MediaStudies.com | MACS 130 -MediaStudies.com-
Mid-term take-home question.
Two magazines which focus on the science and art of creating messages through image construction are 'Life' and 'The Illustrated London News'. The copies you have from the 1940s and 50s provide examples of media content production from an era which is geared toward a target audience made up of your grandparents' generation. As you look through these two American and British magazines, consider how the messages are encoded and in what ways the methods discussed in class and in Chapter 4 of the textbook might be utilized in determining desired signification or representational value on the part of the photographers, graphic artists, writers, and editors.
Please take on the role of a staff person at a Canadian magazine who has been assigned to create either a full page ad or a poster which represents the merits of Canadian culture in 2007. In discussing this assignment, your editor has talked about national unity, nation building, cultural identity, and creating a positive image of Canada both at home and/or abroad. Your job is to encode your text with the right image(s), tone, and language to reach your target audience. If you go with an advertisement, a nationalistic message has to be tied in with a commercial product. If the message is non-commercial, such as a public service announcement to do with something such as health issues, you also need to incorporate a positive Canadian spin. Some of you might wish to work on a text which contains both a commercial and a political message. In addition to the construction of your text, provide a type-written explanation of why you selected the various elements and structured them accordingly. The techniques you use can be high tech or low tech depending on what resources you have available. Either way is fine.
