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

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

When talking about social groups we need to take into consideration Gender, Age, Ethnicity, Social class and status.

Looking at my front cover and at the colours, they portray a masculine image. The image of the male model also maculates the page, however it fits into the Rock genre as there is a large ratio difference of male to females, males are stereotypically the gender of a rock group, and come to think of it, I can only think of one female Rock artist and that is Evanescence.

The model that appears on the front cover relates to the target audience as he is of similar age.

When someone mentions ethnicity, people tend to think manly about race and skin colour, however there is more to it; these include Nationality, Language, religion and culture. On my front cover I can think of three different ethnical differences. The lower banner has the band name ‘Jet’ on it, ‘Jet’ is an Australian rock band, Biffy Clyro is also mentioned and they are a Scottish band. The rest of the people on the front cover and all the other media products are English.

Social class and status wise I believe that my magazine will appeal to those of working and middle class. At £1.50 my magazine is extremely cheap value and is affordable for my predicted class. The language style is set as informal consistently throughout my production.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product?

Who would be the target audience for your media product?

My target audience for my magazine would ideally be between the ages of 13-25. My product I think will appeal to this particular age group because I feature new music artists such as Tim Mitchell and Hannah Mahoney. The images of younger artists will connect to the ages of 13-25 because it is relating to them directly.

The gender of the target audience isn’t a thing I have taken into consideration, however things like changing the model gender could have an impact on what gender buys the magazine.

In general the magazine is for people who an interest music genre of Rock and they can be of any ethnicity and race, but will have to have the ability to understand the English language.

How did you attract / address your audience?

The front cover in my production is the piece that will attract my assessed target audience, manly because it would be the first thing the audience will see of it. So I have had the task to design the front cover conveniently to attract my target audience.

First of all the colours used on the front cover (black, red & white) are suitable choices, as they have suitable connotations that represent that genre of music effectively. The well known pop magazine Q have used the exact colours for their 2010 spring edition of Lady GAGA and have used the colour because of their connotations that match with personality of Lady GAGA.

Second of all the main image plays a large roll, as it is of a new rock star, featured in a medium- close up shot looking directly at the target audience (direct mode of address). This image looks at the audience; therefore bring the eyes of the audience directly to the magazine.

The masthead “Rock Revolution” is quite large in size, therefore easily noticeable. The unique style of mastheads censors the magazine and acts as a seal of approval, as it makes the magazine professional and has an effect on the audience.

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

Publisher

This Program is a package in the Microsoft office software. It is a popular program to make presentational documents, as it is easy to create with and is a user friendly program. As soon as you open it up you are immediately asked what publication you want to create and if you want a template to follow. The templates are normal publication documents like leaflet, memorandums, letter, poster etc...

Through my school years I have always used this program when necessary. I used the program this year in Media Studies to create a group task of producing a case study leaflet on a magazine. Lewis Tillyer and I based our study on Kerrang! The second time I used it was when I created my final versions of the front cover, contents page and double page spread. I used it only to fix the documents up together because it was easy to do with this program, as the images were automatically defaulted with the square wrapping. Without this program I would have struggled to put all my final pieces together efficiently.

When using this program I had a problem that frustrated me quite a bit. I set the background to black and when I printed it out it wouldn’t show. My diagnosis on this small dilemma was that the 2003 version of publisher was confused with the 2007 version I made on my laptop and it just wasn’t able to process the command.

To overcome this problem I simply drew a box spanning the page, filled it in black then right clicked it at sent it to back of the page. This then acted as a background colour. Overall it wasn’t the end of the world and it appeared the same as it would have been.

Fireworks

Macromedia fireworks is a program that I have worked with before in previous years at Sponne in different subjects. This program is manly for manipulating images for editing purposes. This program is very expensive to buy and so I can’t afford to have it my laptop.

Fireworks can manipulate images by cutting out sections manually or with the magic wand which selects the entire colour you just clicked on. This is useful when taking away part of images. It can do more, including changing colour schemes, overlapping images and changing scale.

I used it to edit my photos by greyscaling, changing brightness levels, contrasting and cutting parts of images out.

A problem that I remember was when a saved over the original photo, I realised shortly after I didn’t mean to do that.

I overcame the problem by copying it of a backup folder I made earlier on and recovered the file, which I was then able to manipulate.

Blogger.com

This program is the electronic medium that we had the choice of doing as electronically storing our media folder of our production task. This program is designed for social interaction and is where the user can post a status for anybody to see.

This program overwhelmed me in shock of how confusing it was. It was a totally new experience for me and it took me a while to adapt. For me the hardest part was login on, mainly because you had to enter your email address every time when trying to sign in. To over come this though I ingeniously copied the address when I was on my blogger account and simply created a shortcut icon on my desktop, were I pasted the address of my blog in. This feature I did at home because the school computers restrict everybody from doing such things. This enabled me to enter my blog without any stress and continue typing up my blog.

Camera

This technology I used to take photos for my production. I am experienced with a camera as I have been open to the technology since the digital age arrived. However there were something’s new I learnt. This was to compose shots and set the camera to the close up mode. The close up button focuses on the closer objects the most and so I thought it was appropriate to set it to this setting because we were told that the shot type must by a close up to a mid shot. I had access to a tripod what helped me dearly when composing shots of myself. The tripod enable the hold in a position and in an angle.

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

Looking back at the task I have defiantly made an improvement from the first time I made a magazine. My standards in quality to detail I feel has risen dramatically; this is because I have had more experience working with the programs and have an improved understanding of the task. My ability of working with computers has had a big impact to my performance; I can work much faster when doing tasks for the second time around as I have demonstrated and have more time to perfect parts of my work.

As you can see the main image in the first magazine isn’t even edited, nor taken in focus. The masthead is all done in words giving it a shabby look; the colour doesn’t fit the genre of magazine which is a school/ college magazine.

However my final production has been composed in Microsoft publisher, in have got manipulated images, a professional looking masthead that has been made in fireworks, a colour scheme that matches the genre of rock through the connotations, a barcode, price tag, high and low banner.

In general the final production is better than the other because throughout the year I have studied magazine in a deeper depth and have applied professional concepts to recreate a music magazine out of the best of my ability.

manipulating images

Before

After



To me there are two ways of cutting images. the first is to use the magic wand tool, or you can do it maually with a lassoo tool or a rubber. the magicwand tool is definatly the best as it takes little amount of time, but it can take colours of parts you really want in the image. The manual method takes a long time but it'll go your way.

FINAL PRODUCTIONS!!!!

EDITED IMAGES

These collection of images are ones that I have edited using Macromedia Fireworks. The images have been changed to take away unnecessary parts that i dont want to appear in the final production.

MOCKUP OF LAYOUTS

The two images above are my two mock ups I have just made in Word. I have more to come but i will be positioning my elements on the final production similar to the elements on these two guideline layouts.

Contents page Layout mockup

DPS LAYOUTS MOCKUPS

photos