Week 2 of Media

In Mr McDermott's classes we were focusing on basic audience profiling - social grade.
- Audience is the most important of all key concepts, media is plural of medium, - acts between two groups, audiences have to engage with media text if it is to be a success.
Niche audience - Carpworld
Mass audience - OK
The different segments of an audience are usually split into the following:-

• age
• gender
• demographics (where they live)
• profiling
• values, attitudes and lifestyles

We then also had to try and think of the worst possible magazine for mothers with young children (crafts etc)...these were dull colours, expensive, unprofessional, wrong model demographic etc...this made us also think what would be good for the magazine.

In other lessons with Mr McDermott we tried to use photoshop as we will need it to customise pictures for our magazines. Our homework was to find a magazine (that differs to our normal tastes) and write a monologue in the place of a normal reader.

Our other lessons we focused on magazines and their front covers...sketching the magazine covers proportionately etc, the we started on a magazine presentation which we will have to finish for homework and present in the next lesson.

I'm actually rather enjoying media studies :)

Week One. first few lessons

First lesson: Our teacher first went over our assessment objectives for the course (AO1-AO4), to make sure we understood what we was going to be doing for the year and what was expected of us. Then she went over the different types of media - from television through to newspapers, and went through the different aspects of a certain poster; for example the copy, images, target audience, purpose, background and colourings. We then had to annotate a magazine advertisement and finish it off for homework.

The next lesson was with our other teacher...Mr Mcdermott...we looked into the sections of a magazine cover (for example cover lines, the mast head and the main image), we were also set homework to annotate 4 magazine covers in detail - the magazines were Carpworld (fishing), Empire (Sci-fi), Q (music) and Woman & home (women's lifestyle). We also were looking into codes; these are how producers communicate through the media, the main 5 codes are:-

1. Technical codes - camera shot, angle, editing and transitions.

2. Symbolic codes - body language, gesture, setting, dress, colour and composition.

3. Sound codes - music dialogue and sound effects.

4. Narrative codes - storyline, plot, structure and characters.

5. Representation - age, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality and regional.

In the last lesson of the week we did research on magazines in Tesco's, we had to answer certain questions.

1. How many different types of magazines are there?

There were around 17-20 different types.

2. How do Tesco display their magazines?

In rows with large board above or below telling the customer the genre.

3. What were the most popular type of magazines?

Real life/Celebrity

4. Titles?

OK, Take a break, Heat, Hello, Reveal and Closer.

5. What was the most expensive magazine? How much and what genre was it?

Vogue and Bazaar are both fashion magazines and they cost £4.00

6. What do all magazines have in common?

They all have enticing images on the front cover and all of the names of the magazines contrast with the background of the magazine.

7. What differences do all the magazines have?

They all have different colour schemes, different images and different styles of writing.

And that is my first week of media in a nutshell :) xxx