Monday 12 May 2014

Evaluation 7

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


















Looking back at my college magazine, I feel I have come a long way on this journey. Looking at these two front covers I can see what a massive I have made. Because of Photoshop I have learnt how to fade in images, take out backgrounds and make better fonts. For example i went back and found very simple errors throughout my music magazine drafts the where easy to improve. I am able to now realise and analyse the construction of a magazine and its requirements for it to become successful and address the correct target audience.

The use of photoshop allowed me to get more creative with my tasks so I had more freedom to express what I was thinking.I was also able to learn a lot about photoshop manipulation, allowing me to edit images to better fit them to the genre of the magazine. You can see how i have used a gold house style to make my magazine a lot more stylish and to fit the genre.

Finally I think that I have learnt to plan my work much better than when I started. I think about where everything is going to go before I put them there and I try to give myself a rough idea in my head of what the final product will look like.

Evaluation 6

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


    The first thing I learnt was how to use Photoshop for the first time. At the start of the journey it was harder than I expected but as I used it more and more I got the hang of it. I used many skills such as 

    • The colour effect
    • The crack and peel effect
    • Text photo effect
    • Airbrushing 
    The picture below is one of my practice pictures that I done on photoshop when I was getting used to it. It is airbrushing. The left is the before picture and the right is the after picture. 










    Another thing I used on my journey was 'Voki'. This was very easy to use. I just added text and uploaded it to my blog and it automatically spoke so the reader doesn't have to read anything, they can just listen. I enjoyed using Voki because it made my Blog look more efficient and more creative. It also gives the reader more enjoyment instead of reading writing for 60 blogs. 



    Evaluation 5

    How did you attract/address your audience?

    In this question I once again had to look back at my questionnaire for answers. In my questionnaire I asked the question why people do not read music magazines. The most popular answer was because they were out of date. When making my magazine I had to look at this and try to change it. There was nothing really I could do but a small thing I done that could have caught the audiences eye was the Twitter logo. This shows that the magazine has Twitter so it could give the audience updates on social network. 

    Another thing I done was related to the price they ticked on the questionnaire. Because they were a young age they were willing to spend anything on a magazine because their parents would be paying for it. I made this an advantage and made sure the price was clearly on the magazine.
      
    Another thing I done was use the words "new religion" on one of my pieces of text. I thought this would catch the eye of the young people that were saying magazines are out of date. The words are bold and easy to see. I wanted this to stick out as much as the Twitter logo. 

    Evaluation 4

    Who would be the audience for your media product?

    After doing my questionnaire I found out that my audience was males aged 16-21. In the questionnaire, I asked them what they wanted in the magazine and I got the answers

    • Rap
    • Large images
    • Little text
    When I was making my magazine I took all of these points into consideration and tried my best to give my audience what they wanted.






















    The following picture is the reader profile for XXL magazine that distributes rap magazines. This can help me get an idea of what type of reader profile and target audience read rap magazines.
    This shows that rap magazines sell best to men aged 18-25. Because I only gave out my questionnaire to people in my class, I could only go with what I had.





    Evaluation 3

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

    Here are some of the reasons why music companies would publish my music magazine.

















    This is a magazine front cover made by the company IPC. As you can see, even though it is dark and looks like a rap magazine, it is totally different from mine. 










    If any company was to use my magazine I think it wuld be becauseof the following reasons...
    • It is well set out
    • The design is suitable and relevant to the genre
    • It will catch the eye
    • It looks neat and tidy (l;ayout)
       

    Sunday 11 May 2014

    Evaluation 2

    How does your media product represent particular social groups?














    On the above image there is a picture of the famous rapper EMINEM at a concert. He is wearing a hoodie (with the hood up) and just a plain t-shirt. This is the look I went for when doing my front cover picture. The mis en scene on this picture looked like the perfect suit of a rapper. For the other three images on my contents page and double page spread I used another famous rapper Drake's style of clothing. Simply just a black hoodie and a plain t-shirt. The thing I have learnt about rap is everything is kept as simple as possible when relating to clothing.




    After reading a lot of rap magazines music articles I have found out that there is no specific language that I could identify. They are written formally and the only colloquial language used is when the artist is being quoted. So that is what I done when writing my double page spread and using the quotation for that and the front cover. The age group for the magazine is around teenagers to about 22. Because the people in the magazine (Kasey and Lewis) are the age that you expect for people to read your magazine, you wouldn't be able to talk bad about them because they would not buy the magazine.   

    Thursday 8 May 2014

    Evaluation 1

    In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
    Making my music magazine, I tried to challenge and embrace the traditional conventions that surround the genre that I have chosen (rap).
    Front cover



















    On my front cover I tried to use as many ideas as I could from other rap magazines I found on the internet. I done this on the colour scheme with my front cover because I found one on the internet and thought it would look good. My masthead was nothing I had seen or found on the internet. The ones from the internet were all very simple and easy to do. I wanted to create my own but it needed to suit the genre of the magazine. Most of the writing on the front cover was put in them places because they looked good on another one I was researching. The Twitter logo was my idea and I never seen it on one magazine in the shops or on the internet. I needed this so my magazine was different compared to others. I changed the Twitter colour t white so it wouldn't look stupid blue. The following image was the magazine I took a lot of ideas from.
    Another thing I noticed that I took from this is placing the barcode in the bottom left corner. Most of the magazines I researched had them in the right bottom corner. To existing products I think that this front cover compares very well and is very believable to be a real music magazine cover. Comparing it to the one on the right I actually think mine is better because it relates to the genre rap a lot more.
    Contents Page




















    My contents page was completely different from my front cover. I did not use many things from my research to make this contents page. The colours from my front cover I wanted to keep because I thought the blacks work very well with the mes en sene of rap. I wanted Kasey in black clothing like the picture of 50 Cent on the right. Like the other contents page, I had the image slightly left so the text could go down the right in a list. I took the idea of the page number in the bottom left corner and the name of the person underneath it. The contents text in the top right corner was not copied from anywhere. I got a slight idea from a magazine I seen on the internet but I had to change it a lot. This was from the following image. 

       










    Looking at my contents page compared to many others I have been researching I don't think that it looks as good and realistic as them. I think one of the reasons is the colours in the background don't really go too well with the text and image. Looking at the one with 50 Cent on the front, the image is a totally different colour than the background. This makes the image stand out more and also the text on this magazine is easier to read than mine. 
    Double Page Spread
         
    For the double page spread I got a lot of ideas from the image on the left. This was an image I found on the internet. It looks like a student made this from a school like I done. I really liked this design because I thought it would suit my genre very well if it had the right colours. That is basically what I done. I added the colours I have been using all the way through and made it fit the mes en scene of rap. The image I kept on the left hand side of the page. The quote I added was just a stupid quote but I thought I needed one to make the image stand out a little bit more. I changed the design of the headline but I kept the colours I have been working with. The text is set out in the same way and I have put the image in the same place. Comparing these two double page spreads I would say that mine is a bit better because when you first look at it you know what the genre of the magazine is. The black