The Medium is the Message

Our latest Project was “The Medium is the Message”, a project that focuses on advertising and consumerism. Our driving question for this project was “How does what we hear, read, and see influence us?”

Launch

Teamwork

The very first thing we did in this project was talk about teamwork. Our teachers wanted to show his much can be accomplished with teamwork and working together effectively, so they showed us this video. Of course, we were all a bit confused. Why that video specifically? The teachers however, wanted us to look at the end of the video, which advertised John Lewis and partners and Waitrose and partners. This was a perfect Segway into our Advertising Project.

Developing Need To Knows

Need to knows are exactly what they sound like. What do you need to know for this project? We had done this with our last project so we knew what is was. We basically write any question we need the answer to to answer our driving question, How does what we hear, read and see influence us? On sticky notes, we wrote down all of our questions and stuck them to our whitebook.

Welcome Home

The next thing we did was analyze and dissect Welcome Home, a video ad for Apple’s HomePod mini. For this, we had notes open, and we recorded how the ad made us feel.

Milestone 1: Welcome Home Text Analysis

This milestone ties in with the Welcome Home note taking. With our notes and the discussions we had in class, we had to write a paragraph that analyzed Welcome Home for it’s message, it’s target audience, and how it uses the message to reach the target audience. With the completion of Milestone 1, we were finished with Launch.

Building knowledge

Graphic Design and Photo Practice

Design principles

In this part of the project, we learned all about design principles and how to take good photos. The first thing we did was meet with our groups and we were assigned a design Principle to try and create. Our group was assigned Alignment and we each had to create a slide that shows alignment, then pick the one that shows alignment the best. For our group, we chose Theryn’s:

. After that, we had to present it to the class and listen to the other groups presenting to learn what each principle meant.

Photo Practice

For the next part of Graphic Design and Photo Practice, We had to get photos from many different angles with our photo groups. We learned about good backgrounds, bird’s eye angles, worm’s eye angles, close up view, and long shot view. link to the photos taken

What is Media?

For this phase in building Knowledge, we learned about Media Definitions, The Media Triangle, Media Literacy and using Historical Perspective. For media definitions, were assigned a word to make a pages document on the definition of. Our group got the word “Consumer” so we created this:

The Media Triangle is the idea that there are three sides to media,The Text, The Audience, and The Production. Without these key things, the media wouldn’t be media. Media Literacy is basically five key concepts. (Insert core concept photo) Then we were assigned a piece of media to answer the Five key Questions to (Insert five key question pic) Our group was assigned the Netflix movie trailer Hubie Halloween .

Next we learned about using Historical Perspective. That basically mean understanding how a message would have impacted the world in the past, keeping in mind their beliefs and older ways of doing things. For this, we looked a lot at tobacco and nicotine usage back then and how it’s still here today, just portrayed in a different way. For example, tobacco was strongly endorsed back then and made you look “Cool” if you smoked.

To finish up What is Media, we had Milestone 2. Milestone 2 was Historical Media Analysis. For this, our task was :

Part ONE: Choose a piece of historical media (still or moving image) – it does not have to be an advertisement! Write down the source in a Pages document.

Part TWO: In the same Pages document, answer the five key questions of media literacy about your media.

Part THREE: In the same Pages document, write a paragraph that explains what you think the message of this media is, who it is targeted at, and how it sends that message.

For this, I chose this historical Media:

Develop and critique

The Gospel According to Larry

One of the parts of this project was we had to read a book, The Gospel According to Larry. The Gospel According to Larry is a book about a teen who starts a blog to talk about how he thinks consumerism and advertising is ruining our modern-day society. He’s something of a philosopher and his blog quickly grows in publicity. For this part of the project, we had to complete three power sheets with questions and answers on them and then we would talk about them every week with one of our groups.

Advertising Photo Journal

Another ongoing part of this project was we had to take pictures of ad we see. Once every week we had to ad your favourite ad you saw to the Advertising Photo Journal in Numbers. We then had to answer the questions:

Column 1: Picture of Advertisement

Column 2: Reference Source

Column 3: Why was this advertisement created (what is the message they want to send)?

Column 4: What techniques are used to create this message?

Column 5: What persuasion is used to appeal to the target audience?

Column 6: Who is the target audience for this advertisement?

The World Needs Your Voice

For this part of the project, we had to reflect back on Larry a bit. He had a message and he got it out to the world. The question for this was “If you had a message to share, how would you share it?” So we had to choose what our message was. I chose feminism, as I feel stringly that women, men and anyone in between should get equal rights. We then had to choose how you would share it. So basically we created a hypothetical ad for a passion you want to talk about. I chose a Feminist Club, but there were many options such as:

• Write Book

• Create a Podcast

• Write an Article

• Direct a Film

• OR something else!

We then has to create an ad for our fake passion medium! We had 15 minutes and I think mine turned out pretty good.

Present and Reflect

Advertisement Drafts

The main part of this project was we had to create an ad for a local business. Our business we chose was Bluhouse in Deep Cove. We had to correspond with the owners of the company to find out their needs and requirements for the ad. We made first drafts of our ads before even sending the email reaching out to Bluhouse so there is lots of revision involved in the project. For a week we waited to get her response with the needs for the ad then we realized that we had the wrong email adress. Go us! So eventually we got the right email adress and the owner of Bluhouse replied the next day. She told us to focus on the new online grocery cart which none of us had done so it was back to the drawing board for all of us. We then made new drafts which all focused on the online grocery cart. After that, we had to do critique, so basically bashing everyone else’s drafts but in a kind, specific and helpful way. Come the second email. For our second email to Bluhouse, we had to send in two or three completely different looking drafts for critique and pointers. In the end we chose Teva’s and Nolan’s drafts that we all helped a little with.

(Teva’s left, Nolan’s right)

Buhouse emailed us back promptly with feedback. They gave us the exact shade of blue they typically use for everything and the fonts as well. However, Bluhouse refrained from actually picking which draft they liked better do it was up to us. In the end we went with Nolan’s draft and modified it according to the feedback given. However, the next day, Nolan came in with a completely new draft that we all agreed was better than the old one.

So we made a couple changes and boom we have our final draft!