How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

We used canon cameras provided by college, to take photographs for our products. These enabled us to have high quality images that would reflect those found in a real media product. They also help to take images for our blog to show how our project developed.






During pre and post production we continuously published posts on blooger.com, to help show the different stages that we were at in making our real media products. It also helped during the research and planning stages because we were able to see our thoughts and ideas visually.






The internet aided us well mainly during the research stages to find real media products that could help us when making our own. We could collect images and research into local newspapers from around the country that we normally wouldn't have access to, this gave us a variety of ideas to go off.






Adobe Premiere Pro helped us to create our radio advert. We were able to edit and add sounds to our advert making it more realistic. This helped us very much because without any editing programme like Adobe Premiere Pro we wouldn't have been able to achieve such high standards as we did.






To edit the photographs we had taken we used Photoshop. The programme includes many effects and settings that allowed us to edit our photos the way we wanted.






We used Microsoft Publisher to create our newspaper and our advert. We found that this programme was the easiest to create the layout we were hoping for. It allowed us to move the text and images easily through 'auto-flow', saving us time and making it much easier to read as a real newspaper.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

What have you learned from your audience feedback?


Out of the ten people that we asked of their opinon of our radio advert 7 people thought that it was excellent one person added "It sounds exactly like something that you would hear on the radio"


Also from the ten people that we asked 6 people thought that our newspaper was excellent. Which we were very please with as nobody said that it was poor.



For the poster most people thought that it was good in comparison to excellent for the others.We agree with this as we have never seen an advert for a newspaper so had no insperation from any real media products.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Newspaper Front Cover

Newspaper Inside Articles

Poster

Radio

We tried to link thew main product with the ancillary texts as much as possible. We made the radio and the poster link together by using the slogan, 'the new paper you just can't put down'. Also we linked the poster to the main paper by using the same fonts and structure. This helps to attract more audiences as they will here are product across a range of different medias.

e.g radio/print

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product uses many conventions on local newspapers. To begin with we decided to use alliteration in the title of the newspaper, 'The Wigan Weekly', by doing this we thought that it would be memorable to audiences and therefore they would be more willing to purchase it.

The main story that we decided to use 'White Lies' is a very revealling story and would make people interested and want to read it. It follows news values such as 'negativity' and 'unexpectedness' making it an ideal main story for a newspaper, meaning that it is certainly newsworthy.

We recognised that many local newspapers have a colour scheme running on the front page, The Wigan Reporter has a red colour scheme just like the Wigan Evening Post. We therefore decided to have a purple and yellow theme to ensure that our media product was eye-catching and exciting.

We noticed that many of the local papers follow traits such as using every space on the page possible which is why we designed our own adverts to fill the spaces, typical of regional newspapers.

The smaller articles are all about local people living their lives, (Jessica Riding winning the Lottery and Joan and Bernard Bootle retiring). This is very common in local newspapers with stories such as Joan and Bernard as not that many exciting stories will happen each week.

The front page of the newspaper is in colour which makes it appealing to the audience, this is common through many newspapers mostly tabloid which carry the colour throughout because they have funding. Where as local newspapers tend to just include colour on the front page this may be due to the lack of funding for a local newspaper.

Creating Radio

We edited the radio on premier and found it very easy to use and gained good results using it. From each of the sounds we had gathered we had to chop them in the correct places to fit together.

this is the sounds that are not chopped up we found out the correct places by looking at the waves hich are shown.

This is how we have cut up the sound in the correct places and will fit them together so make each of music and diolloge sound smooth.

Final Poster

This is our final poster, we have used the same font and newspaper name as our actual newspaper to make it more reminiscant of a paper, although we have put a border round the edge of the image. You wouldn't normally see this in a paper but as at the end of the day it is a poster we thought it finished it off better, and just made it look more professional.

Background Music

We found from a cd of background music a tune that we thought fitted well with our newpaper theme. As all the other radio adverts we had listened to had a suitable music in the background fitting in with the theme. We have got a news report style of music which we can use continuously as the voice overs are playing.

By using premier we have found from the whole of the music the section that whe will chop out from it because we think it fits in well and will sound overall the best.

As it is a newspaper we are going to use a television news style voice. So will use words said strongly such as

:- News

:- sport

:- weather

:- entertainment

The continuous music will be playing throughout the all the dialoge at the begining and speach. We thought also to add a news report effect have a sharp sound after each of the news, sport etc words. this will make it sound more appealing and advertiseing the product to sound exciting and worth your money.

From the same section of background music we got this sound which we thought fitted very well.

Image for Poster

We have decided that we will do our poster in the style of a newspaper, with our tagline ("the new paper you just can't put down") as the headline. With this in mind, we needed to think of an appropriate image. After some thought we decided to show someone reading the paper with others looking over their shoulder. We decided to use someone of older years and others of younger years to broaden the audience and show that this paper can appeal to everyone.

This is the image we have chosen to use, obviously it isn't centered in the picture and there is also some shadowing on the face of the male and so we did some editing to fix this. We also decided that maybe it would be a good idea to have the picture in black and white, this would work as a contrast with the name of the paper that feratures purple.

Begining of the advert ideas

From the inspiratioin of these adverts we have decided to create a role play at the begining like the Coca Cola advert to make it interesting.
We have come up with some ideas to try to advertise a paper as it is quite harder as we have no inspiration from an actual newspaper radio advert. These are a few role play ideas we have come up witch to include at the begining.

Woman: what you doing ....
Man: nothing
(rustling if paper)
Woman : Yes, you are your reading that paper AGAIN!!

We thought this was abit to simple and short though

Woman: John what do you want for your tea
Man: mmm
Woman: Are you listening to me
Man: (rustling of paper )
Woman : John I wish you'd put that paper down !!
(slamming of a door)

We thought that this was much more better and realistic so have decided to use this at the begining of the advert.

Here are the pictures from when we produced the radio advert.

Radio Adverts

Coca Cola.
The advert only lasts for 30 seconds which makes the advert easy to follow. The advert is able to engage listners with the short story at the beginning about, 'the diary of an ice cube'. The repetition of, "light on, light off" through the beginning helps to capture the attention of those listening to the radio. This could be a good technique to use in our radio advert for the newpaper to help us persuade the audiences to buy our newspaper.
The advert also has a catchy jingle at the end of the advert. We will diffinitely take this into consideration when producing our newpaper advert because we believe that it makes the advert stand out from others and can help to become memorable for the listener, increasing the chances of them actually going out and buying it.








Auto-Glass
The advert for auto-glass repair is a lot longer than the Coca Cola one. We have discussed this and have agreed that for our newspaper advert over a minute would be to long. It would be best for ours to be around 30-40 seconds. However, the Auto-Glass advert does have noise in the background relating to the speech. Therefore we feel that it would be best if the we had either background noise or seeing as our radio advert is for a newspaper maybe use some catchy music.

Poster

After a long search we came out unsuccessful in finding any existing posters advertising newspapers, we have therefore had a lot of difficulty coming up with ideas for our poster. We have been really unsure of what the nature and role of the poster was supposed to be, and as a result we decided to just play around with a few ideas.
We knew that the poster would have to include a picture and sop that was where we started. Our tag line for the paper is "the newspaper you just cant put down" and so we wanted to depict thin within the picture. Our first idea for this was to show someone behind a counter reading the paper while a queue was building up and they hadnt even noticed.

Looking at the result we decided it didnt look very professional, and even after playing around with the editin we werent really happy.

Our second idea involved a man being stood at a bus stop reading the paper, however this didn't work either. There is too much wasted space in the picture due to the height of the bus stop but to bring it down would make it look perhaps stupidly short.

We will be sure to take these mistakes into account when we are thinking of another idea for the poster.

Newspaper

When starting on the inside page we started to show our newspaper in colour. However after a long delibartion we decided that the newspaper would look more effective if it was in black and white, therefore we decided to trial the page and change is all into black and white.






Looking at them both next to each other on the screen we can see the black and white inside page looks much better than the coloured one and looks much more like a newspaper.

Newspaper

The adverts that we have previously created similar to those in local newspapers have come in useful on the front page as we are able to create a busy and eye catching newspaper. This adverts are of local businesses that would be typically displayed in regional newspapers.


We have placed them at the bottom of the page so that they aren't the first thing that we want the reader to notice, which is the main article and headline.


Although we need to work on the second advert about the solicitors as the appereance isn't quite what we wanted, we feel that the front page is coming together and is reflecting those that are typically seen in local areas.

Newspaper

We have now moved changed the font size of the 'White Lies' headline and believe that this now looks much more professional. We have also changed the subline adding, 'East London' to help reduce the free space shown. In addition we have moved the writers name and details to the right hand side of the article, this again is to help reduce the space as no free space is shown in local newspapers.

Newspaper

When putting together the front page of the newspaper, we have found that it is very difficult to fill the page. We felt that this was very important because when looking at newspapers we noticed that there are never any blank spaces. This made our coursework very time consuming as each seperate text needed to be the right size and font and has to be possitioned in the correct way.


As you can see there is alot of wasted space at the top of the newspaper, this doesn't reflect an everyday newspaper, and therefore we need to try and find something to either put in the space of change the size of the font.

Adverts

Aware that both pages had to contain a considerable number of adverts, we got to work on designing some. Deciding what to do the adverts for was pretty easy - local restaurants and businesses seemed to feature most popularly. We have therefore done an advert for a solicitors, a restaurant and some others.

We drew inspiration for the adverts from existing ones, and we also took into account the time of year. The newspaper is a November issue and therefore on some of our adverts such as the restaurant we have included christmas offers. Aswel as this, we have also used christmas colours on this particular advert - red and green.

Headlines

The first thing we though we would do would be to come up with our headlines. Our main headline that we decided on was a local man who had turned out to be the "face of evil", trafficking young girls from the local area. A random name for the man that we came up with was Darren White - an everyday name, but one that could also be pulled off by a hard brute of a man.

With quick thinking (and inspiration from a Mr Hudson song) we decided on the name of the headline being White Lies - the pun being on the fact that the existing saying corresponds to the fact that the man's name is White.

Thinking about the picture for the headline, we decided simple would be best, just a picture of a face of the man - this would imitate the effect of a mug shot. We decided to use somebody with a thuggish look about them to be in the picture and so we used a friend, who is actually the farthest thing from a thug, but has a beard that made it look convincing, and a protruding forhead that also look pretty good on our picture.

A second story that we decided on was a girl from a local college winning the lottery. We knew it couldnt be like a groundbreaking sum of £20 million as that would be too big a story, so we decided on a smaller but respectable sum of £1.2 million.

We managed to get our hands on a big cheque for the image, and to this we added a national lottery logo. We asked a teacher at the college to be on the photo, handing the cheque over and used a group of friends to be stood behind celebrating.
There wasn't a great load of editing done to the pictures, as looking at existing ones in local newspapers we noticed that first of all they werent very big, second they werent very high quality and third, they just seemed to use whatever picture they could get their hands on.

Research of local newspapers

Our first instinct was to look at existing local newspapers and see how they were presented (layout etc.) and also, the kind of headlines that they printed and who they were aimed at.

Looking at these, we realised that the stories were of local interest, never anything majorly newsbreaking. This is proved in the example we have here, the headline is about a florist, something that would never feature on the national news or tabloid. Also, there are never celebrities featured, all just regular people from the local streets living normal lives, perhaps with the odd scandal. Whereas the tabloids (mainly on the front pages) normally include the word "exclusive", because they have the money and the power to have stories nobody else has.

Looking at the pictures that are included, there are lots of images of buildings demonstrating where the story has taken place; this is because the local people would most likely be familiar with the sites, but also because there is no evidence of the event taking place. In tabloids such as The Sun there are images of the story in action, for example a celebrity falling out of a nightclub, this is because there are photogrophers, or "paparazzi" waiting on the scene to capture the shot, but in local towns this simply doesnt happen. The following is an example of an article from The Daily Mirror.

The next thing we found was that local newspaperss have a lot of adverts for local businesses, restaurants and events. They feature on almost every page, sometimes just fitting in with the text, sometimes having a full page to themselves. Looking at the laytout, it seems it isnt a million miles away from a tabloid newspaper, but it is apparent that there are a lot of smaller stories fitting in amongst the sides, and also the pages are a bit of a scramble. As a difference, however, local newspapers seem to have a smaller subheading under the main one.

Change of Plan

We went to the same club these last pictures were taken in and shot our first scenes. We decided this location would hold the scenes away from the rest of the narrative of the video, the ones of Emma singing the song. We tried out lots of different ideas so we would have lots of material, however true to form, when we looked at the results, we weren't entirely happy with them. So, after looking at our first effort of filming, and much deliberation over whether we were doing the right thing, we came toi the conclusion that we didn't like our project and it wasn't working the way we imagined. We then came to the decision that maybe our collective skills weren't best suited to making a music video at all, and, although aware of the risk we would be taking, we decided to try something different. Taking all the options into consideration, we have decided to produce the first two pages of a local newspaper, together with a radio advertisement and a poster.