For the final 20 marks of the project, you must complete seven tasks on your blog, posting them in this order, with the question heading at the top of each task. Make sure you answer each question as well as producing the visual elements. Try not to write more than 1500 words in total.
1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of music magazines)
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups ?
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
Below is a guide from the exam board on exactly how to answer these questions.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 1
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of music magazines)
As part of your planning and research you should have looked at Music Magazines and selected a particular sub genre (e.g. Indie, pop, r&b, dance etc) to re-create. Find an example of a pre exisiting music magazine which matches your magazine, paste it into your blog and highlight the key generic conventions of the magazine.
You should go through the final version of your project and select elements which follow conventions and any which do not. If not, why not.
The aspects we would like you to consider across your nine frames are:
The title of the magazine
Graphology/page layouts
Costumes, props, iconography used to reflect genre
Camerawork and framing of images
Title, article, header etc font and style
Genre and how the magazine cover, contents and spread suggests it
How your artist(s) are represented
Colour scheme
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 2
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
Pick a key image of your artist from your magazine (ideally the cover image). Take a screengrab of a reasonable sized image of them. Think of one or more recording artists/stars from other magazines with some similarity to them (but maybe some differences too!), find an image on the web of that/those stars and grab it as well. Drop the two into photoshop, as a split screen. Export this splitscreen image as a jpeg then drop onto your blog and write about the similarities and differences in terms of appearance, costume etc.
So for example if you have a female R&B star on your cover, look for other female R&B star to compare them with (remember to try and ensure that they are of a similar age, race etc)...
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 3
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
For this question, you are going to do a 'director's commentary' style voiceover explaining some of the key features of your magazine cover
You will need to script the voiceover which deals with institutional issues to include:
Discussion of your production company name and logo and the role of such companies
What does a publishing company do?
The idea of a distributor and who that might be and why.
Where the money might have come from for a magazine such as yours
What your magazine is similar to 'institutionally' (name some magazines which would be released in a similar way)
You need to refer to actual company names and processes so you will need to maybe do a bit more research into magazine publishers like emap
When you have scripted, record the voiceover using iMovie, windows movie maker etc on a new audio timeline, then export to quicktime and embed on blog.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 4
Who would be the audience for your media product?
You should have a produced a blog post on your target audience and an explanation of what kinds of taste they might have - where they would shop, what music they would listen to, what their favourite Tv programme would be, etc.
Simply take a pic of someone who fits your target audience reading your magazine, post it on the blog and write a few notes explaining why they would buy your magazine (e.g. appeal of artist, articles, features etc)
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 5
How did you attract/address your audience?
Take a screen grab of your magazine's cover, content and spread and place into iMovie, movie maker etc. You will then use YOUTUBE's annotation tools to add NOTES, SPEECHBUBBLES, and LINKS to your magazine:
http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=92710
These annotations will highlight the ways in which your Magazine links to other similiar films in order to attract the particular Audience you have previously identified.
Your annotations will refer to genre conventions, use of iconography, similarities with other magazines and what you have identified as the Unique Selling Point of your imaginary magazine.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 6
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
In pairs, take a picture of each other holding the kit you have used. This might just be the camera and tripod, and your Macbook but there may be other things you want in the shot.
Drop the image onto your blog and annotate it, adding all the programs and other technology you have used as screengrabs and what you learnt about it/from using it. Your written text need only be minimal. You could include reference to all the online and computer programs you have used such as flickr, blogger, facebook, photoshop, vimeo, scribd, slideshare etc.
EVALUATION ACTIVITY 7
Looking back at your preliminary task (the school magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
Concentrate on mise en scene and camerawork.
Grab some images from both tasks and put them on the blog and show what you know about shot types, magazine terms etc. Explain how you've improved.
