https://japclarke11.wixsite.com/movies

For my A Level coursework NEA, I intend to create a homepage and three further pages of a film news and review site. The demographic for my media product will be both males and females in their 20s who have an enthusiastic interest in both film and film analysis.

My audience could be described as left-leaning, opinionated, and free-spirited. Emanuel H. Demby’s psychographic theory applies here, as my target audience is generally laid back with strong opinions on things relating to pop culture. The opinionated nature of my articles and their focus on gender, race, and sex will appeal to this type of demographic due to the interests of young people in the modern era. This is where my articles will link to Judith Butler’s gender theory, exploring how gender is constructed in films, and the way gender representation has changed over time.

My website will act as an opinion leader for movies using Lazarfeld’s two-step flow theory to promote their movie. Readers of my website will be more likely to watch certain movies if I have rated them highly in my reviews, because my website acts as an opinion leader for those readers. In terms of promoting my website, I will be using social media, particularly Instagram, to try and build an audience. My 8 Instagram posts will contain a link to my website, so my followers on Instagram have easy access to my reviews.

The style of my website is also incredibly important. My homepage will be aesthetically pleasing, with a dark, clean colour scheme. I will have a dark red banner stretching across the top of my website, and the background beneath it will fade slowly downwards from red to black. In the banner, I will have my website logo and name in the top left, a search bar in the middle, and my page names in the top right. My style will be bold and colourful, with a retro aesthetic. My logo is 50s star Marilyn Monroe, and the background of my banner is many icons from the 90s. Below this banner, I will have my posts where I go in-detail talking about some movies I’ve been watching. Under this, I will have a section called ‘movies I can’t stop watching’ where I will do short reviews on some of my favourite movies.

I plan to also have a page called ‘My Movie Diary’ (influenced by formats such as Letterboxd) where I log all the movies I’ve watched each month. I also include a rating out of 5 stars. Logging movies in this way gives people a greater understanding of my movie taste and increases interest among Letterboxd users who come across my website.

Finally, I will have an ‘about’ page where I explain a little bit about myself, and I will have a contact page, in case anyone needs to contact me.

My articles will review some classic movies, and talking specifically about their views on gender, race, and sexuality. This is where I am going to be further implementing feminist critical thinking, talking about feminist theories such as Laura Mulvey’s ‘Male Gaze’ theory. This aspect of my articles will likely appeal to female readers, as well as male readers, who have strong left-leaning views.

In terms of representation, I will try to talk about some lesser-known indie movies as well as big-budget mainstream movies. This will appeal to a wide range of audiences whilst also giving balanced representation. Movies which have interesting and progressive things to say about gender, race, or sex are also more likely to have articles written on them.

For my A-level coursework I will be exploiting multiple different key media theories such as, feminist critical thinking, post colonialism and representation for the content and main body texts of the newspaper and also using my knowledge of semiotics and audience theories incorporated into the design and layout of the product to show how i understand how different signs, codes and conventions are used to present a specific response from the audience and grab attention. Some more specific sub theories i will include are:

–The 5 filters of the mass media machine: Chomsky To produce money to cover the cost of production and distribution of Media through advertisement and sponsors.

–Regulation: Linvingstone and Lunt argue that the interests of citizens and those of consumers cannot be easily reconciled. This suggests that there is an increasing tendency in recent UK regulation policy to place the interests of consumers above those of citizens. 

Hypodermic model (passive consumption)Lasswell 1927:  in which the SENDER is transferring a MESSAGE, through a MEDIUM (eg Print, radio, TV, etc) that has a direct effect on the RECEIVER. OR WHO, SAYS WHAT, THROUGH WHAT CHANNEL, TO WHOM, TO WHAT EFFECT. ————————————

etc, I aim to subtly use my knowledge of these theories to produce some content that takes advantage of them – and therefore can produce a product as close to the actual thing as possible

My story is surrounding civil rights throughout the paper and the different impacts it has on the people surrounded by the many different areas it affects.

I will be using two different newspapers as a style model to analyse features used by newspapers on a wider variety and incorporate fitting conventions to create a more realistic product to work with.

For my A level coursework I am going to choose Brief 2 where I will create a front page and a double-page spread from a regional newspaper where it reports the political issues that interests my broad local audience. My story will target the local area I am trying to approach. The newspaper’s audience usually attracts what is happening around the world, equality issues and politics. For my leading story that will be on the front page and continued on the inside I would like to create a story that will interest my audience to want to read more. My leading story will be about the issues of covid and its impact on society, my pages will feature different layouts and design features but will be recognisable towards the same publication through the application of a house style that is common across all pages.

As I will be talking about the impact on covid and how it has changed from time and how covid may reaching out again. My key theorists will be Curran and Seaton, that is about the effects on media content and Livingstone and Lunt where the global nature of the net and the volume of material uploaded make effective regulation very difficult. New technology might open up the media to democratising forces and the development of new communities, but it is also open to potential abuse. I would like to share the news to my audience about how covid made a huge impact in people’s lives and still is. This will include how covid has impacted in many jobs such as actors and news reporters. This is because some Jobs have had difficulty in maintaining social distancing, therefore struggling to earn their royalties. I will also talk about the death rate still raising till this day. Although covid hasn’t been forgotten recently, it still does exist. It is possible to say that it has been predicted that we will have another strong force of covid impacting the world again where it will be more dangerous than it was before, however it hasn’t hit yet.

I would like to present my front page with a strong title so that my audience knows who it targets and creates the impact towards society. I will follow the style of the daily mail as I think it has a good layout of text and pictures. My style model for the double page will also include the same topic but with supplementary reports linked to the main story. This clarifying, stories to do with the queen and politics that could potentially link to covid. I will most likely talk about the queen getting covid as she was very old and family members and the public where getting very worried on my double page spread.

Overall, I want the public to know the impacts on covid and make sure they are up to date in the latest news of covid as it hasn’t been spoken about much recently as it is quite hard to get it now as many people in the world have caught it before.