work

1. L3 Creative Media
Production & Technology
Year Two Evaluation Template

2. Evaluation Overview
This evaluation form is designed to assist you in the evaluation of your projects.
When using this form, it is good practice to:
• Use appropriate terminology.
• Stay concise and focus on key points.
• Evaluate and analyse your statements.
• Focus on judgements about work rather than telling a story of how it was made.
Please find the grading matrix here to help you assess you are working at the right level.
Level 3 Extended Diploma Grading Matrix - https://bit.ly/2Jnqj3v

3. Project Overview
In this section you will outline the aim of the project/task and give an
overview of the activates you undertook to complete it.

4. What was the theme of your project and
what attracted you to it?
The theme of my project was all about football and addressing issues involved with the sport. I was attracted to
this idea as football is a huge passion of mine and is something that I could talk and create a lot about. It also
gave me an opportunity to talk about mental health and disabilities and no matter how bad your situation is,
there is a chance and an opportunity for you to get involved. I was also able to talk about how it doesn’t matter
what your background is, you can still pursue your dreams and become a superstar. I feel like it was important
that included these articles as if this was an actual zine, then this could help people and motivate them to go
and pursue their dreams. By choosing something I'm passionate about, it allowed me to be more creative as I
enjoyed talking about the football in the articles and designing the pages. As discovered in my research,
football is one of the most common types of fanzines as football clubs have huge fanbases and anyone can
make one. I used a little bit of inspiration from old fanzines, which I found doing research, and used the old
school design of having cartoon like images. This would have been because the people making the fanzines
years ago wouldn’t have had access to the equipment to get high quality images onto a page, so they used
hand drawn images. I kept this a theme throughout the zine by digitally animating almost all my images to add
a cartoon effect to give the zine a classic feel and theme.

5. What research did you undertake and how
did it help develop your project?
I started off by finding out what a fanzine was as I had never heard of one before, after discovering that it was
like a less formal magazine and I had more free rain over what I could do with it, I decided to explore the
different types of fanzines. These ranged from bands to singers and from rugby to football. The fact that
anyone can produce a fanzine means there is a lot of variety to choose from out there. After settling on the
idea of making a football fanzine, I looked further into them to see what they had in common and the layouts
of them. There weren’t many inside articles that I could find from football fanzines which would have been
helpful to give me an idea of how they were laid out, however, this may have also been helpful as it allowed
me to be free as I had no expectations of what I needed to make allowing me to lay it out how I like it. I did
notice most of them had an older style look with the cartoon/hand drawn images which I quite liked the design
of, so I decided to replicate that into my own work. I also investigated the content that the articles contained, I
found that it’s a lot less formal than a normal magazine, so I don’t have to conform to strict rules, I can be freer
and talk about what I want to. I wanted to find out more about the football fanzine community, so I looked at
several articles talking about how the community is slowly dying due to the increase of articles and online
magazines that people can access easier and sometimes cheaper. I decided that I would create an online
version as well as a printed version of my zine so I can access the people who prefer the easier access of the
online version and the people who still prefer the classic feel of a paper copy.

6. How did you develop and improve your ideas
throughout the project?
I started my idea development by writing down a few questions about certain serious topics but also related
them to things I’m passionate about such as cars and pollution or films and age ratings. I had a look at fanzines
that related to the topics in the questions and decided I preferred the football style. Before I did further
research into the design and content of the magazine, I developed my idea. I took my topic of football and
added a serious element by talking about mental health, disabilities and rough upbringings. To counteract this,
I did also write a few articles about general football topics. My original question I was going to answer was
“how has football helped those with mental and physical issues”, I talked about this in a few articles when
mentioning how to get into disability football and when I presented a couple of top-level footballers back
stories. When looking at other club specific football fanzines I noticed that in one article they would reflect on
that teams last game, analyse it and give their opinions. As my zine isn’t club specific, I decided to reflect on
two games in the Premiere League that I thought were interesting games, whilst designing the flat plans for the
pages I decided the other half to this page spread should also be related to the Premiere League to keep the
theme going so, as it was the start of the season, I decided to give my predictions on league positions, awards,
etc. I did a similar thing a few pages down by dedicating a double page to the champions league and the
summer transfer window. I decided to put these pages together as they both involved clubs from all over
Europe, so it made a lot of sense. My idea for the interview was to find a lower-level professional footballer to
answer some questions, however, I got no responses, so I had to settle with a football fan instead.

7. What was the outcome of the project/task?
The outcome was almost as expected, there were a few big changes such as layout, but the overall theme and
page content roughly stayed the same. When looking at my flat plans during production I realised that I didn’t
like having everything boxed up, so I decided it was best to remove the boxes and free up the page to make it
look more like a fanzine rather than a magazine. On my flat plans I only gave red background to the text and
put block images on however when making it, I realised I needed to alter the images to make it more unique,
so most images of players are cut out of their backgrounds and then filters were added to give them a slight
cartoon but realistic effect. On pages where there is a huge background image, I tried to make it relate to the
articles as much as possible, for example, on the Premiere League double page spread, the background is the
Premier League pattern and colours from the 20/21 season. I was quite proud of the content I had created in
the end. I felt like it had a unique style compared to other fanzines I researched as they tended to either follow
suit of being a modern style or old-fashioned style whereas I was able to combine both to create a fresh, new
style of zine. I feel like this made me enjoy the project a little more as I was creating something new rather
than just replicating what other authors have done with their fanzines.

8. Personal Response
This section will explore your thoughts and feelings about the
experience. This will help gain a understand of how your personal
feelings may have impacted the outcome.

9. How did you feel about the project before
you started?
At first, I was a little worried as I was unsure on what a fanzine was so first, I had to research and find out the
conventions of them and how they differ from magazines. Once I had a good idea about how a fanzine should
look, I had to decide what to make it about. I struggled on this for a while but once I had a good idea of what I
wanted to make I was able to put that into practice and produce the zine. With the topic I chose, being
something I’m passionate about helped as it meant I knew what I wanted to talk about and gave me more
confidence.

10. What do you think about your project development and
how did it help you to refine your idea?
Development was a crucial part of my project as I feel that without this, I would have started production
without any foundation of how-to layout my pages, or what kind of design style to go for. I learnt a lot from my
research as well as previously, a fanzine was a new concept to me so if I wasn’t to do my research into the
conventions and how they are designed for their target audience, I would have gone into the project blind and
would have ended up making something more magazine like. The flat plans I made were extremely helpful as
without them I wouldn’t have known what to do on each page and it soon would have become messy, by doing
flat plans, I gave myself a target to work for which was helpful. Deciding on the target audience before
production helped as well because otherwise I would may have started to make something suited more to
older teenagers and young adults then randomly switch halfway through and tailor it more towards the older
generation so by choosing an audience, I could keep up the consistency of the zine.

11. Did you collaborate on your project or engage
contributors, etc.?
On my seventh page I included an interview which was one of the requirements of the zine. The interview was
one of the harder things however, as my original plan was to contact the owner or manager of a local disability
club to talk to them and find out what kind of services they offer and any advice they could give. Sadly, I didn’t
get a single response from any of them, so I then decided I would try something else and emailed and
messaged lots of different lower league football players (as the higher league ones wouldn’t reply due to their
high follower counts). My plan was to find out about how they got into football, what/who inspired them, how
their career is going so far and then any advice for someone who is possibly wanting to start a football career.
Once again, I didn’t get a single reply from the multiple players I messaged and emailed. I decided that I would
have to settle for an interview with a football fan instead. A lot of my friends are huge football fans as well, so I
sat down face to face with one of them and asked a few questions about their club. Being a rival to the club
they support, it was interesting to find out their views and opinions on certain topics. The interview went well,
and I think doing a face-to-face interview was a good as you can flow from question to question smoothly and
get a conversation going rather than you sending them a list of questions and you getting a list of basic answers
sent back. Recording the interview was also a better idea than writing stuff down as that is quite time
consuming and your more focused on writing rather than listening to what the person has to say. I learnt this
from the interview task I did with Kieran where we both wrote down each others answers and realised; we
didn’t quite get everything down. Also, for legal reasons, if you have a recording of what the person says then
they can’t deny anything they said. This process was quite long however as every time I realised, I wasn’t
getting a reply I would have to come up with an entirely new set of questions.

12. Evaluating the project
In the previous sections, you have been commenting upon the project development. The
evaluation may include some similar information, but it will also include critical comment.
An evaluation must include information about the good and bad points of the project, and
it is important to be honest. Finally, you should make a judgment about the effectiveness of
the success of the project

13. What were the good points about the project/task and what did you
learn from them? [try and think of at least 3, more if possible]
One good point about this project was that I learnt a lot about interview techniques and how to effectively
interview someone and how to give a good response if someone interviewed me. This will be a very useful skill
for me moving onto do media and production. I found out its not that easy to get the interview you want but
there are always alternatives if things don’t go your way.
I learnt about the themes and conventions of a fanzine as well as the history and community behind them.
Fanzines tend to have this feeling of being a lot less commercialised and less expectations than a magazine as
they are usually made by members of the public rather than a company. The older fanzines had this cartoon
theme which I really liked and decided to incorporate into my own work which improved the style. There is a
much bigger and more passionate community than I originally thought for fanzines so if I ever need to create a
fanzine again, I know who the target audience is and how to target them.
My photoshop skills were improved after this task as I had to learn new skills to achieve what I wanted to put
on my page. I learnt several things such as being able to write around shapes and put text behind a certain part
of an image. The most useful skill I learnt was how to add certain filters to my image, this allowed me to make
my images look more cartoon like which was important as this was the main theme of my zine.

14. What challenges did you face and how did you
respond to them? Try and think of at least 3...
I had the same struggle at the start of each page, the layout. Even though I did a flat plan for every page I
wanted to differ it slightly as I realised the error in my flat plans were that every page looked the same. Every
time I got to a new page, I would have no idea how to layout the text and images differently to the last page,
once I finally got an image in my head of what I thought looked like a good page layout, I would be able to work
through the page.
The biggest issue I had was my interview. The interview I ended up with, was a last minute one that I had to ask
my friend to do with me. The reason it was last minute was because everyone I had tried prior never replied to
me, so I was waiting for responses for a while then finally decided to give up when I realised, I wasn’t getting a
response. I was quite upset as I couldn’t get the interview, I wanted that would have improved my zine, but I
had to make do with what I had.
I also had a few issues with the background colours on some pages clashing with the text. Multiple times I had
to redesign page layouts, backgrounds and fonts to get everything to work. The font I had selected had
multiple different options in its family so when I needed to make font changes to make it bolder, skinner, etc.
everything still flowed well and looked uniform.

15. How would you rate the final piece? [think along the lines of
poor, satisfactory, good or excellent...justify your rating]
I would rate my final project around the good mark as I feel that I ticked all my objectives of making a
conventional fanzine that fits the target audience that I was aiming at. There were areas that maybe could have
done with a bit of improvement. The double page spread that I wasn’t completely happy with was the “Zero to
Hero” one as I feel that the pages were a little boring as they had the images of the players but there was no
background to make the page stand out a little more. I did this on the disability page which I felt made more
sense as it was a serious article and there was no need to make the page stand out with bright colours and
complex imagery. Overall, I’m happy with the hand drawn style images throughout the zine that add some
character to the zine and makes the pictures a little more unique rather than ripping them straight from
google. I also think getting my own pictures would have been nice and added to the uniqueness of the project
but sadly my one opportunity to go to a football match was cancelled due to unforeseen reasons, so I had to
make do with google images. I was happy with the content of the articles; I feel I covered a good amount of the
subject and with football being a big passion of mine I was able to talk about it without running out of things to
say. The other main let down was the interview as I couldn’t talk to the people I wanted to but I found a way to
make sure I got one in the end.

16. How did you design appeal to your target
audience?
My primary target audience was older teenagers from maybe 16 years of age to young adults up to around 30
with the secondary audience being a bit older, around 35 plus. The reason I chose this to be my primary target
audience is because I believe the younger generation are falling out of touch with print in general and more
specifically, fanzines, I know this because I am a part of this group and until this project, I didn’t know what a
fanzine was, so I don’t think many others my age will know either. I wanted to create a zine that related more
to the younger audience to maybe rebirth the fanzine and get people interested in them once again. I did this
by making the zine more modern but keeping the old style at the same time, I did this by discussing topics that
younger football fans will be interested in and can get them discussing and debating with their friends about
certain parts of the zine. I realised that not everyone would be interested in going out and purchasing a paper
back copy of a zine (especially the younger generation), so I decided to make an online version for people to
look at, as its easier and more convenient to access. I also wanted to keep the people who maybe still do
fanzines interested so I tried to make it have a classic feel to it so that my secondary audience can also pick it
up and enjoy much like they might have done when they were younger, when fanzines were a huge part of
culture.

17. Analysis
In this section, you will focus on the details of the project and make
sense of what happened in the project. You should demonstrate how
your decisions informed the project development and the success of the
outcome.

18. How did your skills develop during the portfolio? [remember,
skills aren't just technical, remember things like organisation,
time management, communication, etc. as well]
I feel like I learnt a lot from this project, from technical skills to interview skills, this project taught me a lot. One
of the main skills I learnt, which I hadn’t done before, was how to complete a professional interview. There is a
lot more to having a successful interview than I first thought, I learnt that asking yes or no questions is a
terrible plan as you don’t really get a good response from the interviewee. One of the most helpful skills for
interviewing techniques was communication, I found its much better to talk to the person, whether that be in
person or over a call, as you can get a conversation flowing and maybe with a flowing conversation, more
questions may come to your mind that you didn’t originally think about. Whereas an interview over text or
email is a lot duller and more lifeless. Its difficult to get a flowing conversation going as it takes people longer
to reply and it’s not quite the same. I learnt a lot of new technical tricks on photoshop as well, for example, I
learnt more about how text can be edited to warp in different ways, be put around and inside different shapes
and how to create a gradient effect over it. I feel like my time improvement was better for this project
compared to others as I created a more detailed time sheet of what needs to be done for what dates, I set
myself deadlines for different pages so I could make sure I got them done on time.

19. What feedback did you get from your peers
and viewings?
I was able to get some feedback from people who had knowledge of media but not the exact project details,
and some from people who did the project requirements. The overall outcome was positive from everyone, as
they all seemed to enjoy the content and layout of the fanzine and the modern style, I gave it whilst keeping
the old feel. A couple of people gave criticism about the layout of the zine, saying it had no structure or
consistency. Whilst its important to keep consistency in the zine, I liked the free design of having unstructured
pages as that is what separates fanzines from magazines and gives it its own unique style. Another small
criticism was the content and text in my articles was quite opinionated, which a lot of people might not have
wanted to see but it gives people a taking point for my zine.

20. What knowledge have you gained that would help you in the
future to improve your project? Also, what knowledge from
academic literature and professionals has helped and why?
The main thing I learned was what a fanzine was as previously I had no idea. There were also some photoshop
skills I learnt that will be helpful when creating further print products. I leant how to wrap text around a shape,
cut images into a shape, how to warp text, etc. which will prove t be useful later. Interview skills were also a
large part of the project so doing the practice before production was very useful as I learnt how to effectively
conduct an interview on someone else and how to type it up.