Layout sketches for planning of magazine front cover

Shot Types

Draft Front Cover for Plantsbrook School Magazine

Now you have developed some simple ideas on paper you now need to turn these into draft ideas using sketch. 

You need to plan the photos that you need to take;

1. Who will be in them?
2. Where will they be taken?
3. What will they be doing?
4. What is their facial expression/ body language like?
5. What angle are you taking them from?
6. What shot type do you intend to use?
7. Do you need to ensure enough space to crop the image?  
8. Does it need to be portrait or landscape?
9. When will you take them?
10. Who do you need to organise?

Is there anything else you can think of that needs consideration to help you? 

When you have taken your photos you will select suitable photos for the front cover drafts and then add the appropriate media language conforming to the conventions for a front cover.

Thinglink- how to embed onto your blog

School Magazine Analysis

These are 3 examples of school magazines.  

Copy them and upload them to your blog.

Then.....

1. Identify the range of content that you can see in these magazines and any other appropriate content for a school magazine.

2. Identify who the target audience is for a school magazine.  Describe them in terms of demographics.

3. Analyse them in terms of denotation and connotation.

Preliminary Activity

As part of the Foundation Portfolio Coursework you must construct the front cover and contents page for a Plantsbrook School magazine.

• You must identify the conventions of these media products.
• You will identify who the target audience will be.
• You must identify the type of content that would be included in this magazine.
• You must develop ideas for names for the magazine.
• You will develop ideas for the name and masthead for the magazine . 
• You will develop layout sketches & rough ideas for the products.
• You will plan a photo shoot and take appropriate photos.
• You will produce the final products.

The deadline for this Preliminary Activity work is the 10th October.

Research and analysis activity- Mastheads

Your first task is to complete your masthead analysis.

1. Select 5 mastheads from music magazines
2. Save them in your pictures
3. Upload them to your blog

Then......

you will need to comment upon:

• the use of fonts, style, colour, lowercase, uppercase etc.
• the use of shadow, fills and lines/ strokes
• the connotation of the word used for the masthead
• any use of effects/ graphics
• whether it sits in a banner, callout etc.
• what type of magazine it is, genre(s) of music, type of content etc. (research their website)
• who is their intended audience?  again research is key here, you will need to look at a range of sources to help you.

An example of a music magazine masthead