Writing Your Evaluation

We are now approaching the submission date of the AS Media Foundation Portfolio Preliminary Task, and your attention should be turning towards writing your evaluation of your experience since you began this assignment. What follows is a rough guide on how to write you Foundation Portfolio Evaluation… remember to refer back to your Production Logs while you do this!

As always, an evaluation should have a beginning, a middle, and an end – so three sections. These would be:-

• Introduction – Here you will introduce your brief, planning & research carried out, construction of product
• Evaluation of Finished Product
• Evaluation of Product with regards to Audiences & Institutions

Below is a further breakdown of what you need to include in each section – which should be written as thoroughly as possible.

Section 1 – Introduction
Here, you will need to state which assignment brief pathway you chose (Print or Video). You will need to make it clear to the reader exactly what you are being asked to do for the completion of your chosen brief. You also need to include information on how you carried out your research and planning in response to the brief, and how that has influenced the construction of your media product.
You also need to discuss the construction stage, and decisions made on creating your magazine or video.

Section 2 – Evaluation of finished Product
Here, you discussed your completed product. Again, you must explain  the decisions you have made, and how the finished product may differ from previous drafts. You also need to discuss how these changes impact on your audience. How does your product create meaning to the audience?
Here, you should refer back to critical theories, as covered during your studies on the Key Media Concepts Unit – things like genre, narrative, audience effects, media language/technical vocabulary.

Section 3 – Evaluation of Product with regards to Audiences & Institutions
Here, you are to compare your media product with real existing media products, which are similar to your own. You have to discuss how your media product fits in with the wider context of media institutions and audiences. Discuss how you believe the audience will ‘receive’ your product (a fair idea of this would be feedback you received during your Focus Group sessions you held with your peers).

You must answer the following questions in your evaluation

• In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
• How does your media product represent particular social groups?
• What kind of media institution might distribute your media product, and why?
• Who would be the audience for your media product?
• How did you attract/address your audience?
• What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Other things you must consider….

• Remember to reflect on your experiences/decision-making. If you decided to do something in a particular way, you have to discuss why you did this. It is not good enough to simply describe… you need to analyse and evaluate!