EVALUATION

1.In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real
media products?
2.How does your media product represent particular social groups? *
3.What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
4.Who would be the audience for your media product?
5.How did you attract/address your audience?
6.What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
7.Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? *

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

My media product, which is the magazine I have constructed uses forms and conventions of a real media products because it looks just like a real media product. The way I did this was through my research. When I researched magazine front covers I realised that the masthead from each of the magazines was either covered up slighly, still thats its recogniseable or overlaping the main picture, so I decided to do this on my front cover by covering the masthead up slightly with the main image on the front cover. The main image also links in with how my media products realsim because on every front cover of a magazine you have a main image and I do on the front cover of mine, but most importantly for the main image they normally atrract the reader by the eyes of the main image looking directly at you and I have a strong bold main image which does this very good. My media product challenges real media products because of a slight difference in the layout of the front cover, I mean this by the bar I have created at the bottom of the page, within this bar there is the headline which you would normally expect in the middle of the page and this is what makes the front cover of my magazine a little bit different. The lighting of my main image is darker rather than light and this represents my music genre for my magazine because the genre is rock and when you think of rock you don't think of bright and bubbly things you think of dark and serious things, this also interlinks with the expression on the person in the main image face because she looks very serious, I also think the lighting could represent rock artists moods and they way they act in they way people think of them stereotypically. i edited my main image in photoshop by increasing the contrast and making it darker so it would stand out more and give that dinghy mysterious feeling to it. the make up the person in the main image is wearing directly relates to what kind of make up a real female rock artist would wear, e.g. things such as the dark eye make up and yet again the use of darkness interlinks into the representation of the music genre i have chosen which is rock this is following the convention. My magazine is based on females and I think this challenges the conventions of a real rock magazine because stereotypically at first instance when someone who is not familiar with rock and you ask them what  kind of people do you associate with rock they would probably answer a group of men in a band, on the other hand my magazine only represents females and they are females that are rock artists, but they are totally different from the stereotypical view someone would give them because they are focused and do care and the stereotypical view would be a moody person who doesn't wants to talk to you and doesn't have a care in the world. The colours of the fonts and titles i have in my magazine uses conventions of a real media product because the main colours I have used are black red and blue, the black represents the whole stigma of rock the feeling to it, the red represents danger and this is what people would think that represents rock people and the blue just represents the main gender you would associate with rock but this is contrasted in my magazine because my magazine is about females. I have also used white for some of the fonts and the titles and this challenges the conventions of a rock magazine because you wouldn't compare the colour white to a rock artist because white represents purity and innocence but this actually does represent the people in my magazine. Overall I think my magazine challenges the conventions of a real rock magazine because of the people included in it and through some of the colours I have used and the images.

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

My magazine represents teenagers. In my magazine teenagers are represented in a positive way, I represented them in a positive way because mostly teenagers are represented in a negative way in the media and I wanted to get across that people shouldn't just think of teenagers in a negative way because there is a positive side to them as well and this comes across in the images in my magazine and the articles. The images in my magazine represent teenagers in a positive way because the main image on my front cover shows a female teenager and she looks focused which is a good thing because you have to be focused when you have a music career, also their is a main image on my contents page that shows a female teenager smiling and she looks quite happy and this is representing teenagers in a positive way because people just think teenagers complain about everything but this is just stereotyping them. The articles in my magazine represent teenagers in a positive way because the articles are about the stars success. My magazine mainly represents females because thats what the magazine is about and they are the focus of the main representation, female teenagers. I have represented female teenagers in a posotive way aswel  through the use of language, for example on the contents page supporting the main image and on the doubke page there is a quote from the teenage female artist saying " well lifes not all about holding grudges on people", this represents her in a posotive way it shows she has a posotive attitude. On the front cover of my magazine because she loos focused and is giving the reader eye contact this shows confidence in her and if someone is confident they are more likely to be sucesful and this is portraying her in a posotive light again.

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

I think IPC Media would distribute my media product because they are a very large and sucessfull media institution and they distribute magazines from country life to NME and I think my magazine will fit into one of the many categories that they have, Also for IPC Media this would be a chance for them to extend their institution and have more types of magazines and this could widen their audience by bringing my target audience to them and therefore they will become more recogniseable, so if they did distribute my magazine I would benefit and so would they. I think my media product aswell as being able to buy it from retailers, it could be sold at music festivals, because this is the place where my target audience will be and i think people will buy it there because people who will be performing at the festivals will be inside the magazine and this will get the people who go to the festivals interested in my magazine because the main reason why they are going to the festival anyway is because they like the people that are playing there.

here is an animate video where i meet the manager of IPC media and ask them to distribute my product

http://goanimate.com/videos/0ueew7bMJnOQ?utm_source=linkshare

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

The target audience for my magazine is teenagers aged between 15-19 and they have a taste in indie and rock music and interested with whats happening with the young people in that area of the music industry because thats what my magazine is about, young people in the music industry. The primary audience would be females within the target audience age range because the magazine is female dominated and quite girly and this is shown in the interviews and you wouldnt expect a boy to be reading girly inerviews would you? and this is what makes them the secondary audience. Also other people who are not my target audience or people who dont fit into my primary audience wouls also be classed as the secondary audience and this could be people much older who just fancy a read of my magazine or people who enjoy other genres of music and also just fancy a change.

This is a mood board showing the audience for my magzine

5.How did you attract/address your audience?

When creating my magazine attracting and adressing the main audience was the main factor I was thinking about. To attract the main audience which is my target audience I thought about them and what they would want from a magazine. As my target audience are tennagers aged between 15-19, they are probably unemployed or go to college or university which makes them students and then this puts them into the E category of the audience code and people in this category dont have much money and this is why I have priced my magazie at £2.99 which I think is a very good price for my magazine and afoordable for the target audience, so this is a factor that would attract them because my magazine is cheap. Another way in how I attracted/adressed my audience is the use of language I have on  my magazine front cover, for example the masthead of my magazine is called ' BREAK' that is very easy to read and teenagers are stereotypically seen as lazy, so if they seen a magazine with a very long masthead they might be put of by it, they wan something quick, easy and interesting to read which is what my magazine demonstrates very good.

Below is the link for a little animation i have made that includes real answers from someone who has viewed my magazine.

http://goanimate.com/videos/0vImL8K1khtA?utm_source=linkshare

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

At the begining of the process I never knew how to use photoshop at all, but this is what nearly all magazine editors and makers use when constructing their products because its modern day technology that povides them to do all kinds of things like make celebrities look skinner and their faces look flawless, and it is actually quite important to have a nice flawless face on the front of your magazine, because if you had a one with loads of blemishes on and spots people would think it looked horrible and not buy the magazine, so I thought I would use it when making my magazine. I needed to remove the background from my images so that the original backgrounds didint interere with my magazine, so I opened the image into photoshop and I did that by clicking on file at the top left hand corner and open and it brought up a box with options where I could choose my pictures from. I chose my picture from the file I saved it in ( my main image for the front cover) and opened it up, then it appeared on the page. Even thought there looks like there was no image background, there was because it was white and I needed to remove this. I scrolled down the toolbar at the side of the page and read what each of the tools were, finally i found a tool that was called quick selection and with this tool I could select an area and then delete it and this is what I needed to do, so this was something new I learned. After I did that I then resaved my picture and put it on my front cover, which I made in word, which I knew how to use and I cropped it down using the crop tool and ajusted the brightness by formating the picture and clicking on ajust brightness. Another new thing that I learned from photoshop was how to change the colour of hair, because I thought it would look good to change the colour of the hair for the person in my main image. I googled how to do this, but I didint understand the instructions very good, so I worked half of it out by myself. I knew you had to daw around the hair somehow, but I didint know what tool to use, so i tested all the options and found out magnetic lasso tool was the one you used. All you had to do was draw around the area you wanted to change colour, then it made a line around it. After that I right clicked and chose save selection because it seemed the most sensible to do. I did have some vague knowledge on photoshop and knew that it was the image I wanted to change colour so I went to the top of the page and clicked on image then ajustments, then hue/saturation, then a box came up with some options in. I clicked on colourize because thats what I wanted to do to the picture and moved the scrollers side to side to choose a colour. When I chose my colour I clicked ok and it was done. I tried a few colours out for evidence

Removing the background

Add caption

Changing hair colour                                                                                                               

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 and at my music magazine I have produced there is a big difference. The big difference is that the quality of my preliminary task is actually not very good and it doesn't look that professional and the music magazine I have created looks much better this is because I have done loads of research and realised the key features of a popular magazine and what makes them sell, like using language that appeals to the target audience and having a good colour scheme that fits in well with the genre of the magazine. The genre of my magazine is indie/rock and the magazines I researched e.g. Kerrang and NME have used colours like black and red, and I have also used the colours black and red, because you wouldn't expect a rock magazine to be pink. Also since my preliminary task I have learned how to use photoshop and that has been a big help in editing my images to make them look better and the better they look the more professional my magazine will look. So in conclusion, I think my fully produced music magazine is much better than the college magazine I produced for my preliminary task, because I didn't have the skills then to produce a very professional looking magazine and never did any research.

Preliminary task product

This is the front cover for my college magazine that i did for my preliminary task, it has a neat layout but as you can see it doesn't look very professional.

This is the contents page for my college magazine and just like my front cover it has a neat layout and yet again it doesn't look very professional.

this is my music magazine front cover and you can see the difference between my college magazine front cover and his is very significant, for example the colours on my music magazine relate so much to the genre of my magazine which is rock and the image and lighting is more professional as i took the picture with a digital camera rather than the camera off my phone and manipulated it in photoshop. The overall difference is very seeable ad if you have the same opinion as me I think this magazine cover is much much better and more appealing, and this is because I had learned how to use a variety of programs e.g. such as photoshop to help me create a better looking magazine cover.

This is the contents page of my music magazine and just like the changes between my front covers the change in quality is very significant and yet again this is because I have learned to use programmes like photoshop to make my skills at creating pages for my magazine better.