Evaluation

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

My media product immediately challenges the conventions of a general music magazine as the genre I chose to base the content of the issue on has not been done before. Due to the fact that I decided to base my magazine on a genre that had not been bought onto the magazine front before I had to combine it with the rock genre as this meant that I was able to take conventions from a genre that already had a strong presence in the magazine industry with magazines such as Kerrang! I chose to follow the rock genre for this because many acts in comedy music can also be associated with rock especially some of the most well know ones like Tenacious D.
The picture of my front cover was taken to represent comedy. Because there was nowhere for me to find a magazine cover for this genre I looked at comedy artists album covers and posters.  A common feature of the pictures I found was that many of them had the artist dressed smart. They would either be doing this ironically or would have something  else in the picture to undermine the serious aspect. I took inspiration from an Axil of Awesome album cover which featured the three musicians staring into the camera with a menacing look but this was completely undermined by the band wearing party hats. I also had to make sure that there was a musical connotation s well as some rock influence so I made sure that the models were wearing hats that had rock colours whilst one of them held a guitar. Another convention I noticed in my research about comedy music was that a number of acts in this genre used an acoustic guitar so I made sure that this was the instrument the model used. The font on my magazine front cover uses the conventions of a rock magazine so whilst the issue I was creating for the magazine was about comedy the magazine showed it would usually be featuring a rock element. I also used a colour scheme that connoted it was a rock magazine with red and yellow spaces with black and white writing. There is some use of a yellow font, which makes the main article stand out from the rest of the cover lines on the magazine front cover. One thing that many magazines do to draw readers in is include a puff saying that something is free or exclusive, due to my picture being the wrong size to fill an A4 sheet of paper I was able to dedicate a space at the bottom of my page to lure the reader in with something that could be given away for free. From deconstructing other rock magazines I found that on the double page spread there would usually be a quote or two pulled out of the text and enlarged to engage the reader into an important aspect of the story. I also saw that they made sure the main subject or anything important on the picture was not in the centre of the page as that is where the page will fold and will likely mean that part of the picture is lost so it would be a bad idea to put the focus of the picture here. I also found that the text on the double page spread is very often made up of questions and answers so I incorporated this into mine.

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

 My media product mainly represents youthful social groups as many of the acts that are featured in it and those that have a heavy presence in the industry right now are also in their youth. This issue of my magazine will represent a much more laid back social group than the media product will in future issues but still have an edginess to it. Whilst there are a lot of youth groups that will be featured in the magazine there are some older ones such as Axil of Awesome and Weird Al Yankovic, this means that an older generation will also be represented similarly to the youth.

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

 The institution I had chosen to distribute my magazine was Bauer Media as they print magazines of a similar genre to mine nationwide. Most notably they distribute the Kerrang! magazine which I had used to get my rock influence and made sure I had similar connotations of. They also publish Mojo and Q magazines so they have a strong presence in the industry and would be the most likely to publish a magazine like mine. My magazine will be accessible to a large number of people and Bauer Media will be able to distribute the magazine to such a number of people. 

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

 I originally planned to make my magazine solely about the comedy music genre so when I did research into finding out who would want to read a magazine about this genre of music it came to be late teens to thirties and typically male. However I later found that the number of people who would actually want to read a music magazine about comedy was too few so I changed to the rock genre as this had the closest links to the genre which I had found through further research. The particular issue of the magazine that I produced is targeted at an audience that will not be looking for something serious

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

 On the front cover I attracted my audience by including a picture that has the two subjects looking at the camera which will draw the audience in. The audience will also be attracted by the front cover with words such as "free", "exclusive" and "first". Some of the colouring on the page will be likely to stand out on the shelf and catch the eye of the reader along with the wackiness of the picture that had been used on the front cover. Another way that I attracted my audience was making sure I used a number of well known names in the industry which the readers would recognise.

On the contents page I added a message to the audience from the editor. This made the magazine more personal as it makes the audience feel that I am talking directly to them.

6) What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

 Before constructing this product I had only used the program Photoshop before to construct my preliminary task so I had very little experience with it. When I came to construct  my front cover I had to experiment with the program to find out the different tools I could use. I learnt how to use layers on the page better through  constructing my product and how to handle having many layers on one document. I had also learnt how to control the repair tool more as I was able to make my picture look closer to what I needed by removing things such as markings in the background to make it look more professional. I also had to remove a brand logo from the shirt of one of the models as it would hinder the rock and comedy connotations. I had to do this with care so that the shirt did not appear to be altered. At home I use a desktop mac so I was already familiar with the operating system however when constructing the magazine I had used a MacBook so I had to learn the touchpad controls. As it took me far too long to figure out how to use a right click I learnt different ways to navigate the OS and operate programs such as Photoshop without using the right mouse button. I have also learnt that many technologies can be very unreliable as there were countless times where a mac would not log on so I had to be prepared with at least two MacBook's at the beginning of a session to make sure I was able to log on as quickly as possible so no time was wasted. I was also able to become more familiar with the use of a camera as before the photo-shoot for this task I had only been able to use a mobile phone camera and had the experience with a professional photographer to take pictures for my preliminary task and that time I was given help. When I did my photo-shoot I suddenly had to do it independently. This made meant that I had to make sure I was taking quality shots by myself thus making me learn my way around the camera. I was also able to learn to use a number of online websites such as Slide Share so I could publish things such as my research to this blog. Another website I had used to experiment with was Bubbl which allowed me to make a creative online mind map to display conventions of a particular genre.

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

Looking back at my preliminary task I feel that I have learnt how to construct a magazine much better. In the preliminary task I used a plain background with one colour, which had made it unappealing and looked uncreative. For the front cover for my main task I separated different sections and used a number of colours on the page. From this I feel I have learnt how to make a more creative piece and use Photoshop more creatively to achieve this. My preliminary task was also very plain on the text front as it simply consisted of the title and three cover lines, for my main task I included much more content on the page and made the cover lines stand out from the title more as in the preliminary task they looked very similar. A massive difference between the main and preliminary task was the amount of research that had gone into the both of them. For the preliminary task I had just jumped into the creation process and spent little time thinking about what I wanted to achieve as a final result. In the main task I actually spent time finding out who my audience are and finding the connotation of what should go into my magazine. From this I learnt that it is very important to plan a creation like this if you have any hope of creating a good product. This can be seen very well from the contents page of the preliminary task because I had done no research into what it should look like it was finished with four pages featured on the contents and nothing else. If I had done research into this I would have known that a general magazines contents page should have included pictures and text about what is inside the issue with some of the articles in the magazine being highlighted as ones that are the most important or entertaining to read. Probably one of the most important things I have learnt from going through the process to create the product is how important it is for me to be organised and to manage time well, Throughout the production I failed to do this and had the consequence of having to get a lot of work done in a short time period making it very rushed. If I were ever to repeat the whole task I would make sure that I planned how I was going to handle it much better and not have to pull my coursework together last minute and this is something that I have learnt that will influence any large scale projects like this I do in the future.