Evaluation - Matthew

Evaluation - Matthew

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

For this question i have researched 2 major institutions that could distribute our media product, these were EMAP and BAUER.

EMAP currently has KERRANG! magazine under its belt. It mainly focuses on buisness to buisness magazines and also spreads over the radio to reach a larger audience, through my research i have found that kerrang magazine has been well known for publicising other buisnesses and what i find similiar is that it is just like our magazine as they both have a specific age range and demographics just like ours.

BAUER is responsible for Q magazine and also holds KERRANG TV. BAUER is a german company and spreads over tv and radio worldwide to gain a larger audience and to attract more people also it is responsible for printing of other consumer magazines. BAUER i think is the best as it specialises in the printing of consumer magazines which appeals to our demographic of spreading messages and teaching others who want to get into the music industry.

Evaluation - Emily

Media Evaluation 2

View more presentations from Emily Hadley.

Pardon for my stutter. The photos are images taken on the day of the photoshoot; containing some of the images that we decided not to use.

Evaluation - Matthew

Evaluation - Emily

Final Covers, Contents, and DPS

Evaluation - Lizzie

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

Preliminary Task And Final Product.

Conventions

Going from the preliminary task to the final product i have learnt about the conventions of a magazine and everything that goes into it. In the preliminary task we had done research and planning for our magazine, like what to put into it and what goes where and whats needed. However developing from that to our final product i learnt more about WHY we need certain conventions and understood how their actually used to attract and address the audience. Unlike in the prelim task where we used conventions just because we knew we had to and just chucked them on the page wherever we thought it suited, in the final product weve used conventions purposefully and have actually undergone a process of where to put them and thinking about whats the best way to present it and whats a better layout to attract and catch the readers eyes. Ive learnt why we need certain things and that everthing has a meaning behind why its in its position on a magazine and not just because it has to be their. You can see the difference in my understanding from me deconstruction of magazines from my preliminary task

To a deconstruction from my final product and also my in-depth understanding from the case study i did.

Organisation

In the progression from the preliminary task to the full product I’ve learnt that our organisation had to be precise and efficient in order to produce an immaculate magazine. In our prelim task we distributed the work evenly and then did it on our own and then put the final bits and pieces together. We didn’t have much communication with each other and may be why our magazine was quite simple. But we learnt that we needed to work a lot more together. So in our construction of our final product we still did a lot of work separately but we also spent many hours together during free periods, lunch and break to bring it all together and discuss issues. We made checklists so we could see our progression and set targets for the week so we achieved things and kept up to date with deadlines.

Also we had many other things to do for our final product such as the photo shoot we had to add in all the extra parts to our organisation. I personally learnt that setting specific dates to meet targets helped to keep everything organised and efficient. We set targets for each other to get things done at certain times and the photo shoot we had booked a date, asked some friends to pose for us and made sure we had spoken to them about clothes and props so that they were purposefully chosen and had a connotation with our magazine and fitted into our colours and house style (unlike in the prelim task where we never even considered the colours of clothes and surrounding fitting in with the house style).

Please excuse the laag on the video!

Development of technology

I have learnt a lot more about the technology used in the progression from the preliminary task to the full product. I have learnt a lot more depth into Photoshop and how to use the tools to my advantage to manipulate photos and construct them how i want. As you can see from the links their is a massive jump from the basic use of cropping and text tools to actually being able to use more difficult tools and applying them affectively. I feel a lot more confident in using photoshop and as shown in my construction im able to construct parts of the magazine myself as ive lernt how to use all the different tools and effects in this programme.

Preliminary task

http://emilylizziemattblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/tools-we-used-throught-project.html

Final product

http://emilylizziemattblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/dps-construction-example-lizzie.html

http://emilylizziemattblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/napkin-construction-example-lizzie.html

http://emilylizziemattblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/construction-example-lizzie.html

http://emilylizziemattblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/tools-used-in-photoshop-and-how-we-used.html

Screenshots

An improvement we made and I’ve learnt is that from the preliminary task we didn't take many screenshots so we had no evidence of construction or the work we had done putting together the product. For our final product it’s something that we took into consideration throughout the whole progression and took many screenshots of construction and designing the product. I’ve learnt that this helps a lot as you can look back and analyse your work and you can see exactly what you’ve done. Taking screenshots of our work helped to show the progression throughout our process of constructing our final product. I learnt that this helps to show the relevance of things incorporated in our work.

Photos

In the progression from the preliminary task to the final product I’ve also learnt about editing and camera angles. From my prelim task I used a mid shot which was quite simple and then cropped one photo so it was a close up, but in my final product I’ve got different angles and heights to help give the magazine shape and appeal to the eyes. I’ve also learnt about framing where instead of me just putting block pictures, I’ve cut pictures out and based text and information around the picture so it flows nicely. (eg. In my double page spread there is a photo and the text is based around it and is purposefully done so to create a flow in the text and layout.)

Q7

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In conclusion from the progression from the preliminary task to the final product i've learnt a lot about the construction and all the work that goes into making the magazine and all the detail and thought and process you have to go through. I've learnt to make educated decisions into why i've chosen things and what is best for the magazine and why i'm using particular things.

Evaluation - Emily

Media evaluation question - Slideshow

Evaluation - Matthew

How did you attract/address your audience?

Once we had decided who our audience was going to be we then had to think of ways of attracting them to our magazine. To attract people we had to use certain colours to catch the audiences eyes and also have a certain style that people will then recognise in future.

Language plays an important role as we are trying to attract the audience, not turn them away, because we used 2 people who are in the music industry themselves to be interviewed it makes people more attracted as it is not just some made up stuff, so when it comes to reading it they become deeply interested in it. As well as the language we had to think of what font to put it in, as this also plays a key role in attracting our audience, we decided to put the text in sans serif font as it is informal so will not turn our audience away, whereas serif font is formal and you would normally see this type of font on say a classical music magazine as that will be formal and the informal language makes the reader think they are talking to the person being interviewed.

The style of our magazine will also attract people to our magazine becasue if they see a well layed out magazine they will become interested in it. We used bright, noticable colours such as neon green, red, black, blue and orange/brown, too entise people as they will see these colours and will be intrigued to look at the magazine. We as a group have inlcuded many stuff in the magazine to attract them to buy it all the time and we want to help them become well known in the music industry so we included help and advice from well known bands in our magazine to make them feel welcome into it and feel comfortable seeking help. Lastly to help us understand what attracts people we researched what young people are into these days so we devised a questionnaire to help us understand more on how to attract our target audience.

Evaluation - Lizzie

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

Q6 - Slideshow

Blogger

Slideshare

Evaluation - Emily

Q: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of creating your product?

Over the course I have both progressed and learned new skills in various areas of technology during the planning, construction and evaluation stages of our music magazine production. When our group banded together; my main experience was with graphic design, photography, and Photoshop. Over the duration of the course our group has worked together with the photoshop work, which has in turn widened my knowledge and taught me new things about the software.

Photoshop

For our magazine we worked on Photoshop Elements 6.0; and together as a group we bought the software and downloaded it at home to practice the basics before starting our main task. When we finally began our main task, my progression with the software mainly fell down to playing around with opacity; this can be seen on our contents page [will add link when pictures uploaded] which was something I had never really used before when using both DTP and photo manipulation software. With photoshop I also used a graphics tablet, which I used to draw the wire that is the main feature of our front cover.

Pages

When we began constructing our magazine, we decided to revert away from Microsoft Publisher and use the Apple equivalent; iPages. The software was a whole new experience of Desktop Publishing and was most certainly different from most software I've had to use before. As a group we sat down on a mac and experimented with the basic tools that the software offered. However it did provide a very professional look and feel to it, and was a lot more effective than using Microsoft Publisher to construct it.

Blogger

My knowledge of Blogger has also been expanded over the course of the construction of the main task; our group decided that our prelim task was lacking a lot of progress shots of our work, so this time round we tried to incorporate print screens according to relevant changes in our work. Personally I have learned many new things about blogger including video embedding, embedding links and different formatting styles.

Evaluation

When creating my evaluation I have also researched into new ways of presenting my work; one being Windows Movie Maker, and the other being SlideShare. Windows Movie Maker is a simple video construction software that I mainly use as a visual to assist any audio/spoken work that I do; this can be seen on my evaluation question on distribution. For our photoshoot video however, we used the Apple equivalent, iMovie; which was by far a lot more easier to use with much better results on the editing.

Slideshare is an online slideshow uploader which allows you to embed presentations onto blogs; I used this for my audience evaluation question; however because I am mainly used to making interactive slideshows rather than linear slideshows, the software was very difficult to use in the sense that my presentation may seem rather irregular. I do intend to improve my skills of the software over time.

Photography was most probably my strongest skill in the group, as I study it as well as it being my main hobby outside of school. I currently use a Nikon D40 with an 18-55mm Lens and a Colour Polarizing Lens (CPL) and Ultra-Violet (UV) double thread-lens. For the photoshoot for our main task front cover I used 2 remote lights (which emit a bright light when the camera trigger goes off) which provided an even and adjustable source of lighting for the photoshoot. I had only ever used remote lights once before which was on inanimate objects; so because of the photos taken for the magazine I managed to learn how to use those lights for people and portraiture; a skill that I can also carry on in my future photography projects.

Evaluation - Matthew

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Many problems that magazines face are:

- Who will buy them? - A praticular audience may have been targeted so they must hope that the magazine will sell.

- When will they buy them? - The magazines could be bought in the morning, afternoon or evening but they might not be bought at all as people may not have the money because of the price of the magazine could be too high.

- When will they read it? - Many people may not have the time to read magazines and what adds to the situation is that the articles may be too long to read so therefore making the magazine lose sales and popularity.

Our media product represents young teens/adults and people who go to festivals every year wanting to have fun. As our audience is young adults that are into the Indie/rock genre we can use photos to represent particular social groups. in our media product we used photos of objects being 'destroyed', this represents fun as many young adults do like to have plenty of fun E.G when going to festivals and gigs.

Evaluation - Emily

Who would be your target audience for your media product?

View more presentations from Emily Hadley.

It was supposed to be an interactive slideshow (navigation buttons)...the limits of the cursor seen to have made it linear (one way)

All the areas are covered in clockwise order~

Evaluation - Emily

Evaluation - Lizzie

Q: How did you attract/address the audience?

1st link) https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjypMhiVLkuAF3gjx49LnpoVrtwhjrLetF0wymOsUKQa20t_OZymLaIHLKlTYUCIh1RMZ75qpgWCGkTb0BJnCzxIpa6mRufBCPjcu5pwXVVdO21UkGbKxpE0O_nwnoqCQwwcVqal0Fao2A0/s1600-h/colour+testing.jpg

2nd link) https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHmM9YxNgeluPMp9eZG9SUu6FQBNkTpCFOUz1vqPbMAuf15kc2mBcuxuhmN8KQyRxKZ1MhawJJ_ukn9OuG7vo3YAOm0rM45kOcAVWlsHpPwNpU8R_Q-YuY-QVyGrS3RPgkFLSUwDAD9ak/s1600-h/research.jpg

3rd link) http://emilylizziemattblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/genre-research-lizzie.html

4th link) http://emilylizziemattblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/questionnaire-lizzie.html

5th link) https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVc3U8Let9hUxNMt6wyVvhzaGUR3pT3T656OyNdepHv0FMF3PfLicuvHEZwOMEarrXBThm6lgQlvfjqQeZbJDvTWiBNTx9hr1p3nQAZ17r6hofmDcI95yBDskRr9gDuKjhGaVHu99ceGMC/s1600-h/mindmap.jpg

(Sorry about all the pausing I had a bad throat that day).

Evaluation - Lizzie

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our genre is indie rock and represents the social groups who are teens/young adults and are festival goers. Our media product does this by focusing on what teens and young adults enjoy and want out of the magazine.
































We represent the social group by taking the information we got from our questionnaire and applying it to the magazine. We also represent the particular social group with the traditional colours of rock- red, white and black which sit comfort with our social group and he demographic.


As our demographic is a young audience, having our photos of artists rocking out and smashing things up (having fun) represents our young rebellious social groups.










The lifestyle of our audience is quite busy as they are at school and are spending a lot of time practicing and recording and going to festivals. These social groups need something light and easy to read in their hectic life and our media product represents theses social groups by not overloading the magazine and having light readable articles.









We also represent theses social groups by our article, that interviews and artist. We actually interviewed real life artists and people who have produced singles and done gigs and are young adults themselves and so represent these social groups.
Also all the information in our magazine is from other artists and bands who are the same genre as the magazine. The social groups are reading basically advice from other people like them and is how our media product represents these social groups.

Evaluation - Lizzie

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

Emap Limited is a British media company, specialising in the production of business to business magazines. It was sold 2/3 of kerrang from Bauer. Both Emap and our magazine coincide with the fact that both have specific age range, genre and gender (demographic) and is why this institution would distribute our media product. It fits in with the other styles and forms of magazines that they have in their company.

http://emilylizziemattblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/case-study-lizzie.html

Like our magazine, kerrang the best selling rock magazine focuses mainly on rock but also less mainstream styles such as indie which is exactly our genre for our magazine. The magazine just like ours uses many pages for advertising album releases and tours ( which just like ours promotes the debut single of The Explosion and offers tickets to various festivals.)

Top of the pops institution (BBC media institution) wouldn’t be suitable to distribute out media product as their demographic is 8-14 girls and uses a lot of the colour pink, which doesn’t fit in with our house style. Also their genre is pop and r&b and we are focusing on Indie-Rock. Top of the pops is very unsuccessful now and lays in stores within the kids section of magazines on the other side of the shop away from the music stands. Whereas Kerrang is with the music magazines with added on extra shelving just for the individual magazine. Both kerrang and our magazine have around the same niche audience and we both want our institution to present us in away such as how Emap does.

Draft Covers

These were the first drafts of our front cover. We noticed that the pictures looked rather untidy with the background still around them; the wire was rather rough in parts and the blue around the photo was far too strong. However, the layout was very successful in terms of being able to read everything on the page.

Evaluation - Emily

Q: How does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In my opinion our magazine uses many different conventions which are present in most magazines; however we tried to adapt these conventions to create a new generation of magazine interface. We started off with our questionnaire (will upload asap) which helped us gain a rough idea of the kind of music that specific ages were interested in.

Our brainstorming of names was finally shortlisted to SMASH, and Bassline; of which we decided to use Bassline as we feel it is a rather catchy, yet ambiguous title for a magazine.

Layout wise, our magazine uses traditional elements of a brand identity, price, cover stories, and a signature cover photo. These qualities allow our magazine to be recognized as a music magazine, and it joins the market.

In terms of development our magazine (like

our prelim task) is an expansion of what would normally be a small segment of existing magazines like Kerrang! (get scanalam of magazine) and perhaps local culture magazines. Bassline focuses on exploiting new and upcoming bands and offering a kickstart to those who want to follow the same path; as it is a rather huge market which has been previously catered by internet social network site MySpace.

However whilst MySpace can only provide publicity to new bands, our magazine is also offering the link between those already in the industry and new bands who have yet to start their journey to fame.

The main way that we have challenged general conventions and forms in media is through our use of technology. Our page has a 3D wire that spans across the page; this is something that I personally have never seen on a magazine before, and something that makes it stand out especially to those who understand the relevance of it.

Our theme is black and green also breaks the stereotype of our main genre of music, Indie. When I think of Indie I think of oranges, browns, red and other warm colours. When I think of black and green I think of techno, rave and electronic music; however the main theme of the black and green is to look like an Oscilloscope, in other words, the Bassline of a song.

The font that we chose for Bassline we felt was a perfect replica to the waves.

When we handed in our drafts of our cover, contents and DPS; it was very clear that our magazine was lacking a sense of fluid reading and a very distinct house style. So we spent time creating creating a new layout style to present our magazine with the theme of an Amplifier. As much as it is a rather obscure theme for layout and presentation, we feel it is that especially which will appeal more to our readers than other existing magazines.

Evaluation - Lizzie

Evaluation Question

It was meant to be an interactive slideshow where you could click on the words and it would take you to the slide ( i also created a back button) but due to this technology not working with blogger it does not work as an interactive slideshow but now just works as a normal click slideshow (and i removed the back buttons as they did not work).

Evaluation - Matthew

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

We have developed our media product using Conventions normally found on any magazine and we have adapted them to suit our magazine, for example our Masthead (BASSLINE) took us a while to think of as we had numerous ideas on what to call it, eventually we decided what to call it through questionnaires that we each produced and had many friends comment on what they like best. On any magazine you will find a Masthead/Brand identity, price, pictures, main stories ect, these Conventions are what makes a magazine a magazine, as this is what customers will recognise in a shop, an possibly make them buy it.

In the development of our magazine we had to challenge forms and conventions of real media products. Our magazine is about new, unknown local bands and through our individual and group research we found it very hard to find existing magazines that focus on new, unknown bands wanting to get a record deal or make it big, so this is why we decided to base our magazine on this. We were challenged on what colour(s) to put on our magazine, and green is a neutral colour that suit both genres of our magazine - Rock/Indie - We thought that green is a very effective colour as it will attract customers attention, especially on the black background it stands out really well and the idea of the font we used come from an idea that popped into our heads which was the idea of a heart monitor, we took the idea of the green line and made it into a Masthead, (follow link to see our Masthead)

After getting our coursework grades back we had feedback from our teachers who marked it for us, thay had left comments to help us fix the mistakes we made so we can get a much better mark when it was finally graded. One major comment was about our Double Page Spread (DPS), and how it did not fit with the rest of our magazine, our DPS consisted of a red and white checkerd table cloth with napkins, post-it notes and note paper (follw link to see) after getting this critisim we realised the mistake we had made so we quickley changed it and it now fits with the rest of our magazine, also you can clearly see the connection between the Front cover, Contents page and Double Page Spread.

Tools used in Photoshop and how we used them. - Lizzie

EVALUATION - Lizzie

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

Our media product develops from other magazines as we have taken the typical conventions but changed them to fit our magazine. We have the masthead at the top like usual but took time to study what to call it. We had a few different ideas but we finally decided what to call it through our questionnaire. We used real conventions of media products such as the Brand identity, barcode, price, issue, photos, headlining stories because these are things that every magazine has and are recognisable to people which makes them noticeable. Furthermore we used conventions of a rock magazine by using the colours red, white and black which is connotated as rock which is typical to rock fans who would notice what genre of magazine it is just by the glimpse of the colours, this makes the colour choice effective and grab our target audience straight away. Look at my case study on Kerrang at content and approach to music to read about the connotation of colours.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9nWuP65q8pgXOD6lx-kFL20roqxkbG7BAQiUHGuwvRFxXulf7R5_lRpyKwXUJFAtmx9bYo2D9tpWv0FRKZCo4G3OeKaj1zAOOBFYv0rHsjBid1bpWYA5x5xcNiD4SlscJ-wKo0XWu_S4H/s1600-h/content+and+approach+to+music.jpg

We challenged many forms of conventions of real media products because it was a totally new magazine. A magazine that focuses on unknown, unsigned local bands that gives advice on gigs and recording and information from other bands to help them get known. From our music magazine research none of our group found magazines that based their necessities around unknown people. We wanted to do our magazine for them and because mainly bands that are emerging are rock/indie this was the genre we based our magazine mainly on. This also challenges real conventions as there has never been a rock/indie magazine. The colour green also challenges the typical conventions as it’s not a general choice of colour however we wanted to appeal to both genres as our audience and felt green was a neutral colour and was suitable to able to both. It’s also effective in the way that it’s not a common colour which will make our magazine stand out and catch people’s eyes. It’s also works to our strength due to the brightness of the green on top of a black background which gives it a glowing look that jumps out at you, this is one of the reasons why we choose a bright neon green. We also chose Neon green because it was a more vibrant and funky colour which attracts the audience who like that sort of genre in music and connect it to the colour we used. The main idea sparked from a heart monitor or equaliser (which of course is used in media production).

Originally our first Dps was extremely different from what a real media product would do and challenged it in many different ways. The reason we had chosen paper and post-its and napkins was because we thought as young artists a lot of people’s songs and lyrics start off from a scrap of paper. Or sitting in a cafe and writing on whatever they could find. That’s where we got our original idea to put the writing copy on bits and bobs that people would write lyrics on, but with the added background of a table cloth ( which we chose because of the typical connotation of the red) it just looked like a picnic.

After analysing and looking at it, we realised it didn’t work and made no sense in the magazine and was an extreme weakness in our magazine. Our new edited cover suits more to a typical media product and they layout is a lot more usual and is in the typical columns that you find in most articles. It works a lot more effective for us as the items we have used earlier in the magazine are carried through into the dps and so now you can recognise it as part of this magazine. Our dps basically develops on from real media products but using our house and the items that show it’s our magazine. Our dps is now a lot more successful.