Evaluation Question 1 By Jessica Bartrum

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

My project looks like a music magazine as it follows the conventions of a typical music magazine. It had all the required elements of a magazines. For example, it has everything from masthead and sell lines to bar code and price. It’s specifically a music magazine, not only because the text relates to music, but because it follows conventions that a music magazine would have. Such as, most music magazines are known for using the colour red in some form on their magazine. Other colours that go with this are black and white. I have used this particular colour scheme, mostly to conform to the most common music magazine convention so that the readers would be able to clearly tell it was a music magazine from first glace.

I have also used the particular shot type for the front cover that most magazines use instead of going for a shot type that would subvert the usual convention in order not to push the boundaries and make my publication look unprofessional and unrealistic.

In my blog, I have looked at many

magazine front covers, contents pages

and double page spreads. Such as

Kerrang, Q and NME. I mainly looked

at these to pick out what I liked about

them, such as how they presented a

certain aspect of magazines such as

the placement of bar code or the

colour scheme.

My magazine doesn’t fit into a particular genre. Although, it is leaning more towards a pop/rock genre. I chose to do this in order to stay true to the title of my magazine: 'DIVERSE'. I wanted to include a diverse range of music genres, but not too diverse as I want the genres I include to be able to relate to each others in some way. Such as I wouldn't include country and opera as they're their own niche genres that don't relate well with genres such as rock.

For the models that I used on my magazine, I got friends of mine to pose for photos, imitating a band and therefore becoming music artists. I gave them a persona: The Thieves, and then created a back story and tried to work with that. I attempted to bring the band to life in the magazine through the story but mostly the photos such as for the interview and meeting the crowd. In the interview, it is set in a studio with lights, an interviewer, a studio audience and even appropriate chairs.

When taking photographs for my magazine, I followed the normal conventions. Such as for the front cover photographs, I took them in portrait so then I had the option to crop them to either a head shot or a medium shot. I didn't go too experimental when taking the other shots. Such as for the interview and meeting the crowd, I took them in landscape as to get the whole scene in.

Editing was rather a large part of my work. For the front cover, I decided to go against the normal convention of a plain colour background and include the brick as to make my magazine stand out from the rest. I also had to edit most o the photographs in order to improve the look of them.

When taking the interview and meeting the crowd photographs and video, I had the scene set up especially. There were chairs placed in an audience formation, two chairs placed facing towards each other ready for an interview. There were lights set up around the studio and the black curtain backdrop were all propped up.

Question 2

How does your media product

represent particular social

groups?

My magazine mostly contains people who are of young adult age. I haven't put any of the people in my magazine in a negative light. If anything, they are shown in a positive light. For example, I have included a photograph of my band members meeting their fans which shows that they are nice and considerate of their fans and have time to meet them. Also, the fans themselves are of a similar age and are shown to be passionate as they are clearly enjoying meeting the band who they must really like and are passionate enough about them to go to a meet and greet opportunity event. Through the band members, I have shown that that particular age group can be capable of obtaining power as they have obviously gained fans and loyal followers and are successful enough to be on the front cover of a magazine.

Gender in my magazine is dominantly male. In fact, there are no females in the entirety of my three pages. This, however, was not intentional but it does help convey the target audience, who I predict to be mostly male. The male gender is represented as powerful as they people in my magazine are all mostly famous.

These two demographics are the only two that have been focused on in my magazine.

My magazine combines the following aspects in order to represent a particular social group. The model on the front cover is sporting a closed off, hard expression. This is joined with the expressive fonts, all of the text being laid out in a straight forward fashion and the lack of usage of complex words .All of this combined helps to represent teenagers as it almost mimics them. This is because teenagers are known for being at that stage where they are still learning so they don’t know too much yet they still think they have a high status in the world.

When creating this magazine, I knew I wanted it to be aimed at young adults. With that in mind, I was rather experimental with the fonts especially. I used ones that would be interesting to read and look at as I know that’s what young adults are known to like. If I were aiming for a more mature audience, I would’ve used formal fonts. I also put models that were of a similar age to the intended audience as to give them a connection with the magazine.

The magazine carries the theme of rock through it. Especially with the music band I have put into the magazine. I tried to pose Sam a kind of a rock star seeing as his band does produce rock music. I tried to get this stereotype across though his harsh, careless expression on the front cover and in the interview, his response are straight-forward. “Okay, I’m going to be straight with you. Warren was taking the band places it didn’t want to go.”

Question 3

What kind of media institution might distribute your

media product and why?

The most likely magazine publishing house to own my magazine is IPC. This is because it is very popular and owns many popular magazines. Also, one of the main reasons I think this particular

publishing house would own my magazine is because it also owns NME. This is important as NME is similar to my own

magazine and would attract the same sort of audience as that magazine but then my magazine is even more diverse so could then attract even more people on top of that. Also, it is quoted

as “the UK's leading consumer magazine and digital publisher.” This means that it works with the technological side of the

magazine publication. This relates to my magazine as because of it’s target audience, it will be best if there is a digital copy of the

magazine for the readers to buy as well as they are becoming increasingly popular.

My magazine will be circulated monthly. This is because this is the most common option for magazines to be circulated. Also, if

it was more often than this then it wouldn’t contain as much content as it does.

I have looked at this website which shows statistics on how well various magazines are selling.

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/uk-magazines-lose-print-sales-average-63-cent-full-abc-breakdown-all-503-titles

From this, I have discovered that BBC Music Magazine has dropped sales 2.2%, Kerrang has dropped sales down 8.9%, Q has dropped 14.2% and NME has dropped 21.1% in just one

year. From my findings, I have discovered that music magazines aren’t at their most popular in the present time.

I decided to look into why this was and found the following website:

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/feb/13/nme-sales-falling-off-charts-music-magazine-circulation

This tells us that magazine sale are dropping as people are becoming more in favour of digital methods. I have included a

website for my magazine and added the address onto the front cover so the readers will have easy access to the digital side of

my magazine.

It will be available through subscription as this way, the readers can just sign up and receive the magazine easier and this will be

a good option for the magazine to have as it makes the magazine easy for the readers to obtain. Also, most magazines nowadays have a subscription option so it would be pointless not too. It will also help with predicting sales and popularity

and even if the magazine are reaching the allocated target audience or if there are a more diverse range of readers than

expected.

The magazines website will be modern. It will be high tech yet easy accessible and straight forward. All of the material featured

in the printed version of the magazine will be available in the digital version and some will be on the website also. There will also be extra content on the magazine such as videos and other

technical content that relates to the content inside of each monthly edition of the magazine.

Furthermore, such media institutions as social networks, would help with distributing the magazine. Such as Facebook, Twitter

and Tumblr.

Question 4

Who would be the audience for your media product?

My target audience for my magazine is teenagers and young adults of both genders, but mostly male, aged from 16 to 24. I

have chosen to target this particular group of people as they are roughly the same target audience as other well known

magazines that are similar to mine as they would all attract a similar audience. Such as NME, whose target audience would be

the same. They would also be music enthusiasts.

This particular target audience would most likely be classed as C1,

C2 or D on the standard occupational classification. This

means the magazine would target people of lower middle class,

skilled working class and working class.

Question 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

My magazine shares certain conventions with other professional magazines. The main one being

the use of colour. Many music magazines are known for using red along with black on white for their front cover. I have incorporated this colour

scheme into my own magazine.

My magazine in general has a USP: it contains a diverse range of rock sub-genres as shown

through the contents page. For example: indie rock, alternative rock and pop rock. Also, this

particular issue has the USP of having an exclusive interview with the band: The Thieves.

I wanted my anchorage line to be catchy so that it would attract the target audience and communicate the idea that the magazine is interesting to read. So I used a combination of a metaphor and sibilance in order to

make the title sound good. For the layouts of the front cover and the double page spread, I tried to keep it simple and easy to navigate around. I didn’t want it to look too

overcrowded. For my contents page, this was more complex as there was more to put on the page. However, I tried to keep it fairly simple whilst

also including everything necessary. I wanted it to look full of content also, hence the inclusion of lots of text on this page. This is good for the target audience as because they are younger, they are known to prefer easy to

understand things. I also kept the colour scheme simple for this reason but included a colour from the rainbow to improve the overall look so that it

wouldn’t be dull and boring. I was experimental with the fonts as I wanted them to look expressive and interesting. If the page looks interesting, then the audience are more likely

to think that the magazine is also interesting.

For locations of the photo-shoots, I chose to do the individual ones for the front cover outside in front of a brick wall as then I would have a ready

made, interesting looking front cover that would stand out from the crowd. For the other photographs, I took them in a studio in order to give it a realistic look. I didn’t use any specific pros in my photographs, except the chairs, which I picked out the nicer looking ones for the interviewee

and interviewer opposed to the crowd.

Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of

constructing the product?

The process I had to go through in order to create the final product was a long one. I had to start off by getting the photographs which I had to of thought of and gotten inspiration for beforehand. I had to

organise the set, props, people and camera. I then took these photographs and looked through them and analysed a few and then finally pick out the best one. I did most of this deliberation on a blog

post.

The next step was making the actual magazine. It was at this point where I would open up Photoshop. I began by editing the chosen photographs so that they looked of the correct standard for my

magazine. For example, I had to edit the photograph of the model on the front cover so that they looked better and I also had to crop the

image to the correct size. I then used this as a base for my magazine by then adding the key elements of each page on top, such as the

masthead. Once I had adding everything, put them all to a suitable colour, shape and position, then I went and got feedback from peers and then made any necessary changes and then my production was finished. I recorded most steps of piecing together each magazine

piece on my blog

For all of my photographs, I used a Nikon D3100, which is a digital SLR camera. It was used first of all for the individuals photo shoot. I had to

adjust the zoom when doing this shoot in order to close down the space around each of the models. I used flash for these shots as I was holding the camera myself and without flash, the pictures turned out

not as good quality you can’t get a steady shot whilst holding a camera and not using flash. The use of flash also added extra light to the shot,

enabling the photograph to show up more detail.

I then used the same camera for the interview and meeting the crowd shoots. For these, we were all in a studio and had set up lights so the flash was unnecessary. Also, when using it, the people in the shoot

looked too white. So, because of all this, I couldn’t use flash. Instead, I put the shutter down and tried that. However, as I was holding it by hand, the photographs weren’t turning out the best of quality. In order to get around this problem, I used a tripod and balanced the camera on that for both shoots. This way, the camera was perfectly still so it didn’t need the flash on and I was able to get a high quality

photograph using this method.

For this project, I used a few different websites for different purposes. The main website that I have used is Google images to find images of other magazines in

order to complete my research: https://www.google.co.uk/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi&ei=9009U_y5BImG0AWCwoHgAQ&ve

d=0CAQQqi4oAg To research into fonts, I used:

http://www.dafont.com/ To show case my research, planning, drafting, final products and evaluation, I have put them all on my blog. This is a Blogger blog. I have put in screen grabs, final products and steps of various things I have done for my production. I have then added in YouTube videos to show case the interview and meeting the crowd and also some answers for my evaluation. I will also use slideshare and prezi to show case my evaluation.

Photoshop played a massive role in creating my magazine. I use this to edit all of my photographs and then to create the actual magazine itself. This was a decision I am thoroughly pleased with. This

is because everything I needed was on Photoshop., Using this software, I had access to a wide range of tools to work with in order to alter,

adjust and improve each photograph and each piece of the production.

Question 7

What have you learnt about the conventions of

magazine productions and what progress have

you made from the student mag?

When creating my preliminary task – the college magazine – I focused more on the text that I included. I didn’t really focus on the theme and colour as it didn’t really follow a particular theme and there wasn’t a colour scheme. The only colours that I actually used were black and white. I also didn’t really have anything to base this magazine off as

college magazines aren’t a popular genre and there is a large range of them without any being specifically well known.

Whereas, for my music magazine, I thought this through before hand a

lot more. It was easier to research as it is a very popular genre. Also, there are many popular ones that I took inspiration from. After I had researched, it was easier to make certain decisions. Such as I knew

what colours I wanted to use as I had seen them used often and I knew that I wanted to experiment with fonts as I had also seem some

interesting fonts used on other popular magazines. Also, I connected all three pages together better in my music magazine.

I have learnt how to narrow my magazine down so that it fits a certain niche opposed to being a general looking magazine. I have also learnt

to be experiential with certain aspects of the magazine in order to maintain reader interest