Evaluation Question 7 (Draft) - Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

My Prelim task focused on a school magazine; I used a stock photo background and a dark image that was not taken in the best of conditions. I used an outer glow on the image to make the model seem as if he was actually in the background and not just added on. I already had some knowledge of the programs I was going to use, although I did gain some knowledge throughout the production.

I believe that my biggest downfall was my positioning; I struggled deciding where I would position each of the components of my design work, although this did improve throughout the production of my magazine. My confidence has improved a lot when it comes to my design work, with the ability to pick colour schemes, to the ability to pick fonts. A big problem I had when making my magazine was deciding what fonts to use, I used references to other magazines and picked fonts that used the same spacing, although had a different style allowing me to have a reference and make progress.

My Target Audience changed a lot through the development of my work; for my prelim my Audience revolved around school teenagers aged 15-19 of both genders, whilst my current age group revolves around males aged 16-24. The changes to my Target Audience caused my language to change when addressing my audience as well as the images I used and lighting alterations.

Trying to find an appropriate target audience was rather easy as the magazines that my magazine was based around already have the same audience.

Evaluation Question 6 (Draft) - What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing this product?

I am already rather familiar with the use of Photoshop, although I did learn some things on the way; one of the main things I learnt during the duration of my magazine creation was to make an image more vivid through the use of Layer Styles. By duplicating a layer twice and giving each of the duplicates a different property, for example 'Hard Light', this led to the alteration of my double page spread image, allowing for the colours to stand out a lot more clearly.

Relying on natural and synthetic light while taking photos is not one of my strong points, as I am not perfect with the format of taking pictures in a studio. I have never had a strong sense of being able to tell what lens or settings to use while taking a photograph outside, and within a studio the same problems apply; I tried to overlook these by creating the best lighting situation I could, giving me a lot of space to work on editing the photo in Photoshop.

For my double page spread, I did have a temptation to use a different program other than Photoshop, but decided in the end to stick with what I knew and create something that could easily be created in the program that I knew well.

Evaluation Question 5 - How did you attract/address your audience?

In order to attract my audience, I tried to address them in a very casual tone. The reason for this format of addressing the audience is to make the audience feel as if they are having a conversation with a real person. By making the Audience think they are talking to a real person, it allows them to feel a lot more casual while reading and in a real life magazine it would cause them to want to try and socialise with the content, such as going on Twitter and Facebook and making contact with the creators, creating a community.

I included a lot of images of Richard, my model that featured on all pages that I created. My model is dressed in very smart clothes, a suit, this is to help attract my audience, male; they see a smartly dressed male and desire to look like him. It could be said that my audience could stretch to female because of the male on my cover, and how he is dressed, although this would be down to personal preference.

I took 200 photos over the course of two photo-shoots; the first photo-shoot I took did not land me with any good shots that I wanted to keep, as they were of a different model, so in the end I decided to delete them. My second session was of my current model and contained a lot more professional looking photographs that I was able to use for my final magazine. The first photo-shoot I had only used two lights, but the third used three, and with the use of three lights it allowed me to take a lot brighter and vivid photos.

On my double page spread, I added filter effects to my image to make the colours more vivid, especially the strap on the guitar; there are two lines of blue on the strap that I added filter effects to make stand out amongst the rest of the image, giving a very vivid contrast of colours.

Evaluation Question 4 (Draft) - Who would be the audience for your media product?

Without a doubt, my Target Audience is male between age 16-24. I can say this very confidently because of the style of music and how it is applied to it's audience. If I take an example of one of my friends Richard, who bears the stereotypical look of a 'Rock Fan' as seen on the image to the right, and take a look at his Ipod you will find the style of music that is found wthin my magazine.

My artist, who coincidentally is Richard, is a 'Made-up' rock artist who strives to apply to many different age groups, one of them being the group my magazine applies to. My Target Market spend their free time researching into their favourite artists; following them on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr to provide them with enough knowledge to satisfy their hunger for the addiction that is their taste in music. Music Artists of this Genre are very common users of these mediums of communication, using Social Networking to communicate with their fans.

My Audience rely on television containing controversial humour because of their desire to rebel against society; the same applies to the style of music that is popular for this Audience, with the desire to go against what is seen as what the age group should be/ act as.

Evaluation Question 3 (Draft) - What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

The Media Instition to produce Mojo and Kerrang is 'Bauer' so straight away I am drawn towards this company because of the relationship they have with my inspirations. Looking deeper into the question, more so into Bauer, I see that the institution has a very tight link with social networking such as Youtube, Twitter and Facebook. Companies keeping links with social networking is a very important thing in modern society, because of how communication has evolved; many magazines include such accounts in order to keep in contact with fans of their magazine and get a look at the reception of each issue.

I exampled the link with social networking on my contents page; at the base of the page I made sure to give reference to different websites. I included Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, three very popular websites amongst teenagers, and especially popular for Magazine creators as they give a very simple method of distributing information. There are many references within my contents that link to the community and twitter; an entire section of the contents revolves around talking to the community.

Bauer allow for subscriptions to be made online to each of the magazines that they produce, which would be a very useful feature to have, along with the ability to subscribe through a phone number. The price of magazines within this institution basically remain the same, which is why I would want to follow through with them, in order to create a magazine that fans of other magazine styles would not think feels out of place.

Evaluation Question 2 (Draft) - How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Through the research of my magazine, I found that the target age group of my style of magazine revolves around 16+ male, and potentially female. On UK Tribes my Audience remain in the groups 'Skaters' and 'Young Alts' because of their desire to break away from what the word sees as 'Normal' for their age group. It is not very common for Skaters to be into mainstream music, and as such this fits my style almost perfectly, as it is not very often that Rock/ Pop Punk is classified as Mainstream amongst others.

Evaluation Question 1 (Draft) - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Before starting the creation of my magazine, I had to research into the existing formats of magazine designs to take away some ideas and concepts to create my own idea. The Genre that I decided I wanted to follow was Rock/ Pop Punk, so my main focus revolved around Mojo and Kerrang, with a rather cluttered style to represent the style of music present.

The style that is exceptionally popular when it comes to this genre, more so in Kerrang is to have a rather large logo at the top, with a rendered image of a music artist that is made to cover some, and sometimes all, of the magazine name. It is very common for the layers to overlap, with other layers being on top of the magazine title other than the rendered image, to give a sense of depth. There is often a headline, which more often than not is the name of the artist, with a subtitle following afterwards that usually related to the story in which the artist is in.

Kerrang is particularly fond of red headers and footers, as seen in the example magazine I have shown; white text on red is very clear and easy to see in terms of contrast, so Kerrang like to use this style in order to make certain that the user can see what is included within the issue. The background is kept rather simple so that attention is not drawn away from the main image on the page; this technique is one that a lot of other magazines tend to take after too

When designing my final magazine, I waned to take some of the best ideas from the magazines I researched into, and add some of my own ideas to create a new product. My front cover conveyed the red header, whilst varying with the black footer; I thought that giving this contrast of Red above and Black below would allow for a much more graphically pleasing look, and am happy with the final result. Some variations of the Kerrang front cover use rotated objects to add into the cover image giving it a 'messy' type of style which is something that I used for my front cover; text is very common for this style, as used for my cover for the header and the sub header. My contents is rather similar to that of Kerrang with positioning, I followed the concept of using a black box header with yellow text on the inside, one of the strongest contrasts of colours to help keep a very bold and easily seen style of header. My Front Cover follows the 'F' Pattern.

A style that I decided to input was to add subtitles into the titles underneath each header; I used this to give more details into some of the page titles and make the page seem more filled than it would without them. For the subtitles I used a dark grey in order to make sure that the reader knows what they are meant to focus on first and what they are supposed to focus on next. When it came to the 'Album Reviews' and 'Interviews' I used a simple list in a font 4px bigger than the rest of the font, without any subtitles so that it stuck out amongst the rest of the page. There were other sections of the contents that I mixed together elements of Subtitled titles and Non-Subtitled titles to give a sense of contrast.

My double page spread was a hybrid of an interview and a story on the artist I chose. I rendered out the person in the picture I used for my page and changed the background to be a gradient of a Light Grey, and a slightly Darker Grey; the way this was done is very apparent, and easy to notice with the white text being placed upon a darker background and the black text placed onto a light background. I used a mix of white text and red text for the header because I felt this worked as a nice contrast, and kept the body of the text black, as this is a very common style used within Kerrang and Mojo.



 

Double Final

Final Contents

Final Front Cover