These are some key points that examiners stated where problematic and caused marks to be dropped:
In general, less successful music either missed key elements from the brief or did not adhere to the codes and conventions of the form. Some examples were:
• Tracks that did not fit the dance genre. Although this is a very broad field, some songs chosen could not be regarded as dance, with a number of pop/ballad tracks, for example (e.g. a low-tempo piano track by Lorde with no drums or bass; several indie rock pieces and at least one 1980s classic which, good though it was, was clearly not ‘dance’)
• Failure to mention the name of the band/ artist/ track at the start or end of the video
• Editing which did not match the pace/ BPM of the track (particularly important for the genre)
• Concepts which lacked a clear through-line (for example, pieces which were effectively just environmental studies where candidates had gone into the countryside or down to the beach and simply filmed footage with little or no consideration of structure/ theme)
• Mise-en-scene featuring school fields / classrooms/ uniform. In several centres, it was hard to see that two social groups were represented
• Pieces where performance footage was used in a perfunctory manner or where lip-synch was not fully effective
• Videos where some sort of simplistic narrative, e.g. a chase or use of a candidate’s holiday footage (a huge number of airplane windows were filmed through this session!), was imposed with little or no consideration of the content/ mood/ tone of the track
• Camerawork/ camera movement which did not demonstrate the level of skill, finish or excellence required for Level 5 marks to be secured – although this is less important than it was for the legacy specification, the criteria relating to this uses the descriptors ‘sophisticated’ and ‘accomplished’; where shots are out of focus or the camera-operator is reflected in glass, it is difficult to agree that these are appropriate terms to use
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