AS MEDIA EVALUATION

1. AS MEDIA EVALUATION By Daisy Robb

2. CHART MUSIC MAGAZINE, THE BEST MAGAZINE BRING THE BEST OF MUSIC!

3. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Like other media products this magazine gives an outlet of a popular magazine through appealing and persuasive language in order to sell! Individual columns and headings Main picture as the dominant feature of the magazine – attracting audience and representing magazine The use of a barcode gives a realistic convention that magazines having giving the idea that it could be sold Price is again a realistic feature other media conventions would incorporate

4. The two parts of the contents page are split into columns creating a simple format easy to interpret Number references are realistic contents features giving it a representative outlook The image creates a structure linking between each page which generalises the main feature of my magazine.

5. Heading is comprehendible from its clear, bold style, and uses a persuasive insight leading to the article Dominant photo, figure represents the main feature of the magazine and links well between each page Drop capitals is a realistic technique used in media articles Eye catching break in the article acts as a hook drawing in any browsing readers

6. How does your media product represent particular social groups? My magazine represents a female dominant social group ages 15-25, it has this representations through feminised colours such as pink and baby blue which I used on my front cover, contents and double page spread. It attracts females firstly as the front cover photo is of a female, therefore it represents a feminine outlook attracting this audience. I think my magazine represents the age 15-25 because it consists of young icons and stories that this age group would be interested in, it is a broad age group as younger girls always look up to older role models which is one of the reasons my magazine represents a young age, however because it incorporates these older aspects, it appeals to older females who may be attracted to this style of magazine and music. The style of music however is chart music which is not gender specific but is still female dominated due to other aspects of my magazine, which I made clear through using feminised colouring and front cover stories.

7. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product? Distributors such as the institution that distributes BLENDER magazine would be an appropriate institution to sell my magazines as they have similar target audiences and sell to the same sort of social groups, the genre is very much the same and could mix nicely together.

8. Who would be the audience for your media product? UP TO DATE MUSIC MAINSTREAM The audience for my media product would be 15-25 year olds, female dominant as the genre is mainstream/pop/chart music which appeal to this audience, the women role models on the cover make it more female dominant as an audience and they would more likely to be the gender to pick up the magazine and buy it. Chart music is a modern taste which is why I feel the age gap is fairly wide, as a lot of people have this music taste. MODERN POP CHART YOUNG Magazines similar to my representations of a realistic music magazine.

9. How did you attract/address the audience? • I aimed to attract my audience through a well known singer appearing on the front cover with persuasive insights that would draw them in. Secondly as my magazine is to address females, I chose a colour scheme that would appeal to them, through soft eye pleasing colours, blue and pink, pink is quite stereotypically a female colour, however I used blue as a contrast which looks effective. I used language such as ellipses to create a hook on an intriguing story and incorporated more of a selling point which would attract the audience as well, specifically when it’s a deal for example, ‘FREE downloads..’ which would ideally attract the audience more.

10. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product? • To create my front cover, I used Photoshop which was fairly easy to use and was simple to get the outline of my magazine prepared. Photoshop allowed me to come back time after time to redevelop and change my front cover to how I wanted it to be, which was good as it was simple to change on that software, although things like layers were difficult to use at times because I did not fully understand them. I then used Adobe InDesign for my contents page and double page spread, this was a suitable software which I quickly grasped the hang of using at its guidelines were clear and made it easy to create my two products. Although this software was fairly easy to grasp the idea of, I struggled at the beginning to create a realistic style of my double page spread like other real media products due to huge amounts of editing that I had to do in order to get everything into the write place. However using such a technical and widely used software in making media products helped me understand how real media was constructed through creating my own.

11. Other software's I used to create my media products… . In the start of developing my ideas for my media products i used Microsoft Word to plan my product… . Google to find pictures to analyse other magazines… .PowerPoint to analyse and develop my ideas.

12. I used this button for selection. The crop tool to make my photos smaller and in a more preferable size and shape. The main editing technology I used during the creating of my media product was Adobe Photoshop which has various aspects which I have learnt more about from using it, such as the layers pallet, this is when you open a new image or blank document or background, it will go to layers, so you can edit and play around with the order of layers, or editing words onto backgrounds and removing or erasing backgrounds etc. My layers consisted of one background and many worded layers, I used it to change positioning of text on my magazine cover and it made it easier to edit my magazine when I wanted to change something. To write my text onto my front cover. Changing colours of text.

13. Looking back to your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progress from it to the full product? School magazine Looking back to my first school magazine at the start of the course, my media skills were weak and my magazine had no realistic features in comparison to my magazine now. The colouring is well thought out, the photo is dominant, and the writing and colour of text contrasts with the layout of the photo effectively. It took a lot of researching and analysing of real music magazines to come to terms with the forms of real media products, before I didn’t think about colours, staging of texts, layouts, or the appeal to the reader with my school magazine but I feel with my current media product that I have demonstrated my deeper understanding in developing my magazine considering these factors. Adobe InDesign has helped my skills improve significantly as before the editing and development was poor however I feel more confident in using that technology now, I also feel that looking at the first product ‘school magazine’ and now my music magazine, that you can see I have planned in more detail and know more about media audiences and institutions in terms of selling my now finished product.Although my first magazine did take the style of a real magazine it isn’t realistic or appealing at all, it lacks qualities needed to fit a genuine magazine such as the price on the front cover, a bar code, text to fit the page, and general features. However i have progressed since then and feel I have created a suitably realistic, eye catching, and representative product. Music magazine