Codes and Conventions

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When you carried out research on existing products you identified codes and conventions.

Some of these are codes and conventions which apply to all or most magazines.

Some of them exist only in the magazines covering your style of music.

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

Conventions

Definitionplural noun

the ‘rules’ that are generally understood and accepted when producing a media text in a particular genre.

Before we start to look at the codes and conventions, we need to think about all the elements of your magazine.

What elements make up a magazine?

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

Title

Text

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

• Page numbers• Masthead• Fonts• Colour scheme• Style of photography• Writing style• Pull quotes• Cover lines• Barcode• etc

Here are just a few elements which make up a magazine.

All (or most) magazines will contain these elements.

The way they are presented is what defines your genre of magazine.

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Now you need to think about each of those elements.

How did the magazines you looked at present those elements?

How did you present these elements?

Did you use (follow) this convention?

Did you develop (progress) this convention?

Did you challenge (go against) this convention?

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

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You look at these codes and conventions when doing your research.

They helped you to analyse magazines.

They helped you to plan (style sheet, flat plans, pitch etc)

Now you need to go back to this work and look at the conventions you identified.

Then look at your own work and then explain how you used, developed or challenged these conventions.

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

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Presenting your work:

Present your work using lots and lots of examples.

Give specific written examples supported with images of existing products and your own work.

Every point you make should be supported with an image

Use lots of examples

Use cropped sections of work to help us isolate the section you are talking about.

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

Text

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