AS Evaluation Activities - Print

Once you've made your print product you need to evaluate what you have done. What the exam board don't want is a boring essay response. They want to see you make full use of new technologies and present your thoughts in an interesting and engaging way. Below are some suggestions on how to respond to the seven questions set by OCR.


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)

You should go through the final version of the project and select nine elements which you screengrab and drop into a photoshop. You will be using these to write about how typical or not of music magazines your particular design is, so choose them carefully.

Once you have the nine frames neatly in Photoshop, screengrab the whole thing and post to your blog, then write an analysis of how you have used such conventions.

The aspects we would like you to consider across your nine frames are:

The title of the magazine
mise-en-scene of images
Costumes and props
People
Title font and style
Written content
Music genre and how your magazine suggests it
Layout
Contents pages

EVALUATION ACTIVITY 2
How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Pick a photograph of a person from your magazine. Take a screengrab of a reasonable sized image of them. Find an image from a real magazine which you think bears some similarity. 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 the way you have constructed the image.

You might consider posture, gesture, angle, shot type, lighting, costume, expression, hair, etc

EVALUATION ACTIVITY 3
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

For this question, you are going to annotate jpegs of your magazine in Flickr.

You will need to consider institutional issues to include:

discussion of the role of magazine distribution.

what your magazine is similar to 'institutionally' (name some magazines which would be distributed in a similar way)
You need to refer to actual company names and processes

EVALUATION ACTIVITY 4
Who would be the audience for your media product?

You should have a drawing of your target audience member 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.

make sure you have taken a photo of it, post it on the blog and write a few notes on why they would buy your magazine.

EVALUATION ACTIVITY 5
How did you attract/address your audience?

You will use Flickr's annotation tools to highlight the ways in which your magazine links to other similiar magazines in order to attract the particular Audience you have previously identified.

Your annotations will refer to genre conventions, use of music, 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,photoshop,InDesign, 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?

Grab some frames from both tasks and put them on the blog and show what you know about photography, layout, fonts and modes of address.