iMedia at That Blue Square Thing

Creative iMedia

This page is for the 2023 iMedia syllabus - so it's for Year 11. If you're not in Year 11 you need to look at the 2024 page.

R082 - Creating Digital Graphics

Learning Objective 3: Making

LO3 is worth 18 marks. It involves sourcing the assets (images) you need and making the final product.

You need to:

source the assets (images) you need - the Copyright Free Images page may be useful
re-purpose (edit) and store the assets properly - making sure that they are "technically compatible" with the final graphic
use a range of tools and techniques to combine the assets to make the final graphic
save the final versions of the graphic as required by your project brief
submit your final graphics as digital files

You also need to:

submit evidence of using file names and version control

A copy of the markgrid for this LO is at the bottom of this page.

What the LO3 markgrid means

Gathering Assets

It's important to use high quality assets and to try to make sure they are copyright free if possible. There are lots of places you could get these from on my Copyright Free Images page.

You need to record where you source your assets from and how you edit them. You can use the exam board template below to do this.

Assets table

This is a template produced by OCR which you are allowed to use. I'm providing it here because it's easier to do that than put it somewhere else. I'm not claiming it's mine and haven't changed it in any way (not even to make the header rows work properly...)

Here's an example of the sort of thing you could do in an assets table.

Assets table example use

It's useful to use screenshots to evidence your use of image preparation as well. This will help get you marks for technical compatibility and in the other part of the LO3 markgrid...

What is "technical compatibility"?

This is all about making sure that the images you source and then prepare will work with your final graph. So, if your final product is a print graphic, you need to make sure that the images you source have been converted to print quality (i.e. 300 pixels/inch). If you don't then they aren't suitable for use in a print document.

Preparing assets summary

Creating the Graphic

You need to use tools and techniques - including some nice advanced skills - to create the final graphic.

What skills should I use?

Good question. Anything that uses sliders or layer styles are an excellent idea. I spend a lot of time teaching these sorts of skills in Key Stage 3. You could take a look at:

my KS3 Photoshop workshop - as well as its subpages
my KS3 Vector Graphics workshop
the Recipe Card mini-project
the DVD cover mini-project

Image skills summary

It's important to evidence what you do. Screenshots, with some writing to go with them, are probably the best way to do this.

You also need to evidence your use of version control, filenames and folders. If you don't provide evidence of this you can't get any credit for the bottom two parts of the markgrid.

File names and formats - how to evidence these

The Markgrid:

Here's the markgrid for LO3. You'll need to use screenshots to evidence a lot of things in this LO.

Note: this markgrid image is a copy of the one included in the sample assessment briefs produced by OCR in 2019. These are available freely on the OCR iMedia webpages. It is copyright OCR and reproduced here to make access easier for students. No attempt to claim copyright is being made. I asked the chief moderator at a meeting in July 2018 if it was OK to put it on the web and he said it was...