AS Media Evaluation

By Isaac Jones

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

• My media product uses and challenges the typical conventions any magazine you would find on the market at the moment. I will do this by keeping a simplistic design and I have chosen to particularly use the same house style as the magazine “Vibe”, this is a big rap magazine and after researching many magazines, in particular the style and lay out of each page, vibe was what caught my eye most, hence the reason I followed there lay-outs.

• For my front cover I used one dominant image in the centre of the page which meant it would be the first thing to catch the audience’s eye, to make this possible I made the image the largest thing on the page. I also did this for the simple reason that the article inside the magazine is about the model on the front cover. The mast head was situated at the top of the page slightly to the left hand side in size 150 text to make it stand out and also catch the audience’s eye. I used numerous text effects on this piece of text such as, inner glow, drop shadow, bevel and emboss gradient overlay and so on, this made the text stand out on a light coloured back ground the reason being the font colour I chose was also a light. I had three particular colours of which I stuck with throughout my magazine and these are green, red and white. I did this because I wanted to have a special edition of this magazine, this would give audiences a different view of my magazine instead of the same lay-out and colour’s every single edition. Due to the fact that it was nearly Christmas I chose to do a Christmas edition of my product. The puffs and plugs were in red and green, sticking with my colour scheme. I dimmed the text brightness and increased the opacity levels so they weren’t so in the audiences face, as the main thing I wanted to stand out was the main cover story. I did this in size 80 text and in the colour red. I chose the colour red for this particular piece not just because it fits with the colour scheme, it is a colour used to attract attention, it is used on road signs etc, because it is used to draw the attention of drivers, so if I use the colour red it will attract the attention of passers by. Also it has been scientifically proven that the colour red attracts male attention more than any other colour. I used the effect of inner glow and drop shadow so that the text stood out more than the puffs and plugs, I also increased the opacity levels of the text so that it wasn't in the audiences face and putting them off. I decided to put the twitter user name at the bottom of the page so that if someone did happen to stop and look at the magazines front cover they could visit our twitter to find out about us.

• On the contents page I kept with the house style similar to vibe magazine and for the title on that page I stacked the letters up in some form of tiers much like they did on the Vibe magazine contents page. I used numerous text effects so the text stood out and these were, bevel and emboss, gradient overlay, drop shadow and so on, this made the text stand out and make it more visually appealing to the audience as having just a coloured bit of text saying “Contents” would be boring and may even put the audience off reading on into the magazine. I used an image of my model again, “Liam North” because he is the main story in this edition of the magazine so I wanted the audience to know who he was. The image was situated at the bottom of the page and to the right hand side, the text telling the audience about what's in the magazine was on the left because in the English language we read from left to right so it made sense to put that bit of text on the left hand side. I stuck with the colour scheme and used the colours red, green and white throughout the contents page. In the back ground of the page like they do in vibe magazine I put the initials of my magazine on the back, with extremely high opacity levels so that it didn’t stand out but was there for visual effect for the audience as It would be boring to have just a plain white back ground with nothing on it. Also at the top of the page near the title I used, a cut out of the main article of the magazine, this was just to emphasises the importance of this article if you are interested in battle rap. Again I stuck to the colour scheme by using the colours green and red on this article cut out. I prefer using coloured text other than black because reading black text all the way through which is what you are usually faced with when buying a magazine can become tedious.

• On my double page spread I did an article about an up coming battle and on one page I put an image of the model who this main story is based upon and on the other page an image of his opponent. Above their photo’s I wrote an article about each rapper and what their style is and a little back ground information about them. I had a grey back ground, this was so the images of which were in black and white didn’t stand out too much or look tacky as they did on a white background. I used a large font size and numerous text effects to make the text stand out to the audience. Some of the effects used were, bevel and emboss, drop shadow, inner glow and gradient over lay. On the articles I used a smaller front size and again white coloured font so that I was keeping with the colour scheme and also because green and red were too dominant over the grey colour itself so white looked best in general for this particular page due to the back ground colour I chose for it. I placed the images in the bottom corners of each page, this was so that the audience could see who they were and read about them in more detail as there was more room for text whereas if id of used big photos there'd of been little space for text and it would mainly of been photos. I know from the media questionnaire I did in my class that my peers prefer to see a mixture of both text and images instead of one or the other being most dominant, so I put this into my double page spread to meet what the audience looks for and is pleased by.

How does your media product represent particular social groups

• My magazine represents mainly male, but predominantly the younger generation because these are the type of people who are listening to rap in this day and age. However, there are lots of middle aged battlers, this I found out in some of my research so I had to try and represent the older generation at the same time. This would give me a wider range of people to appeal to, resulting in more magazines being sold, thus more money made.

• To appeal to the younger audience I tried to keep text to a minimal so that they were less likely to be bored by lots of reading and where there was reading to be done there was always a photo or two to break the text up for the reader. I stuck with one colour scheme which was green, red and white. I chose the colours due to the Christmas edition of the magazine I did but I mainly chose the colour red due to the fact that it has been scientifically proven to attract male attention more than any other colour. I also used a twitter “@” something that will be familiar to younger males and it will also mean if they don’t end up buying our magazine they can find us on twitter and if they like what they see on twitter it may result in a magazine being sold.

• To appeal to the older generation of males, I did simple things like keeping slang words to a minimum and gave detailed break downs on each rapper which featured in the magazine, for example, where they lived, their battle technique and so on. Due to the fact that younger people would prefer to see a predominant use in images more than text I jumped to the conclusion that the older generation of males would prefer to read more than see images, so where there was text and images on the same page, I tried my best to share it equally so there wasn’t a dominant one over the two this would then please both parties because it would have use of text and images. The reason I kept slang to a minimum so that the older generation men didn’t think that this magazine was solemnly aimed at the younger males.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?• The institution that I would chose to distribute my media product

would be future PLC. I chose this particular business because currently they are the number one magazine distributer in the UK, they are the number 1 magazine exporter and export to 89 different countries! This drew me to their business because looking at these statistics makes me wonder why they couldn’t distribute my magazine and make it the top rap battle magazine there is. They can make it the best rap battle magazine there is by exporting it to different countries if it manages to take off in the UK, with future PLC being the number one magazine exporter if they export magazines to America especially the magazine will take off as rap battle is huge in the states. From my research I have found that rap battle channels on YouTube pay for battlers to go to the states or for battlers from the states to come to England, the magazine would appeal to both! I could also start to write about American battlers if the magazine took off over there and this would result in bigger sales of the magazine, thus getting more money from sales.

Who would be the audience for your media product?

• The audience for my magazine would be mainly males from the age of 18 and above. The reason for this is because the people of whom are allowed into live shows have to be of a minimum age of 18. However this shouldn’t discard a younger age group of males taking interest and buying the magazine for the reason that they can still read up about rap battlers and find the magazines twitter account and YouTube channel and watch the videos of their favourites battlers and many others. Also I wouldn’t want to discard woman from buying the magazine as there are a number of female battlers and even though the venues are filled up predominantly of males, there are usually quite a large number of females too. Thus I had to make sure my magazine wouldn’t remove the hope of women buying the magazine because this would end up in a big drop in money the magazine makes.

How did you attract/address your audience?

• To attract my audience, the front cover was the key. For this reason I had to make sure I made an eye catching cover, therefore I used the colours red and green as they are quite eye catching, also to make the texts stand out I used numerous font effects and changed opacity levels. I made the mast head in 150 font size to catch the audiences eye, and font effects such as bevel and emboss, drop shadow, inner glow and gradient overlay to make it stand out over most things on the page. Another thing I made dominant on the page was the

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of

constructing this product?• From the process of making my product I have come to the conclusion that designing

and producing a magazine isn’t quite as easy as it first seems. I shouldn’t of been as laid back during pre-production then this would of meant I wasn’t so far behind in the other stages of producing the magazine. Nevertheless throughout the process I have gained extremely good knowledge on the photo editing programme adobe photo shop CS6, Considering I had never used the programme before it came to making this magazine I feel the understanding I have gained is phenomenal, I now know how to, crop photo’s a number of ways, changing the colours of peoples eyes, changing a photo from colour to black and white, adding/removing hair on a person using the clone tool. I have also leant about taking photos and that the best position for someone to stand in a photo isn't directly in the middle like you would take if you were on holiday, there are four points of which are the best to be used and I never knew this but put it into work for my magazine images by having my models stand slightly to the left or right on the centre. I learnt how to change text and colours to connect with different audiences for example, if I wanted to connect to men the colour red would be a suitable colour to use a lot as scientific studies have shown that the colour red increases the male heartbeat and attracts them more than any other colour, therefore using this colour would attract a male audience almost immediately. The use of effects such as drop shadow and inner glow, can change the amount a piece of text stands out and attracts the audiences attention, this is extremely important especially if you would like a piece of text.

Look back at your preliminary task what do you feel you have learned in the progression

from it to the full product• From looking at the two products side by side I can clearly tell a difference

of professional standard of work done. For example on the preliminary task the back ground was just simply one image of which had been dragged out to fill the page making the image itself look distorted and not visually pleasing to the audiences eye. On the other hand in my final front cover I used a gradient background of white to grey and to black, this just gave the back ground a bit of life instead of having just a plain white back ground with the image on it, because my image was black and white it corresponded well with the back ground and was visually pleasing. The preliminary mast head font was smaller than the one used on my final copy and also looked tacky as it was a yellow font with a grey glow, on my final copy I used large 150 size text with numerous text effects such as, bevel and emboss, gradient overlay, drop shadow and inner glow. Playing around with these settings made the masthead a lot more attractive than what it was on the preliminary task. On the puffs and plugs I created a white box with a black outline with black text inside the boxes this looked tacky and it also prevented the audience from being able to see the image on the back ground fully. The use of text effects, image editing and so on show the amount of which I have progressed from the start of the task.