Link to Subject spec

Here is a link to the OCR Media Studies specification. It is a PDF document. On pages 67 - 68 are headings for different sections of your evalation. On the pages before are the mark schemes for the project and for the research. Make sure you can tick all the boxes!

http://www.ocr.org.uk/qualifications/type/gce/amlw/media_studies/index.aspx

What are the purposes of a music magazine?

List created by Mr Kenny's class:

To inform the audience about new artists / upcoming events
To promote celebrities / musicians / artists
To advertise products (music and related lifestyle products)
To entertain the audience
To promote the magazine itself – to sell more copies!

Developing and challenging these conventional purposes . . .

To provide local music information? Eg. Drowned in Sound
To provide responsive information about music? Drowned in Sound
To provide in-depth, intellectualised coverage of ‘pop’ music? Eg. Pitchfork Media
To provide independent coverage of music? Eg. The Quietus

Screen grabs

It can be a good idea, while you're working on your magazines, to take screen grabs occasionally so that you can show your magazine as it changes and comment on the edits that you make.

Prelim Task

Mr. Strathdene and Ms. Brooks' class, please take note of Mr. Kenny's post below. After Monday's class, your school magazine should be finished and you should be moving all your efforts onto the music magazine.

Prelim Task - School Magazine - Hand In

Mr Kenny's students:

- You need to have your final front cover and contents page completed and posted on your blog by Friday 13th November.

- You also need to have your blog completely up to date with all of your supporting research and experiments with photographs, text and layout on Photoshop.

Next week, you will write one further blog post to complete the project. This will be a detailed evaluation of your front cover and supporting evidence.

Looking forward to seeing your final pieces!

Year 12 Media Studies Foundation Portfolio

Plan for Magazine

When you have concluded your research (worth 20 marks) – at least six blog posts including your assessment of survey data you have collected, you can move onto writing and posting the plan for your own magazine. In this you need to include:

Outline:
Name?
Genre of music?
Why have you chosen to do this? Refer to your research data as part of your justification.
Audience: who is it targeted at? Why?
Institutions: large publishing/media company (emap, IPC) or independent production. What might be the advantages of your chosen institutional background?

Design:

Comment on your initial ideas for:
Fonts (type/size, one or many)
Page layout/design
This is the ‘look’ of the magazine – explain how you will achieve it

Content

What are your ideas for your front page, contents page and double page spread? These don’t have to be too specific at this stage – just make sure you get ideas down. Where will you take pictures? Use of technology/ICT?

Language

Will you have a house style? An idiolect that will be shared and give ‘ownership’ of the magazine for your target audience can be a good idea – what will yours be?

Probably enough to be going on with for now…

Jude Rogers

I hope you enjoyed Jude Rogers' visit as much as I did. Aside from her celebrity revelations (!), I think she had some really useful advice for the coursework. Here are some of the notes I made, you might want to record your own thoughts on your own blog (hint!):

• Make interviews interesting by recording little details about how the subject answers, looks, eats, begins, behaves etc.
• Know your audience in terms of what information they need (NME readers know who Muse are, New Statesman readers probably won't), but that doesn't necessarily mean changing your personal writing style.
• The key for a good interview is being able to ask questions to a total stranger that will elicit something interesting about them that hasn't been written before.
• It's not a coincidence that almost all magazines have a main image of a person staring out at the reader.
• You don't have to limit yourself to a certain type of music, readers nowadays are more eclectic than they were 10 or 20 years ago.
• The importance of a good logo and title - single word, catchy etc.
• Ways the cover information draws in the reader - it doesn't need to be too clever.

Keeping blogs up to date

Just to help you so you don't get confused, by Friday you need the following posts on your blog:

• semiotic analysis of front cover
• comment/analysis of falling magazine sales
• analysis of Kerrang and NME articles
• case study of specific magazine - features, audience, font/size, use of imagery etc.

(all qualitative data)

Also it would be good if you have designed one survey using surveymonkey - a general one about readership of music magazines/online magazines. (quantitative data)

Where is your music magazine research?

Come on Year 12. I was expecting to log on and see you posting about music magazines. But none so far. We have a lesson tomorrow and I will need to see some evidence of your research on your blogs!

Last Year's Efforts

If you haven't already, make sure you spend a good amount of time trawling through last year's efforts. Go to fortismeremedia.blogspot.com and click on the different followers. The two covers above are particularly good and show quite a different approach to the task. What kind of reader do you think each magazine is aimed at? Think about fonts, titles, image, layout, language and use of magazine conventions.

Problems with followers

Make sure that when you are signing up to be a follower of this blog, you show the links to your two blogs: the school magazine and the music magazine. If you have already signed up, do this by clicking on your name as it appears in the followers list, then "site settings", then add links, and add your two blogs (they should appear as options) as the two links. If you are in the process of signing up, select "further options" as you are doing it and you are given the option to add links. Make sure it works by checking your two blogs appear when someone clicks on your follower image on the main blog.

Evaluation of School Magazine

Everyone in Mr. Strathdene's class needs to have completed their first evaluation of a school magazine cover by Tuesday 6th October and posted it to their blog. Make sure you add a picture to your posting. Make it look beautiful.

Be careful of losing your work. The safest thing to do is to type up your thoughts into a word document that you are saving and then copy and paste it into a blog post.

If you've chosen one of last year's magazines to evaluate, go to last year's site (fortismeremedia.blogspot.com) and get the image from there. The ones we looked at in class were Sameera's and Leila's.

Ms. Cunningham's class? Come on! Catch up!

Welcome to Media Studies 2009-10!

This term you will be creating your own Music Magazine.
This will be 50% of your final AS grade.

The magazine will consist of a Front cover, contents' page, and a double-page spread article.

Four original photos must be included.









The break down of the marks is:

• 20 marks for Planning / Blog


• 60 marks for Production
  
• 20 marks for Evaluation

You will start off by creating a school front cover magazine for practice which will constitute part of your planning mark. The evidence of your planning needs to be done in blog form.

So you need to set up your own blog and become a follower of this one. Don't forget to include a nice picture of yourself!

As the term continues it is your responsibility to update your blog with your analysis and planning.