Poster research

Before creating my poster I researched others. I tried to find specific posters for newspapers, I mostly found Evening Post posters, this was good because it is a local newspaper. I indentified where they positioned their logo, if they had a picture, whether things were relevant and what sort of colours were used and whether they stood out or not.

Edited Photos

All of the pictures of cars I had taken were for the supplement banner which was situated along the top of my newspaper. I cropped each picture to make them in a portrait layout. Doing this only reveals part of each car so it makes people more intrigued as to what cars they are showing and what they look like, so they are more likely to visit the page.

Original Photos

My original photos were taken over a period of a week. The first photo is one I had taken near to my house as i was coming home from school one day. I saw the car abandoned in the middle of a busy road with flames blazing out of the bonnet. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to grab a photo for one of my Media Studies productions.

The cars pictured are of my dad's and my uncle's cars. The car moving along is a random one that I took on the motor way as it looked professional and would be likely to been seen in the type of banner I was producing.

There is also a picture of my local football club made to look boring and run down to suit the article it was being featured in. I did this by trying to take the picture on a dull day and include some bits ands pieces lying around to make it look untidy.

Layout Research & Adjustment

Front cover

First draft

I created my first draft front cover layout by resizing and positioning different boxes in Microsoft Publisher. I started to use a conventional layout which I had learnt about when researching existing newspapers. After I had produced my first draft I had realised that I planned to make far too many adverts but not enough articles.

Final draft

This was my proposed final layout for the front cover. I had changed some of the adverts and put different features in the position where they were. I added a supplement banner along the top instead of adverts. I had seen this in a local newspaper I had researched and it appeared professional and would suit my own local newspaper well. I also inserted an index of articles instead of the advert along the right hand side. This would give a reader a good understanding of which main articles will be featured in the newspaper. This created more of a professional looking front cover as the space wasn't filled up with adverts.

Second page

First draft
This is the first draft I have produced for my second page layout. After creating this first draft I had realised that there as too many adverts again. Also the main article picture, I felt it was too big and there could be space for another article nex to it instead.

September & October

Main Task - Planning & Research

I started the new term by researching newspapers. I did this to find out certain styles and features that I could use in my own newspaper. First of all I looked at newspaper front covers. I needed to identify a strong layout to use for my newspaper and think about where each feature would be best positioned.

I then started to look at the images/photos which are placed on the front pages of newspapers. I found out that the main stories usually have very eye catching photos to grab viewers attention, these photos usually contain a lot of drama e.g. flames, destruction etc. Although in some stories these photos don’t apply, so they have pictures of people or locations where the story took place.

I then looked at the lay outs of second pages. These are usually very busy with a lot of articles and adverts. I looked at the style in which the articles are separated with lines and how they are positioned.

Also I looked at adverts in detail. I focused on a couple and asked myself a few questions about each of them. For example who’s the target audience, how do they meet the criteria to attract this audience etc. Also I looked at how most of the adverts are laid out and what information is usually included in them.

I then created my newspaper title/logo. I couldn't decide which font to use so I put a few different ones i liked next to each other on the same page. I decided i preferred font 1 to the rest. I liked it more than the other because it is a more traditional style font which suits the town of Portishead well.

Finally I started to analyse articles and what sort of language/tone the writer has used to create specific moods. I did this by scanning in articles to the computer and annotating them.

Pre-summer holidays work - WEEK 3

Miss Rappel

In the last remaining week before the summer holidays we continued to study narratives and explored many more theory, some much more complicated than others. We also used these other theories and had a go at applying them to different films.

Pre-summer holidays work - WEEK 2

Miss Rappel

In this lesson we started to study Narratives and learnt about the difference between a plot and a narrative. We then looked at different structured theories, the first one we looked at was Tzvatan Todorov’s (basic 3 part structure). We then applied this theory to a film and a short Pixar animation shown to us by Miss Rappel.

Mr Dignan

With Mr Dignan we started to look at previous A2 music videos to grasp an idea of what we could achieve. We looked at the positive and negatives of each video and decided why there were good and bad aspects to each one.

We then looked at a variety of local newspapers and started to deiscover the different features the newspapers contain. We looked at local newspapers from Portishead (The Evening Post) and we also looked at big city local papers from Manchester and Bristol.

Pre-summer holidays work - WEEK 1

Miss Rappell

The first lesson was spent looking at the course and how it is structured, looking at the main tasks and ancillary tasks we would have to create.

We then looked at section 1b which started by learning about genre in detail, identifying the different sections (Hybrid, Repertoire of Elements, Iconography, Style, Setting, Narrative, Themes and Audience Response). We also studied sub-genres, we did this by choosing some main genres and breaking them down.

The next lesson with Miss Rappel we looked at Representation. We looked at good and bad stereotypes and talked about dominant beliefs, for example, Native Americans were uncivilised which made their killing and taking of their land seem justified in western films.

One of the last things we did in week 1 was looking at some movie trailers, such as, “Public Enemy”. We also watched a music video “T-pain – Freeze” and commented on the stereotypes used, how they are being represented and why they are relevant to the video.








Mr Dignan

The first lesson with Mr Dignan we viewed a television advert for Adidas Originals. We then descovered the genre and what audience they are trying to target. We then looked at a complaint that had been made towards it about the way in which they were trying to target a youth audience.