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