviour of others. The advertising industry use this in celebrity endorsements – paying celebrities to promote their products and services.

The idea of a such influence was first suggested by academic researchers Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet in their study The People’s Choice. This research was based on an examination of the factors that influenced voters in the 1940 American presidential election campaign. They found that the direct influence of pamphlets and speeches and advertising had a limited impact with voters when compared to the influence of those they termed opinion leaders – people whom voters trusted and deemed to be intelligent, reliable and honest.

This idea was further developed in Personal Influence by Lazarsfeld and Katz in 1955 and in The Effects of Mass Communication by Klapper in 1960.

Lesson 16: Straight Outta Compton

The trailer applies well-trodden conventions of form:

• The length of duration of the trailer at 2.30 minutes is conventional of modern trailers – sufficient to tease with glimpse of the full narrative and creating expectations
• The MPAA green band with the regulatory rating - NWA were controversial and this enforces that narrative and values reassuring audience that there is no sanitising of the historical/cultural content and context