As the centrepiece of my Final Major Project, I conceptualised, planned, designed, and created a physical and digital magazine, Morena Journals. The first magazine issue is dedicated to exploring how Asian culture and diversity is represented in the current marketing, film and media industry, and features an interesting and engaging variety of articles, interviews, and informative content that explores this subject from different angles and perspectives.
Final Major Project Magazine
The first few pages of my magazine explore my Filipino culture and the childhood I had living and vacationing in Manila, Philippines. I wanted the first section of my magazine to represent the message of my Filipino lifestyle before living to London, United Kingdom in April 2006 which was shortly after I just turned 5 years old.
Moving onto the next section of my magazine, I interviewed university students from different cultural backgrounds and I asked them questions on how diversity is applied to magazine publication and social media channels to educate the current audience. I wanted my questions to allow the interviewee the chance to speak freely and honestly about their thoughts and opinions around the current presentation of their culture in the media today.
I also interviewed students who were not from cultural backgrounds, and I wanted to get their thoughts and opinions as to how the current fashion, marketing and digital media industries present those of ethnic backgrounds in their publication and marketing campaigns/advertisements. Additionally, my questions allowed the interviewee the chance to speak honestly on how individuals of cultural backgrounds are presented.
I had the opportunity to interview three young professionals from the creative industry: Industrial Light & Magic, this was a chance for me to interview creative professionals and allow them to share their story, their thoughts and insights around how culture and diversity is presented through their media of work. After my interview with Bianca, Bimpe and Terry, my work was approved by the Public Relations team at ILM San Fransisco, as well as the Executive Producer Lou Hussey who found each interview to be inspiring and honest.
Moving onto the next section, I wanted to dive deeper into the film and digital animation aspect around how culture is presented in movies and television series. My two key movies that I researched and analysed were 'Turning Red' (along with the documentary 'The Making Of Turning Red') and 'Moana', and for television series, I chose a popular childhood classic 'That's So Raven' where I explore the stories and how the message of culture is projected to influence the audience about diversity.
The next sections I explored how culture is represented in Anime, where I analysed their approach to narrative storytelling and expression of their animation. Along with the 2018 Philippines Miss Universe Winner Pia Wurtzbach and her story from upbringing to career. Finally, I ended with research and analysis of four popular bloggers who are born from Filipino backgrounds, and I explored how they use blogging as their form of self-expression.
Media Kit
After researching on how popular high-end magazine publishing companies produce and present their Media Kits, I created my to reflect key specifications which could support my final magazine and also understand the insight as to how publishing houses such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar plan, produce and distribute their magazine copies each month/year.
The first sections of my media kit explore the background and planning of the magazine; this consists of understanding the brand highlights, the niche/statement of the magazine and the statistics on online presence. The next section moves into the production process of the magazine, where here I created a schedule on how the printing process of my magazine would go, a look into how much the advertising rates would cost, and the deadlines to which the editorial phases needed to be completed by.
Overall producing this media kit allowed me to develop a clear understanding on what it would be like to have my magazine(s) planned, produced and distributed as a professional magazine company.
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