EVALUATION OF MY MEDIA PRODUCT.

BY : VICTOR-RICARDO DOS SANTOS SOARES

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

The conventions of a media product

Having a bold red and black masthead.

The main image in the front cover is only of the artists top half of his body .

This cover of VIBE doesn’t have a barcode.

The name of the main artist has the biggest font and is in red to stand out from the rest.

Having the main image in front of the masthead and all the other titles means that the magazine will mostly be about that artist.

The chosen background colour makes the artist stand out more when looking at the magazine

Eye contact with the artist makes it seem as if he is looking directly at you.

Compared to the real magazine my front cover has a barcode at the front and the VIBE magazine doesn’t.

There is a little similarity between my masthead and VIBE’s one both being red and black.

The main headline is in red and has the biggest font to stand out from the rest

Having the artists arm in that position makes the reader follow the direction of the arm and read what ever is below the arm, in this case it will be the main headlines.

The eye contact gets the reader to think that the artist is only focusing on you and nobody else.

This tells us what else could be found in the magazine.

The chosen background color makes the artist stand out more and makes him more noticeable.

In compression to VIBE my magazine but other titles on top of the main image to show that my artist is not the only artist spoken about.

On the slides above I have identified the forms of convection, now I will be writing about how my magazines challenges the real magazine.

With my magazine the way it challenges theses form of convections is by trying to improve them or to be done a little bit differently. For starters the use of a barcode in the front cover to indicate it is a UK based magazine. Having my artist do a hand gesture to get the reader to follow the arm on to the main headline which is in big red writing to show it’s the main headline. Also I chose to be different on the way the picture was taken, for example the main magazine only had the top half of the artist whereas I chose to add a little bit of my artists bottom half to make differ my magazine from everybody else's.

Main image

Companies Logo

Articles laid out with page numbers and information about them.

My logo

Main articleI deceived to put in a image that corresponds in with my main article

All of my magazines features are written there. Pull Quotes

I used pull quotes beneath the image to make the reader want to read that article

Drop CapArticles usually feature a drop cap when the first letter is bigger than the others

In this issue of Vibe there are quite a few columns

The footer is always located at the bottom of the page.

This is the main image

My headline was printed with a much bigger font then the rest of the text to catch the readers attention

This is the stand first that tells us a little more about the artist.

Main images, I used them as the background so I could write on top of them, this was done because I wanted my magazine to stand out from every other magazine we know of.

With my text I decided to write in white because it is a colour that goes well with my background image .

The footer is always at the bottom of the page

I also added an extra image to show my artists graffiti work

2)How does your media product represent particular social groups? My magazine will be targeting both male and the female audience aged between 16 –

25. This is a suitable age because the magazine is aimed for teenagers and young adults. It is also aimed at an audience of a social occupational class between C1-E

Not only music will be featured in my magazine but also dance, art and cloths will be part of the magazine. With art it shall include graffiti from my artist, dance will include break dancing and music will include hip – hop & RnB.

My magazine will be published monthly and sold monthly in the UK, America and also other parts of the world. It will be distributed in the main cities such as Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, London, Glasgow and many more.

My chosen language was not formal but also not informal, this is because I wanted to use yours such as ‘yute’ to communicate with the younger generation.

Reader Profile

James is seventeen years old. He got kicked out of school at the age of fourteen lives in East London, most of his close friends are in prison. Not knowing how to change his ways he tried looking for other things to do for example trying to find success in the music industry.

The images I have chosen they contrast a thugest life style that impacts on my artists old life style. Taking the pictures in the block also represents their childhood days when they used to spend their time in the blocks doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing. The chosen clothing had to be appropriate to the lifestyle I wanted to portray. This is important because the magazine has to comply with the genre.

3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Magazines are distributed by their publishers, Vibe magazine is published by Time Inc, whose main publisher is Time Warner. The magazine that I have made is to be published by IPC Media.

In a magazine the having an obvious content is an important part of the representation of the magazine image and the language that I used were all essential to the genre of my magazine. As I am making a Hip-Hop and RnB magazine I needed to use some slag words to fit in well with my target audience. Also the images I used had to fit my format.

My magazine will be sold at newsagents, supermarket, music stores such as HMV and many more other music stores.

4) Who would be the audience for your media product?

My target audience for my magazine are people who are interested in Hip-Hop&RnB and for those who aspire on being national and international stars in the music business. Like I mentioned before hand, my magazine is aimed at both males and females aged between 16 – 25. it is also aimed for the social working class C1-E. my magazine includes articles which my relate to the younger generation such as how to make it from nothing to something and it also tells them about the positives out there in the world and not everything is negative even though there will be people trying to put you down.

My main article will is about a up and coming artist who had everything against him when he was trying to make it to the majors.

5) How did you attract/address your audience?

When trying to address my audience, I looked at previous magazines of the same genre as my own to determine how they connected to their audience. I looked at the front cover, contents page and double page spreads of both Vibe and XXL because they are both magazines with the same genre as my own. Once I got my information, I put my article together used some slag words to attract the attention of the younger generation.

I took pictures of a surrounding which will be very familiar to most of the younger generation. I had to make sure that everything complied with my selected genre, or my magazine will fail to appeal to its target audience and therefore the magazine will not be successful in the market.

Also my magazine sort of teaches the the young teens that there are better ways in life than just hanging around causing havoc in their area and it shows them that you don’t need life to hit you hard before you realise that this shouldn’t be the right path to pick.

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

Making my magazine I have learnt all sorts of things from cropping out pictures on Photoshop to making a whole new magazine with InDesign. At first I found both programs very difficult to use because I have never used them before, however over time I became very familiar with both programs. I used InDeign to make my front cover, content page and double page spread, Photoshop to edit my pictures, Wordpress to blog my work, this is also the first time I have used this program. Lastly I also used Google to look up information on other magazines

I had to book out cameras from my college in order to use them, at times this was a problem because the college didn’t have the right equipment needed for my magazine. I purchased CS5 for my personal use at home, but when trying to work at college I couldn’t open my file because the college only had CS4 which then made me have to bring my laptop to college to be able to complete some work.

After a few tried of Photoshop editing my image became very easy.

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

Whilst constructing my preliminary exercise, I learnt many different skills from how to use InDesign and Photoshop to taking a good cover photo and I also learnt about the conventions of a magazine and the measurements required to make a full sized magazine.

The main skill I think I have developed over the past couple of months was how to use Photoshop and InDesign, I have never used theses programs before taking on As Media but after using it often I feel I am more comfortable using them and if I had to use it again I would be more confident.

Also working as a group of 4 helped me construct my magazine seeing as we were able to bounced ideas off each other for the concept of making a Hip-Hop&RnB magazine for 16-25 year olds.

There was a massive difference between making my preliminary exercise to making my final product, the preliminary exercise was on a college magazine whist the final product was on a music magazine so designing both of them where slightly different.

I feel that I didn’t spend as much time making my preliminary excise as I did making my final magazine, I gave my self more time on working on my final product which gave me a better understanding on what I was doing.

I also feel that my magazine was not up to scratch due to me not knowing how to set it out, this is something which I think I need to improve on my next task

I have also learnt many things about manipulation of photos whilst completing my course work. The main thing I have learnt is that almost every image you see in magazines and advertisements have been manipulated using Photoshoped. This is often done to enhance them and make the people look picture perfect.