In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?My media product follows the majority of conventions that are used by real products. I took a lot of inspiration and influence from the music magazine ‘Rocksound’. The contents page and convention of the purple colour scheme were used in this magazine for young people who are interested in the ‘Rock’ genre. I wanted to make my audience more music-specific, and used the genre ‘Pop-punk’, which applies to mainly an age group of 11-18 year olds.The contents page’s layout was based off of Vibe’s1 and Rocksound’s layout [one main image with the contents listed]. I liked this style of the contents page as it is simple and not complicated to navigate [unlike other contents pages such as Kerrang! Which have multiple photos, sections, textboxes etc]. So it would be more suited to a younger audience who do not wish to spend as much time searching for an article they would be interested in; younger audiences are much more likely to use the internet to gather information that could be found in my magazines, so I tried to make it as easy as a search engine to navigate through.In Rocksound’s issue where they interview Mindless Self Indulgence [who are also on the front cover]3, they use purple as a theme colour as it is a part of their outfits. The masthead and parts of the article were in purple, which gave the connotation of continuity. I wanted to expand on this idea so I made it a base colour throughout the magazine pages. I also felt that purple was vibrant enough to stand out and catch the attention of the audience. Purple is also not seen as a particular colour specified to gender [when in the right shade], so by using purple I made sure equal representation of my target audience was achieved.Vibe magazine also used greyscale [aka monochrome, black&white] and colour together to make colours stand out. On the cover of an issue with its main article on Rhianna2 it used a bright blue as a key colour and the greyscale made this colour ‘pop’. I used this same scheme with the colour purple to help attract attention and make sure that there are no clashing colours.Almost all magazines have a consistent ‘key’ font that is used throughout the issue. It is often the same font that the magazine’s masthead uses that is used as the title of an article or section. I used the ‘Stencil’ font for this conventional method of creating a professional-looking product. A research example of this method is Kerrang! using the font ‘Birth of a Hero’.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?I want to represent social groups that were interested in the ‘punk/pop’ music scene. My magazine would achieve this by giving reviews on concerts, albums and festivals of the same genre. I would also like my magazine to be distributed at festivals [as Q have been doing at Glastonbury Music Festival].As most of my audience would be of a more youthful generation, I would also have my magazine online so people on the web can stay up-to-date with it. According to the ‘find your tribe’ questionnaire, the majority of my audience would spend the

1 -Vibe’s contents page2 – Vibe’s front cover

3 – Rocksound’s ‘Mindless Self Indulgence’ issue

majority of their time on the internet researching new bands, gigs, etc. My magazine going online would benefit from this.

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?I would want my magazine to primarily be distributed through print. I want this to be its main distributor because magazines in music are often seen as the most reliable source of information for things such as reviews and interviews whereas the internet can be less reliable. Print is also available to almost everyone living in the UK today as newsstands are often not too far away from an audience member’s home.Online distribution would also be an important factor in my magazine. As my target audience would spend the majority of their time online

Who would be the audience for your media product? (Refer to your research)

I

based my research off of the ‘Find your tribe’ results. I took the quiz a few times and got a range of different results, so I knew what kind of teenager/young adult to aim my product of. Most of these teenagers will be listening to music constantly and are often very loud, making going to live concerts an important event in their lives. They usually wear dark colours or dark colours with a flash of bright colour [this also inspired my colour scheme]. Loud or rather ‘undiscovered’ musical artists would attract this audience’s attention as they are strong believers in being ‘original’ and ‘individual’. As my ideal audience would be listening to music and finding music online, I would have more features on online events and music events than on events that were related to TV soaps, for example.

How did you attract/address your audience?I used a competition, mentioned in the contents and on the front cover to attract attention as I hope the audience would become interested in the prize [VIP tickets to a concert] as my target audience would be very interested in live music.Using bands of the same genre also helps attract my audience as they would probably recognise the band’s name and want to either read more about them/gather information on them/get opinions on their music/live atmosphere etc. By using more ‘well-known’ bands, I can introduce smaller, more independent bands which would also interest my target audience as they like to discover new artists.

My colour scheme aims to be aesthetically pleasing as the colours are co-ordinate and do not clash. Grey often makes other colours stand out, even black and white, so I decided to make ‘purple’ my key colour [taken inspiration from VIBE and ROCKSOUND magazine] as it is vibrant and a unisex colour and made everything else greyscale so it stood out, catching the reader’s eye.My magazine name/masthead is also a way of catching my target audience. ‘Megaphone’ gives the connotation of something being loud/amplified/noisy, similar to an atmosphere at a festival/concert. This connotation would work well with the ‘punk’ scene as it is all about rebellion and making your voice heard, so I believed ‘Megaphone’ would be a good name.I also mention festivals in the contents as a well-known band give ‘tips’ on how to survive them. Not only is this useful information but also it is relevant, as I would have my magazine sold at music festivals and my target audience would often attend music festivals like Glastonbury, Reading, Edinburgh, etc.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?I used slideshare and blogger for the first time in this project. These websites allowed me to upload my work straight from my harddrive so I didn’t have to copy and paste and reformat, or take screenshots and upload as photos.I also used a canon digital camera to take my photos, paint.NET [a free photo editing software] to edit them, Microsoft Publisher for my preliminary task Used InDesign for it allows text and image to work on simultaneously.

I used paint.NET – a free photo editing software that I commonly use at home. The software allowed me to work with layers, colour selection [the ‘magic wand’ tool enables you to select a section of a certain colour and move it, cut and paste it, etc], saturation and brightness/contrast levels, etc. Layers allowed me to work with different photos or different parts of the photo separately, adding separate effects. For example, I used to magic wand tool to move the purple dress of my model to a new layer, and desaturate the layer I cut it from.

In paint.NET I was also able to merge these two images together to create a more ‘surreal’ and interesting photoAdobe inDesign was the publishing program I used to compose all of the raw elements of my magazine together. In this program I could import images, text from word documents, and create titles. I could also use the eyedropper tool to select colours from text or photos in order to create colour consistency.

From inDesign I could publish all four pages [contents, front cover and double page spread] into a PDF file so others can read it and I can put it online.I found inDesign a much more practical software to use compared to Microsoft publisher fur multiple reasons.

1) inDesign has more tool such as the eyedropper tool, more text formatting features, etc. These all helped my magazine look more consistent and professional compared to my preliminary task.

2) inDesign could import text from Microsoft word documents, allowing me to use the article I had type out. If I was using Publisher I would have had to copy and paste, and resize, etc.

3) The ‘text outlining’ feature of text formatting allowed my text to stand out from photos and solid colour – Publisher does not have this feature and I could lose visual impact from this, or my text would be more difficult to read.

4) inDesign gives many more options in terms of formatting, publishing, etc. Text spacing between letters is a feature I found particularly useful.

A downside to using adobe inDesign is that it was not free and only installed on the school’s computers – therefore making it impossible for me to work on it at home. I tackled this problem by converting a copy to PDF regularly and making notes at home on it if I wanted to work on it/make changes. I transferred my work between computers using an external hard drive and email.

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

I have learnt a lot about different technologies, especially publishing software during my time on this project. I learnt how important and how much of a difference it makes to have more formatting capabilities with text, and I feel as if my skills as a photo editor have improved [looking at the comparison between my preliminary and final pieces, I think my photo editing is much better in the final piece].I have also learnt about representation of certain social groups such as age [my music magazine is made differently and has different content and styling because it’s aimed at a wider age range than my school magazine]; gender - I tried to make both pieces as equal as possible, but looking back at my preliminary, it looks like I’m targeting a male audience more as I use the colour blue and only use pictures of a male student. Likewise in my music magazine, I only use photos of a female artist, but this is because see is the main focus of the largest article, not because of her gender, and purple is also a non-gender specific colour; and other factors such as clothing styles and music tastes.

I also see I could have made improvements to my final piece, such as being more diverse in my photos, and possibly having too much purple. If I have more time/another chance, I would have taken more photos of multiple people to add more

diversity