The year began with students having to master the department’s new Apple based editing system in time for the Royal Russell Model United Nations conference.

To mark the twenty fifth anniversary celebrations, two teams created a fly-on-the-wall documentary following Presidents, Admin, Security and the Cuban delegation during the four day conference. The standard of the final cut surpassed all expectations, largely due to the editing skills and committed attitude of Gaby Zoccola and Suraj Shah.

Tsidi Dagadu, Angel Nicholls, Camilla Russell, Denis Starchevskiy and Gaby Zoccola also wrote, directed and produced a horror film trailer that the WJEC examination board intend to use as exemplar material. The trailer starred some of the school’s drama talent as victims of a faceless psychopath. Meanwhile, a documentary is in production which charts St Andrews’ valiant attempts at retaining the school’s tug-of-war championship.

For the first time Media Studies joined forces with Design & Technology for a major exhibition of practical work. Each year, AS students create a new brand and then write, shoot and edit an advertising campaign for its launch. This year competition was fierce with Harry Muldoon, Tim Crawforth-Moller and Camilla Russell’s work all proving popular with viewers. Ultimately, Angel Nicholls won the audience award for her innovative fashion campaign.

Caroline Culbert was awarded the Media Student of the Year prize for consistently gaining outstanding grades, although this award could easily have been shared with Jonathan Greenland who has similarly excelled throughout the course. Special recognition should also go to Madge Lu, Ksenia Titova and Laura Teder who have become fluent in everything from psychoanalytic film theory to postmodernism despite English not being their first language. In fact the whole of Yr 13 have worked incredibly hard to achieve a 100% A- C rate, whilst two thirds of Yr 12 gained an A or B grade.

C Dear