In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
When we first looked at the task we researched occurring student magazines already in the media. Most of these, students hadn’t heard of or found appealing. Our media product challenges these forms by its presentation and contents being more suited to our audience and appealing to students, it speaks to the students from a student’s voice as not to be patronizing and making them feel comfortable. My media product also uses regular conventions such as the masthead (SPAM) the unique barcode, the issue number and price, the major stores as a quote on the front cover and the traditional picture to capture the reader’s eye. It develops from real media products as I designed a new and exciting design for a magazine and the contents of it, is adapted to the style and information that students preferred and wanted to read and so intends to please them.
How does your media product represent particular social groups?
The fact that I’ve used an actual student from our school and she is expressing happiness with a big grin on her face and the comfortableness of her body posture standing outside the school shows how happy she’s to be there and suggests students are glad to be around school and sends off a positive message to any readers. Also most young kids nowadays sit at home on computers doing what they want (eg. Music, games, facebook ect) and so a computer theme and a computer style running throughout would attract the typical young teenagers who is our major audience. Furthermore the quirky masthead “SPAM” Will appeal to students as they will laugh and joke about these sort of colloquial words but actually there is deeper meaning to the title (meaning Students Person Advice Magazine.)
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
The magazine would be distributed around a senior school for £1.50. It would be distributed around classes through tutor time or available at pupil reception or front desk. If it became a successful magazine it could also be distributed in corner shops providing the information to a wider audience and spreading the magazine to attract other students from schools outside our own.
Who would be the audience for your media product?
The audience for our media product is year 7 - year 11. It’s aimed at this year group and is for both boys and girls. We would get a wider audience and more involvement if it was open to both genders. The magazine is fun for the readers but also informative which may also attract another audience that wasn't intended such as parents. But this will be good and informative to them which may encourage them to get their children to buy the magazine. The wider we made our magazine available the more people it will attract and gain more readers.
How did you attract/address your audience?
We wanted the magazine to be for both boys and girls as to attract a wider audience and encourage more students to understand, learn and enjoy school. Our media product attracts the audience by the neutral colours to apply both to boys and girls. Also the modern representation of computers would also attract the student audience as many girls and boys nowadays have a computer. Also the funny attracting brand of SPAM is something that would sound funny and appealing to many teenagers and yet cleverly has a more significant meaning as it stands for Students Personal Advice Magazine = SPAM. Our media product also addresses the audience with the pop up boxes down the side of the magazine as they rhetorically ask questions that link into the magazine such as the Ok click boxes which make the reader then think if they like to read about it and eventually attracting them into reading and buying the magazine. Also from the start of our research we looked into and asked around exactly what students would want in a magazine and what would appeal to them, and so we’ve taken this into consideration with our contents involving all the major things students wanted such as music, advice columns, problem pages and own stories. All of these are what students themselves wanted to read about so in turn would attract the audience with its involvement within the magazine.
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
When we first started looking at what we were going to have to do I thought it would be quite a simple process but actually the depth and skill you have to learn and use within the technologies was difficult. I have learnt how to use the blogger to process and display what we have done and to present it in a more mature way. Also one major thing I have learnt about the technologies during the process was using and developing my skills on Photoshop which I thoroughly used throughout the process for the development of the front cover and contents page to do things such as the making of the pop up boxes, bar code, Brand title, Photo manipulation, and using of the different tools to create the effects and fix anything needed.Ive also learnt to use www.Slide.com to display our photo manipulations and the descriptions of how I manipulated them. Another technology I have used in this process was Picasa, do print screen and edit pictures into the blogger. The last technology I’ve used was publisher to put all the bits together and develop the final outcome of the cover and contents page.
What do you feel you have learnt in the progression from starting the course to finishing your preliminary task?
I feel that I have learnt a lot through the progression of this task. I have learnt new skills throughout Photoshop to create specific things and manipulate photos to the finishing picture. I’ve also learnt different media terminology and developed my understanding of representation and the media world. I’ve also learnt the process of putting together a magazine and the skills and all the aspects and parts you have to work on to create one. I’ve also learnt to organise and distribute all our tasks evenly between our group as to get all the work done but also fairly. We’ve worked well as a group to come up with the finishing task. A lot of the programs we had to use were a challenge for me such as publisher and Photoshop as I had never used them before. But now with the finished preliminary task I feel confident in sufficiently using them to a good standard. I think this task has also helped me to learn to cooperate as a group and make an input into decision making and coming up with initial ideas to make a finishing preliminary task. I’ve learnt that making something like this in the media, I believe is important to plan and research. I thought that it would be quite simple to create a front cover but soon discovered that without research it’s hard to create one. Researching and asking questions helps to cut down and decide on exactly what needs to be done and what is needed.
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