The Shine School Media Awards hosted their first ever competition as an attempt to involve as many schools, from as many communities, with as many pupils as possible. For The Ravensbourne School; the aim was to involve as many different students that had a passion or talent in a particular subject area and show them that there is more to life than just being purely academically capable. The competition enabled them to appreciate that that, with hard work, comes reward, in terms of both the final product and recognition, not only from the Shine judges but the recognition received from our schools community.
After a day of planning and preparing details such as the name of the magazine, the roles of each individual and the difficult decision to make of our overall aim, each student and teacher was able to understand that there is far more that goes into the making of a magazine than initially appears. We became journalists, photographers, graphic designers, marketing researchers, editors, co-editors but most importantly we were a team working towards the same goal: to create ‘OUTLINE’, a magazine aimed at Year 6 students’ transition into Year 7 with a twist! One of our many aims was to ensure that the magazine wasn’t based purely on exams and school trips, because we know that everyone needs a break from school and, being young people, we knew that young people like to hear about celebrities, TV programmes, jokes and even cooking! So whilst making the magazine very school orientated, we were able to bring in a sense of fun and reality into it, in a way that was (in some cases) an attempt to be funny and in others, dramatic but knowledgeable. We didn’t want to belittle the Year 6’s with intimidating language; we just wanted to show them that there is more to get involved in if you are willing to get involved. And we did exactly that.
After many ‘draining’ months of tapping at keyboards, modelling for photo shoots and interviewing students we began to realise, that this was actually a lot of fun! It brought students from all year groups together to produce a final product that was, quite simply, amazing. And we were not the only ones who thought so.
We were shortlisted for 3 categories: Best Cover, Best Design Layout and Best Commercial Strategy. We were then shortlisted again and put into the top three for Best Cover. This meant that we were able to attend the Award Ceremony at Stationers Hall to see if we had won or were runners up. And after taking a train to London on an unbearably hot Monday morning and waiting anxiously whilst visiting various amazing workshops, the time came for us to see if we’d won.
Out of almost 200 schools, The Ravensbourne came out on top and took home Best Cover. Amazing!
Not only did we win first place for Best Cover, but at the end of the ceremony a raffle was held. By sheer luck we had won again! Our prize was a high specification Xerox printer/photocopier and Quark graphic design software. The day could not have been any better, and we would all love to be involved in it again next year!
Cydney Honour
