Research and Planning: Magazine covers and DVD covers

Due to taking so much pride, care and commitment into finishing both parts of the main product through filming Lego animation and the second part of our video in the school we were very limited on the amount of time we had to complete the ancillary texts. We had unfortunately fell behind by 3 weeks on our time schedule and instead of rushing our main product we were left with hardly any time of complete the ancillary texts. We had a discussion and decided we would put all our effort into the ancillary texts which would leave us with very minimal research and planning for the magazine and DVD cover, However this is a normal problem in the media world, if you cant reach a tight deadline you have to make sacrifices!

Planning

In the small amount of time I had to plan I tried my hardest to be fully prepared when having to actually produce my ancillary texts. Firstly I created drawing templates of magazines and DVD covers and as I did more and more research and felt confident. I started to alter them and add what I wanted and expected from a magazine and DVD cover. Next I started to gain audience feedback by using facebook to post my drafts up and get comments on improvements etc. I even had enough time to get feedback off my target audience as I got my little brother Jordan to take my templates and drafts to school to show his friends who were in the age bracket of the target audience 5-11. I got useful feedback from the target audience and then felt ready to produce my ancillary texts. I spent hours a day learning how to use Photoshop as it was rather new to me as I did video work at AS. When I was at a level of knowing what I was doing and was in control of the technology I was using I was able to produce both my ancillary texts which took several days as I kept changing my ideas and altering them. I just made the deadline, look at the blog posts above to see my magazine and DVD cover and to see how/why and what I did to them when creating them on Photoshop.

Research

Research was more relaxing to do than planning but I still felt the pressure of the deadline looming.

When walking through town after college I would go into music shops like HMV and look at the DVD covers they had and what conventions they used to attract a particular target audience. This was very useful as I got to understand what they used to attract and fulfil the target audiences needs.

I did the same for magazine covers as well. One day I went into Tescos and looked at the Children's magazines that were based on Children's TV Dramas and had a look at the conventions they used to attract there target audience. Then came the boring part, I hid away behind a shelf and waited for kids to pick up and look at their favourite magazines. Then I would go over and explain that I was making a magazine for kids and asked what they liked about it and they would reply by saying things like "Its bright" and "because my favourite characters on it" From these comments I created whats known as a "style guide" where I set up rules I would have to apply to my ancillary texts which were conventions from my main product.

With very little time left at this point I started to do Internet researching and used sites like Wikipedia to help me understand what I had to know to produce a DVD and Magazine cover. The links below are some of the research I used:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/magazine

http://en.wikipeda.org/wiki/cover_art

http://www.world-newspaper.com/children.html

http://www.sendit.com/dvd/chart/family-chart.list?sortOrder=salesRank&sortReverse=true

I also found some helpful Videos on Youtube which have instructions on how to use the software appropriately in order to create a Magazine and DVD cover for a specific target audience:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-LE-I9ZgoE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQVSJ4xns58

Here are some images of Children's TV Drama's DVD and magazine covers which I found useful to look at and take ideas from like how they use conventions from their main media text to be recognised by their audience as something under that main media text.