'Construction' Blogging

You're now all working on the construction of your music magazine and it's important you blog about the major decisions, experiences and issues you have during this process - this is your chance to highlight and support your creative decisions.

Tips:

Make a habit of blogging after every time you worked on your construction for about an hour - this will avoid having to go back and retrace your steps and gives your online portfolio fluency.

Print screen the big changes/decisions you make in Photoshop and keep this images in a powerpoint for you to then select the ones you need for your blog.

Don't just blog the images/print screens - explain the decisions, experiences and issues you've had.

Your research and planning doesn't just stop - link all of your creative decisions to what you've found out from your market and audience research and make this clear in your blogging. 

You should be showing aspects of your construction to your target audience throughout and amending your design to suit their feedback - all of this needs to be evidenced on your blog!

Happy blogging!

An Introduction to your AS Media Foundation Portfolio

Your Brief:

Print
Preliminary exercise: using DTP and an image manipulation program, produce the front page of a new school/college magazine, featuring a photograph of a student in medium close-up plus some appropriately laid-out text and a masthead. Additionally candidates must produce a DTP mock-up of the layout of the contents page to demonstrate their grasp of the program.

Main task: the front page, contents and double page spread of a new music magazine (if done as a group task, each member of the group to produce an individual edition of the magazine, following the same house style). Maximum four members to a group.

All images and text used must be original, produced by the candidate(s), minimum of FOUR images per candidate.

AS MEDIA INITIAL RESEARCH WORK

·         Buy or take photos of a minimum of two magazine front covers, contents pages and double page spreads and analyse their use of conventions. Select magazines that link to the target audience/sub-genre that you’re interested in.

Consider the following points:

o   How often the magazine is published, how much it costs, where it’s sold, who distributes/publishes it.

o   What their target audience is and what sub-genre of music they focus on. How do you know?

o   Their use of colour, different fonts and sizes, layout, number and type of images, how the text links to the images, the variety of articles.

·         Upload this analysis onto your blog (including images – not loads of text) focusing on what you have learnt about what your magazine must look and ‘sound‘ like e.g. a bullet point list of the things (both visual and text) that you will include in your music magazine based on the research.

·         Based on this research, decide on a final sub-genre of music to focus your magazine on and a target audience for it. Begin to research this genre including current artists, record labels, other magazines, events, gigs etc and post information on your blog e.g. links to YouTube videos or relevant websites.

·         Research local artists and gigs especially those linked to the sub-genre of music you will be focusing on. Try to make links through Twitter or Facebook with these artists and consider if you’ll be able to interview and photograph them for your magazine.

Remember:

·         There should be several posts (at least 5) on your blogs by 7^th January – we will be checking everyone’s blog!

·         There should not be lots of writing on your blog; the more images, videos and other media you have on there the better (refer to the website resources sheet for ideas on how to be more creative).

Double page spread

View more PowerPoint from MissOMills

Your magazine genre and target audience

Your task today is to work on deciding the genre and target audience of your magazine

You must reasearch two magazines which already exist within the genre you are interested in (if you're still undecided choose a well known genre to work with for now) and analyse the effectiveness of the following elements, looking at how they help make it appealing to its target audience:

• what are the colour schemes?
• cost?
• the content - what kind of topics are the articles about?
• how the magazine distributes, markets and sells itself
• is there and online version? is it defferent to the print version?

You must also analyse similarities / differences in the use of conventions on the front covers, contents pages and a double page spread from inside the magazine. Pay particular

You will need to post all your work on your blog.

Follow the links below to see examples of this work completed on students' blogs from last year:

Blog 1
Blog 2

Section B: Music Industry Useful Articles

Here are some useful articles to digest before your exam:

http://www.emimusic.com/news/2011/emi-announces-successful-capital-restructuring-and-change-of-ownership/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16382648

http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/16/2567284/google-music-launching-with-universal-emi-sony-music-and-many

Festive delights

Some great dramas coming up on itv over the holidays as well - make sure you're well stocked with chocolate, the sofa cushions are plumped and sit back and enjoy. Happy homework!