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

I think that I have progressed a lot in terms of my magazine production skills. Looking back at my preliminary task front cover it lacks a lot of professional conventions and generally looks very unprofessional. One of the best things that I did was probably good use of props so it was clear what the magazine was about, and there was also a clear and bold masthead. The main negative points of my preliminary task are that there is a very small variety in fonts and colours and there is also a lack of any form of lure. Despite already having a decent knowledge of Photoshop and taking photos, as I hadn't done any research into professional magazines and lacked knowledge of all the conventions I didn't produce a very good front cover. Before starting to produce my full product I did a lot of research into professional documents and learned all of the conventions that they have so that I could incorporate them into my own magazine. From doing this research I was confident when starting to create my full products. Firstly when doing the photo shoot I took a lot more photos than I did for the prelim task as if don't have enough when producing the magazine pages later on in the process it can be very annoying and I may of even had to do another photo shoot. The next thing that I learnt about the photo shoot is that it is important to plan a good amount of shots you want to take before you actually do the photo shoot so that you can make the most of the time that you have during the actual shoot. I also decided to make plans for the pages so that I had an idea of what to do when starting to make them. Whilst creating the full products I learnt a lot of new skills in Photoshop which allowed me to create better looking pages. These include how to add special effects like flames/smoke and flares to make certain parts of the page stand out more. I also learnt how to  use the alignment tools so that the pages were easy to read and not messy. Overall I think that my final products are all a huge improvement over the preliminary task and am happy with the final pages.

Evaluation Question 6- What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Magazine Page Progressions

Evaluation Question 5- How did you attract/address your audience?

Before starting to produce my media product I created a questionnaire so that I could do some market research into what my audience wanted. I found the results that I got from this research very helpful as it gave me an insight into what my target audience wanted to see in the magazine, which allowed me to create a magazine closely linked to what the target audience want. If I had not done this initial research into my target audience my magazine would of probably ended up quite different to what the customers wanted. (The data that I collected from this questionnaire can be found  at this blog post: http://sams-mediablog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/questionnaire-data.html) This includes making sure that the front cover picture was very bold and grabbed the readers attention as my data suggested that the picture is usually what attracts them to the magazine when looking through all of the magazines in a shop. I also used good mode of address in my editorial profile so that the readers felt like I related to them well and could easily understand me. Another way that I attracted them to my magazine was by having a big lure saying 'Free Plectrum Inside', with a small picture as well so that they could see what it actually looked like. I think that this will help attract customers to my magazine as if they are comparing different magazines they might go for the one with an extra free gift. As the front cover is the only page that the customer will see on the shelf it is important that it makes the customer drawn to it. I also used a lot of bold colours and fonts to make sure that my magazine could stand out from the rest and attract the customer towards it. This annotated version of my front cover shows all the techniques I used to attract my audience to my magazine.

Evaluation Question 4- Who would be the audience for your media product?

In general the main audience for my media product will be any people who enjoy listening to and hearing about rock music. More specifically my magazine is aimed at 14-18 year old male teenagers, however it can be enjoyed be anyone who has a passion for rock music. The widest group of people that my magazine could appeal to would probably be people aged 12-40. Generally after the age of 40 people are more interested in classic rock which my magazine doesn't focus on very much. I used the questionnaire to help me with some parts of the customer profile and the results can be seen here: http://sams-mediablog.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/questionnaire-data.html
My customer profile sums up my ideal customer perfectly-

         
'Mike is 17 years old and has a keen interest in rock music. In his spare time he enjoys playing the drums and has recently started a band with some of his mates. He also spends a lot of time online like most teenagers finding new songs and bands, and also enjoys playing video games whilst listening to them. His favourite bands at the moment are Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace, however he also likes some classic rock occasionally e.g. AC DC. In the summer he goes to festivals like Download and Sonisphere with his mates. The magazines that he reads the most are Kerrang and NME, however he doesn't read any consistently. He is more focused on having fun than studying for school.'


A picture of my ideal customer can be seen here:

Question 3 Evaluation- What kind of media institution might be able to distribute your media product and why?

Distribution is the act of giving/dealing something to people, which in my case means supplying my magazine to customers. There are three stages to distribution which are production (making the magazine), the actual distribution (getting it to the customers), and then the consumption by the customers. After doing research into different magazine publishing companies I have decided that the best media institution to distribute my media product would be IPC Media because they are already a large and established company which should mean that they should be able to distribute my product to a large audience. They also already publish the NME magazine, which is another magazine based mostly on rock music which means that they would probably be happy to look into publishing another rock magazine. Whilst this company would be my favoured institution to distribute my product any there are many more big publishing companies that may distribute my media product.

My product could also be distributed online as it has its own website which I displayed the URL of on the front cover so that readers could find it (rock-it.com). I also advertised social media pages on my contents page to help promote my magazine. One of the reasons that I decided to advertise web content was because Kerrang which I had taken a lot of inspiration from whilst producing my magazine have a very good website (http://www.kerrang.com/).

Question 2 Evaluation- How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Representation is the act of communicating on behalf of other people. I think that my media product represents all fans of rock music well. The constant use of red throughout the magazine gives it quite a powerful and strong feeling  as I feel that it is quite a strong colour which represents the rock genre well. I also attempted to create this same effect by using quite rough/messy fonts (mostly on the front cover) and I think this also helps to represent rock music. There is an example of this below in my masthead.

Another way that I represented the rock genre in my magazine was by making sure that my models had quite serious expressions on their face to fit in with most other rock magazines and to keep with the stereotype of young people generally being anti social and troublesome. This picture shows that I made sure my models had serious face expressions for the main front cover picture.

As well as making sure that the models facial expressions were correct, I also took my photos in a dark forest to give the photos quite a dark and sinister feel which links back to rock music very well. This can also be seen in the picture above. In general through my magazine pages I encouraged the stereotypes of young people behaving anti socially as in my article it talks about how they put school on the side-line so that they could do more with their music.

I made sure that my models were close to my customer profile (White, Male,Teenager) so that alot of the readers would be able to relate to them and  want find out more about them.

Question 1 Evaluation

Question 1 Evaluation

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Final Magazine Pages

Magazine Pages (Front Cover, Contents and Double Page Spread)

Making the background of an image blurred in photoshop

Spotify and Napster

Spotify is an online music streaming service which allows users to instantly stream millions of songs. Free users have to put up with ads and limited song plays however a subscription service is available which allows users to access songs an unlimited amount of times without ads. There are also many other premium features included in this subscription, which costs £9.99 a month. I use the premium service myself and it easily allows me to make playlists of all of my favourite songs, and even make them available on my phone using the spotify app. There is also a version for half of the cost which just removes the advertisements and allows unlimited plays on all songs. There has been a lot of controversy about the rights that Spotify have to allow them to play songs from different record labels however they now have the rights for Sony, EMI, Universal and Warner Music Group, amongst many other independent labels.

Napster first launched in 1999 as an independent peer to peer file sharing service, heavily based on audio files. They had their most successful period in February 2001.This company eventually ran into a lot of legal problems over copyright infringement and had to close down, before being bought by Roxio. It then went through a phase of being an online music store, similar to iTunes or Amazon MP3 store. Recently in December 2011 Napster merged with Rhapsody, which is a browser based music streaming website similar to Spotify.

Word Map about Music Magazines

Music Industry Presentation

Music Industry presentation

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Contents Page Draft

This is my first draft of the Contents Page.

Video Blog Evaluation

I'm really bad at these...

Peer Assessment on Front Cover

Yesterday in our lesson we went around looking at everyone's first document. Mine was the first to be looked at and I got the following feedback-


Pros:
Good use of house style
Consistent colours (Red, black, white)
Good use of lighting
Good masthead and pun


Cons:
Could do with more cover lines
Possibly a big cover line in the centre of the page
Mixed opinions on whether the masthead was difficult to read against the background


I was pretty pleased with my feedback from my peers as it was mostly positive. The main problem from what I gathered from the feedback was that I need another cover line somewhere on the page as there is not enough pull towards the magazine, so I think I will just add in a small cover line in a bit of space that I can find as I dont want to change to whole composition of the page. I dont really agree that the masthead is hard to read as to me it seems quite easy so I think I will just keep it like it is.

Magazine Front Cover Draft

This is the first draft for my front cover. I have also uploaded the original image and the front cover without the background image so you can compare.

Photoshoot Images

I uploaded all of my images from the photoshoot to photobucket, they can be seen here:
http://s1079.photobucket.com/albums/w519/samcarden123/

Photoshoot Storyboard