From the category archives:
Look closely – Walsworth is going to play a small part in High School Musical 2.
When the Disney Channel aired its made-for-TV movie High School Musical in January 2006, it turned into a blockbuster. Now they are making High School Musical 2, a sequel set for release later this year. Among the props needed for the new movie were yearbooks for East High School, the fictional school the characters attend. Walsworth is producing those books.
One day, page submission via shipment will be as obsolete as page paste-up. While transitions to new methods can be scary, the switch to online PDF submission should not be. PDFs offer advantages, such as complete control over yearbook pages, no missing links and no shipping. Two yearbook advisers found other perks.
To Susan Asher, the idea was simple.
Every day, she saw dozens of students walking around the halls of Inza R. Wood Middle School carrying iPods and MP3 players, the small, portable digital music players that have become popular and commonplace among kids today.
Asher, the yearbook adviser at the school in Wilsonville, Ore., figured that the trendy devices could be put to productive use by her staff.
This effect can be done with many types of elements. The staff of the 2006 Epic of Lee’s Summit West High School in Lee’s Summit, Mo., used it to help illustrate their theme, “Not So Obvious.” See more about this yearbook in the Caught Our Eye feature in this issue.
For the third spring in a row, this column is profiling a professional photojournalist so they could share their stories and expertise. For this issue, I talked to Jim Barcus, staff photographer of The Kansas City Star. Jim’s story should be interesting to young photographers because his professional journey began not in journalism school, but the nationally renown Kansas City Art Institute.
Text is the most important aspect of the yearbook. While pictures will be admired first, it is the body copy and the cutlines that accomplish the book’s final goal by capturing the tone of the year. Time and time again, I have had to deal with poorly written copy, whether it is riddled with grammatical mistakes or lacks the interest that draws in the reader. Cleaning up the text is an easy process, with a few basic tips.
Those of us who have been advising for a while know yearbook production is a year-round job, no matter what our teaching contract says. Just like the Boy Scouts, the better prepared staff members are, the better the outcome. Here are ways to keep students thinking yearbook over the summer.
Middle school students are scary, to put it mildly. Turning them loose with digital cameras, computers and the internet could turn into something from a bad horror film. Beyond all that could and did go wrong during the fifth period communications class, the staff did publish a yearbook last year. We made a ton of mistakes, left in a few too many typos, but ensured that everyone’s picture showed up in the book at least one time. For a 72-page book with a first-year adviser, things went well.
Most everyone is familiar with Find/Change to correct misspellings and search for word references. But in InDesign, the tool has broader applications, such as type formatting and styles. Here is an example of using Find/Change to make a style consistent throughout documents.
Improvement in a yearbook happens in different ways. Some advisers and staff members make a great leap in the quality of their yearbook from one school year to the next because of an “aha moment,” that second when they realize how to break through and take their book in a new and improved direction.
