Music magazine evaluation

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

When I planned my music magazine I wanted the design to be like NME magazine, because I enjoy reading NME and I like the design they use in it and also the colour scheme they use. NME is also the main music magazine I studied, I compared a lot of the work I done to an actual NME magazine because I liked how NME done there pages and liked the designs used and really wanted my magazine to be similar to give mine the same effect on the audience. I also liked the colour scheme used in many NME magazines Yellow, Black and White and Black, White and red, I think these colours go well together and are effective toward the audience, so I used a similar mixture of these colour’s on my front cover.

  How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The genre of my music magazine is Indie Rock. My made up artists are called Jacob Walker and a band called Gold Scars. The real life artists I based them on were Gold Scars to be like White lies because there songs are similar and there band styles the same. They are interesting because both artist and band don’t really care what others think they are quit rebellious and do things without thinking, but are also always in touch with fans over Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The band I featured in my double page spread are a typical indie rock band as they don’t care about the public there just there to make music and as much noise as they can, they all have a rebellious attitudes toward haters, they dress mainly in black with an Indie fashion. The models I chose in my photo-shoot for Gold Scars was a band from a college nearby they are an Indie band In real life so though It would be perfect If I could get some pictures of them in band practice. I didn’t need to give out any props because they had everything already. The Jacob Walker Photo shoot was a lot different because I used one of my mates (Rahim Khan) and I took pictures of him posing we used a light adjuster to make the lighting just right, The clothing used was made to look Indie for the Indie fashion to the artist.

 

 Who would be the audience for your Media product?

The age range of my target consumer would be teenagers from 13-25 because the genre I chose was Indie and in my opinion and from research mainly young generation (teenagers) was targeted at by many different music magazines. They’d mostly be male aimed at in my magazines because my magazine Is similar to NME with mainly males represented in the images, but on the other hand has a female band member in one of my band (Gold Scars) so it does have some kind of influence towards females in my magazine but overall the magazine is targeted at males. The target audience could be of any classes but mainly aimed at working class because my magazine is cheap and affordable to purchase. The audiences hobbies would tend to be music, being able to play or enjoy instruments, aimed at people in bands or could inspire them to make one with friends; It’s mainly aimed at people who enjoy going to gigs and listening to Indie rock genre. In terms of the other media texts they’d consume, they would like Misfits, YouTube, Anouvahood, IPhones, Facebook, twitter and NME. Contemporary bands or artists they’d tend to like would include Oasis, White lies, Coldplay, The killers, Ellie Goulding.

How did you attract/address your audience?

The most attractive aspects of my magazine work were my colour scheme because it was made to be more dark than colourful to suit the genre and also similar to NME  Black, White and Red. For the double page spread. In terms of design of the front cover, I wanted to make the reader think that my magazine was a similar one to NME and the design had slight changes in it but overall to make it to look like a typical Indie magazine. Particular coverlines were used for effect, such as, the text was yellow to stand out from the dark background and also in a bold font used to stand out to catch the readers eyes with attractive writing. The type of language I used was Informal because my magazine audience is young and use slang word so my magazine is understandable to them makes the reader feel that they are more involved with the magazine and understand it better than.

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

 From doing my project, I have learnt a lot of new skills with Photoshop, like editing pictures with effect and also sharpening pictures to make it look a lot more clearer. I also made my Masthead for my front cover in Photoshop I found it hard to make a gradient background and importing cropped out text but I got there in the end and know how to do it now. Also learnt how to crop images so that there was no background and could be placed In my magazine work so it don’t overlap writing ect. InDesign was a new program to me that I have never used before this project, so at first it was hard to use but I got used to it and this was the main program we used because it had my magazine front cover, double page spread and contents page, so I got used to it fast and learnt new skills by using this program. I learnt how to take different camera angles suitable for music magazines and how to edit them and plan by looking in a music magazine, seeing a picture you like and then getting your models to pose the same way to imitate there pose to suit the certain genre.

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

I have learnt a lot more since the school magazine task, there is a lot more detail and has better editing used.