We’re proud of our work!
On Thursday 6th February 2010 the AS Level Media Studies group were taken off timetable to take part in a project that was designed to help us with the coursework that we are currently working on.
The work produced is below.
The project was planned by Miss Hollinshead and Ben Rye of Rye Design, which is the company that designs Strood Academy’s website and publications and was also involved in the creation of the Strood Academy logo.
Our task was to work in pairs to create a one-page promotional microsite for a new radio show being launched by BBC Radio 1. The show will actually be broadcast as a midweek official chart update, called ‘MidWeek’. It will be targeted toward Radio 1’s youth audience of 17-24 year old listeners and our website had to allow the audience to contribute their opinions via e-mails and possibly in-site polls, as well as direct links to iTunes to allow the audience to download tracks that they want to be successful in the charts.
The Creative Team at Ryedesigns and Miss Hollinshead had created a promotional package, which was given to us on paper and saved onto the shared area, including images that would enable us to create a plan and put together our electronic version of the microsite and follow the in-house style of the Radio 1 website.
When each pair’s publication was finished, it was to be saved as a PDF, which Ryedesigns would then send to Radio 1 as part of our pitch, as this was a real project.
The first part of our day was the shortest: 9-10 am. During this hour, we were introduced to Ben Rye, who was going to be helping us with the project. We were then given our brief, asked to decide our working groups, and given our promotional pack to look through.
The second part of the day was the planning section. In this two hours, we had to plan our website on A3 paper, decide which images we would be using, and have written out any copy we would be putting on to our website, all in addition to creating a logo and colour scheme for ‘MidWeek’.
The final part of our day involved creating our microsites. Some people found that they had to change the software they had chosen to use because they weren’t able to use it in the ways they had hoped. This created some big setbacks for some of us, as we only had two hours to solve the problem. Some people created their products in Dreamweaver, but most of us found this too complicated and actually learned how to use a new program: Adobe Fireworks. Be Rye came back to help us with this final part of the project. We came across a few technical issues, but we worked it out thanks to Miss Hollinshead.
At the end of the two hours, many of us had still not finished our microsites, so we used our Media Studies lesson the next day to finish them. Some of us could have easily carried on working, though, as the deadline was very challenging.
I found the day very helpful, as I realised that the planning stage of the project is actually a lot more important and involved than I had thought. Without a well-worked out plan, it is extremely hard to arrange the final webpage exactly as you want. I also discovered that I wasn’t as familiar with the software I planned to use, and instead learned to use new software that I now plan to use for my final coursework.
