GCSE Photography Specification.

SPECIFICATIONS

What you have to do

The specification of an examination course is a breakdown of all the things you need to learn to achieve the qualification. It's what we used to call the syllabus of the subject.

What the Specification says. What we do.

AO1 Developing ideas.

Students will:

Understand how ideas provide the starting point for art and design practice and form an integral part of the creative process.
Formulate ideas from a variety of starting points.
Carry out appropriate research from primary and contextual sources.
Analyse and evaluate their own and others' work in the context of developing ideas.
Develop insight into selected works from contemporary, historical and cultural contexts.

Students will:

develop skills through experimenting with appropriate media and methods.
Use materials and techniques to explore the potential of ideas.
Use research sources to inform the development and refinement of ideas.

Students will:

Carry out appropriate research from primary and contextual studies.
Demonstrate skillful use of the formal elements, including line, tone, colour, shape, pattern, texture, form and structure.
Use media and refer to contextual sources to develop a range of recording skills.
Develop visual, spatial, textural and other qualities within the context of recording from appropriate sources.

Students will:

Develop and communicate ideas through an informed use of visual, spatial. textural and other qualities.
Demonstrate understanding of selected works from contemporary, historical and cultural contexts.
Show evidence of an ongoing critical and analytical review of their progress, making relevant connections between visual, written, oral and other elements.
Recognise the important role of individual responsibility and personal development in producing and presenting their response(s) in a meaningful way.

Students

AO2 Refining ideas and skills.

AO3 Recording for purpose.

AO4 Presenting and realising.

We start with research.

Once we have a project in mind we produce a mindmap in our sketchbook of all the ideas we have on the subject of the project.
From this we write a 50 word (minimum) proposal of what we want to do in the project.
We research artists' work which is similar and analyse this work in the context that the artist was working in.
We develop ideas about what we are going to do from the artists that we have studied and annotate this in our sketch books.

When we have an idea of what the subject of our project is going to be, we start to take photographs of that subject, informed by the research that we have carried out.
We try different techniques, different editing styles and different cropping based upon what we have learnt through our research.

Having developed our ideas, we begin to build them into a coherent body of work.
We annotate and reflect upon the work we are developing and identify those elements that would best for the final piece of work.

We select our best ideas and can explain why they are the best.
We can relate these ideas to our research and explain how we have developed them, showing and explaining which ideas worked and which were less successful.
We create our final piece of work.
We can reflect on this body of work and explain fully how it was achieved, and also identify aspects for future developments.

Developing ideas.

The Final Piece

Testing ideas.