Evaluation draft answers

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions for real media products?There are many ways in which you can follow a real media product and if you do it makes the task a lot easier if you do so. There are many things that stand out in a magazine for example to title, if you make the title stand out it is going to make people buy the magazine, maybe just because the front cover looks good, this is especially with the younger generations how they pick things up because they are pretty or because they stand out and they are interested. My name IT was named that because it was easy to remember and it was short and simple. I also thought it was a good way of saying that the magazine was ‘it’ it had all the in stuff and it was the magazine that people wanted to buy. I didn’t chose to have a skyline as I didn’t want to make the magazine look too busy and there was simply not room for it as my photo took up all the room from top to bottom. As my name for my magazine is short and simple I didn’t want it in the middle of the page at the top because it was short I thought it was better to put in the corner of the magazine, other magazines do this such as Q magazine, because it is short it would not look right if it was in the middle of the page, it drags the attention of the reader in if it is at the corner or the page. I would also never move where the title is on the page if there was another issue that was brought out I think it should stay in the same place and people will know where to look if they are looking for the magazine. I think the information on the front of the magazine is vital, it is what grabs the read and pulls them in, if you have amazing story lines on the front cover you need to make sure that they are so interesting that people do not even think about it and just buy the magazine, if the magazine has interesting stories every month it means that people are going to buy it every month, purely for the story lines and the celebrities that are inside the story. It is harder creating a magazine that is music based and I think that is one thing that I struggled on when it came to making my magazine, I would of preferred to do a gossip magazine, however it was good to add a musical twist on my magazine. My idea for my magazine was to create a magazine that was about music and what had happened in the past month but also keep it quite art-y and make people buy it for the fact that it was pretty and that it drew the audience in. There are other things that I have used things such as the issue number and the date of the issue, other things such as the barcode, every real magazine has a barcode, this was a good affect to give my magazine and make it look like a real media product. Another thing I made look like a real media product was the huge story line, the double page spread story was a lot bigger than the other stories, it caught the readers attention (I hope) and would hopefully make people pick up the magazine as the main story was on a celebrity. Another thing I added was the ‘free CD’ a lot of magazine put freebees in their magazine and it make the sales of the magazine go up as sometimes people just buy for the CD, however they may end up liking the magazine and buying it continuously, which is good for sales of the magazine. Another convention I have also used

is putting the price on the magazine, this is a vital part of the magazine, the price may or may not put people off buying it, but you need to make sure that the price of the magazine is a good price for what is included in the magazine and what you get with it.

There are many things I have developed on my media product for example, when I was looking for ideas for my magazine and looking at real media products I came across blend magazine, I like the idea of their magazine, it was a fashion magazine but I liked their take on it, the fact that it was about fashion but it was very art-y and had a artist twist to it but inside the magazine it was full of skinny models. I took this idea and expanded on it, I liked the idea of it and the layout, my first idea was going to be that I copied off this idea to a T but I suddenly changed my mind when it came to actually putting my magazine together and I realised it didn’t work for my genre of magazine, Blend magazine looked better because they were professional models and the company was famous for being an artist fashion magazine. I got rid of having a small picture and made it bigger making it cover the full of the front page, so it drew the audience in and made the titles stand out more, I didn’t want the photos that I had taken to be tiny and for people to have to squint to be able to see them so I made it 100% bigger and realised that it looked so much better, then developed even further and edited the photo and didn’t have a line around it like Blend magazine did. The only thing I ended up taking for Blend Magazine was the half a picture idea, Blend magazine change that image every issue and change the photo depending on the central image they find images that contrast well with the central image which is good for sales, it means that people will buy it for the difference that every issue does, sometimes blend won’t have their image in the middle centre they will have it covering the full front page like what I have done but they won’t put many stories on the front if any at all. This is how I adapted the front cover, I will not change my front cover just the story lines and the images if I was to do it again, my issue would be consistent, and the reason why Blend change it up is because it is an artist magazine. The other thing I have changed is not having a skyline and not including that in my magazine front cover as I simply didn’t have the room and I didn’t want to make room for it to look silly and not my idea what I had in my head. I had to make sure that the text I was putting on my front image looked good and didn’t look too busy. There are many things that I would love to add such as more storylines to the front page but my idea was to keep it as simple as possible and I didn’t want to over crowd it, my aim was to keep it simple and make sure that it was eye catching and make sure that the storylines on the front page were eye catching and it made people want to buy the magazine.

There was no magazine conventions that I necessarily challenged, however there my magazine is a pop magazine and the standard look on a front page of magazine does not normally look like this.

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

For my magazine I decided to do a pop magazine that was for the older generation, for teens. I thought that there was no other pop magazine out there that was based on 16 to 20 year olds, it was mostly young aged children who liked pop singers such as One Direction and Union J not people like Madonna, I wanted to re-invent that type of music for older teens. I think older people these days prefer to listen to old school pop artists because it is trendy and individual to listen to people that aren’t current and in the charts that’s why I wanted to added people from Beyoncé to Madonna, I wanted a wide range of people to buy my magazine but of the older generation. My magazine is very famine it is full of pinks and neutral colours, there is no blues or reds in my magazine which these colours you typically associate boys to. I simply choose to focus on a famine magazine because being a girl I thought it would be easier to do a girl-focused magazine. However if my magazine did attract a male audience I would be just as happy. I hope that with the price of my magazine will mean that everyone can buy it. The front cover image of my magazine suggests it is a very dormant female role, it shows that woman is powerful, the front cover image is covering the full page and suggests a strong female role in the magazine, this is why I think my magazine is better from young woman than younger girls and boys. I want there to be a limit on my magazine, so that it is clear it is for the older generation but in a tasteful way I do not want to cross that line and it look as though my model is way older than she actually is.

3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

I would like to think that Bauer Media would be my publishing house for my magazine, it is a music magazine and it would fit in nicely to their publishing house. Bauer Media publishing house publishes magazines that are music related, for example Q magazine is a music magazine and I think it is similar to my magazine it is ‘art-y’ and a music magazine, I hope that Bauer media would publish a similar magazine such as mine. Each issue that I will publish will be £3.49, in the first year I will expect to make £35,000 revenue, this is based on the price of my magazine and selling 1,000 issues a month and taking away the editing and the creating of the magazine costs away from this, on profits alone with selling 1,000 a month for twelve months it would be £41,520. My magazine will be available on different platforms; it will be accessible on iPhone at 99p (This is because it is a lot cheaper to create the app than the magazine.) In this day and age people use their phones for almost everything to read the news and magazines this is why the app is a good idea for the magazine, the magazine may be more popular than the actual hard copy of the magazine. It will also be able to android and on iPad and tablets and the standard way, which is copy of the issue that you can purchase in newsstands and bookshops. This means that access to the magazine is easy, it means that more people will read the magazine which is good. I needed to add eye catching titles and titles that related to music but had a gossip edge to it, gossip on the music world.

4. Who would be the audience for your media product?

My target audience is aged 16+ years, I choose this age because I wanted to huge adult humour and adult language in my magazine, I wanted to focus on a target audience that was for my age group as I knew what my age group want. At this age I would not buy a magazine as I may think it was embarrassing and that I was ‘too old’ to buy one so I made a magazine that was good enough for people my age to pick up and buy, make it magazine that was fun and informative to read but also looked good and looked ‘fashionable’. I had to make sure that my first issue was so good that people picked it up that the subheadings on the front page made people want to buy it, it is a bit like a pilot to a TV program the first episode has to be so good that people carry on watching that TV program my magazine has to be so good that people pick up the magazine again and again, monthly. My idea was taken from Blend magazine and how it was set out with the front cover was half a image I took that and added that into my magazine, I did expand on that idea by making the image a lot bigger than what it is on blend I thought it was very plain and the idea was not in my eyes a very good idea so I expanded on this and made the image huge and made it stand out more than the tiny image that blend does on their magazine. With my magazine I have included good headlines and a free CD which may make the audience by the magazine, the front cover does not state which CD it is so you have to buy or look inside the magazine to see which one it is. Each month I will add new and up coming things to my magazine such as the UK top 40 of the past month, the songs that everyone has been talking about and but stick to my idea of the girl and pink theme, I need to make sure that it attracts as many people as possible and I think that girls are the way to do it.

5. How did you attract/address your audience?

My target audience is 16 to 20 years of age, I wanted to target a older generation so I could use adult language and humour. I wanted to be able to talk as I would myself personally I did not want to focus on young people because I already think there are lots of magazines for younger people already I do not think there is a magazine out there that is aimed at 16 years plus. There is not a magazine that I would personally buy myself. My theme of the magazine was pinks was pink is usually associated with girl, however this is stereotypical but I have added storylines about woman and girl bands and had my main model as a woman this suggests to me that the magazine is a for woman and not associated with men, however this would not be a disadvantage if men did read my magazine. I needed to make sure that my images used in the magazine and my text was very woman related to attract a older generation of girls, maybe including pop singers that the younger generation would not of heard of however I didn’t include people that 16 years olds would not know, people like Madonna. I choose the Vampire Raves font all the way through my magazine on almost 90% of my magazine because I wanted to keep the theme of that font and if I was going to create another magazine I would use that font again to make it a tradition of the magazine and make it stand out to people, even though it is a font I thought it

was quite famine and that it worked well with my magazine. The idea of blend magazine I loved, I saw it and knew I had to follow that idea, I didn’t want to 100% copy of that idea however the use of images on that magazine was amazing and I really wanted to use that idea. I wanted to use this idea because Blend magazine looked very neat and very well presented; I was hoping that my magazine would turn out the same, I knew that if I followed that magazine outline that my magazine would turn out pretty similar and that it wouldn’t look messy.

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of construction the product?

When I took my photos of my model I used a Canon 600 D, which was very good to use and very easy, at first it was hard to get it focused and to get the lighting correct but it was a good camera to use and took very good quality pictures, even if I took a bad angled photo the camera brought out the right areas and made it look ok. As my model changed outfit a lot the lighting had to be correct for that type of outfit, a dark coloured outfit the lighting had to be brighter than if it was a light coloured outfit the lighting didn’t have to be as harsh.

I used two publishing software’s on the computer, I used Photoshop and InDesign; these two software’s were very helpful and helped me out a lot. I used Photoshop the most, I used many tools, such as: I used the spot healing tool to get rid of any blemishes that the model had, my model had very bad fake tan on her neck so the spot healing tool blurred that out very well and now it is hardly noticeable. The thing I liked about Photoshop is that it is very easy to get rid of a mistake you have done it can be gone instantly. I think the tool I used the most is the Lasso Select Tool, it is very easy to select photos and get rid of the background this made it easy so you could put it straight into InDesign and it was done. Another tool that was very useful was the colour picker tool, the pink on my magazine was not on the colour chart and I created it so I had to make sure that I had the same colour every time I used pink so I did not make the magazine look silly. Another tool that was useful as the move tool, this helped me move things around the page and made sure they were in the correct place. The foreground and background colour tool was also helpful it meant that you could change the colour instantly without using the bucket tool. The Eraser tool was helpful after I used the selection tool to get rid of rough edges and get rid of the bumps. The Marquee tool was also good if you only wanted to edit a small section you could not go out of that area it made it very helpful.

InDesign was another software that I used that was easy and very helpful, I also used a lot of tools on there as well as Photoshop, such as: the colour tool, making the text black and pink and a hint of red, it was very useful because I didn’t realise until I had a done it that when you do copy and paste things in InDesign it goes back to black and white however it did not take very long to change back to the correct colours it was very simple because of the colour tool. Another main tool I used was the text wrap and changing the size of my guttering around the

images, the tool was very good and very useful, if I did it by hand and used space bars it wont not of looked as good at all, so the text wrap really helped me when adding my text to the page. The other thing I did on InDesign was add the page numbers, I didn’t do this on Photoshop I added them in on InDesign because it was a lot easier. The tool on InDesign that added grids to the page also helped it made it easier to line your text up and line the images up on the page, this again would have been hard if it was done free hand.

InDesign and Photoshop really helped when constructing my magazine it would have been a lot harder to do without them software’s.

7.Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel that you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

When doing the planning and the research of the genre of magazine made creating the magazine a lot easier, at first I was really apprehensive and when I started I became very confident. Looking at other magazines made me come up with my ideas for mine such as Blend magazine, looking at other magazine conventions helped me to create my magazine because I knew that if I followed the standard conventions that I would more likely get high grades on my over all conclusion. Doing research on pop music helped because then I knew what to included in my magazine I knew what pop readers wanted to read and what they looked for in a magazine so this helped me expand on my magazine.

The prelim task of the college magazine mock up, was terrible compared to my magazine now, I have developed on my Photoshop skills 100%, if I did that magazine again I would know how to work Photoshop better and would do a better job. However the magazine task was a good starting point and did help me learn, I had never used Photoshop before that time so it was good to do that task to help me with my magazine now. My Photoshop skills were very poor but I did have the help of my teacher and my friend Chloe next to me who was on her second year of media so she knew what to do and could help me a lot.

My dad is a photographer as a hobby and sells his photos, so using the camera wasn’t hard to me because I have been using them since I was a little girl, so the camera was not a issue and if I did have a problem my dad was there to help and teach me how to use it. So taking photos of my model was the easiest bit of my full magazine and the thing I enjoyed the most.

My overall product has turned out better than I hoped for, half way through I was really worried that it wasn’t going to turn out the way I wanted and it was going to look silly but it does look a lot better than I first though, I am proud of my ideas and my final product. However I do know there are a few things that need changing and that need tweaking but they will be changed as soon as possible but over all I am happy with the outcome of my magazine and I would love to do the task again.