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

  For my media product or music magazine I used other magazines aimed at similar target audiences and social groups as inspiration for the development, design and production of my music magazine. I took things from a selection of other magazines such as colour schemes and page layout and brought them togethert as one for my music magazine.

  While I have used ideas from other magazines and developed them to my advantage in order to challenge conventions, I am aware that there are areas where perhaps I have relied too heavily on other magazines and should have developed those ideas further to make my magazine one hundred percent unique. An example of this is the design of my contents page.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

  The following Prezi link will take you to a prezi presentation that I have produced to answer/explain my response to the above question

http://prezi.com/x4yxgjkdfvc8/how-does-your-media-product-represent-particular-social-grou/

Who would be the audience for your media product?

  Before making my music magazine, I ensured that I had a strong target audience that I could aim at by carrying out market research, but at the same time I  needed to find a gap in the market for my product. To do this I looked at other magazines aimed at the same age range as my target audience and then decided to apply these features to my music magazine because this would mean that m magazine can offer all of the features of the other magazines and I could also include the fact that mine is also a music magazine, therefore appealing to a wider target audience.

                  

  I also feel now looking at my magazine as a finished product, in comparison to its audience I am confident to say my magazine targets, young people between the ages of 8-14. I feel that it is aspiring for the younger side of my audience in terms of style of the models and such like, and at the same time i feel that the fashion and content would also appeal to the higher age range of my target audience who are interested in main-stream pop music. 

  The following are images that I have sourced which i feel represent my target audience either from the style and appearance of the people, or the poses or surrounding settings.

How did you attract/address your audience?

  The first step that I made concerning my target audience was to create a reader profile. This consisted of what sex the typical reader would be, their age range and their likes/interests. Once I had created this reader profile I researched into what this type of audience liked to read and what was popular among this age range. I looked at other music magazines and the colours, themes, designs and imagery that they used in order to help me produce a magazine that would appeal to my audience.

 

  From this research I noticed that this particular, young, girl orientated audience were attracted to very bold and colourful magazines as oppose to more discrete and minimalist magazines that slightly older women are attracted to for example: 

  I addressed my audience in an informal manner, to ensure that the reader feels at level with what they are reading and entices them to read on. I did this as more of a formal tone could make the reader feel inferior and not appeal to them.

 For the title of the magazine I have used something that is simple yet effective to engage the readers as it is not too complex for my young target audience. I selected my colour scheme so that it would appeal to the whole of my 8-14 year old audiences and at the same time my main-stream pop audiences. Such as pastel’s and splash colours. Furthermore I used young models for my magazine to appeal to younger girls because for example if i used a woman in her sixties as the model for my front cover this would not appeal to my young target audience. 

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

The following Slideshare presentation is one which I have produced as research into an additional media institution and the magazine that inspired me in producing my own music magazine.

http://www.slideshare.net/jessicalennon96/emont-magazines

  Out of the four media institutions that I have researched I feel that the most appropriate one to distribute my product would be EGMONT. I feel this way because they currently have no music based magazines for young teenage girls, but they do have a gossip based magazine (We Love Pop) which is aimed at the same sort of target audience as mine. Therefore they will have the necessary contacts for the production ,marketing and distribution of my product. 

Furthermore EGMONT only publish for children who are their main focus not a sideline unlike IPC, for example, who focus predominantly on an adult audience.

EMAP

 For further research into the question "What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?" I have also researched into the media institution EMAP. Below is a slideshare presentation demonstrating my findings.

http://www.slideshare.net/jessicalennon96/emap-31821771

  From this research i don't think that EMAP would be a suitable institution to distribute my product as trey do not offer anything aimed at an audience anywhere near the specifications of my target audience. for this reason i feel that a magazine such as mine would be too far away from their comfort zone.

For more information on EMAP and EMAP values please visit:

http://www.emap.com/about-us

IPC Media

I have created the following slideshare presentation as research for the question "what kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?"

http://www.slideshare.net/jessicalennon96/ipc-media-31753641

For more background visit:

http://www.ipcmedia.com/about

And for history about the company visit:

http://www.ipcmedia.com/about/companyhistory

Bauer Media

Main media institution, research Bauer:

http://www.slideshare.net/jessicalennon96/bauer-presentation-31024579

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

  As already mentioned I have learnt a lot about editing the pictures that I have taken for the music magazine. I have discovered that it is much easier to used the Internet website 'Clipping Magic' to remove the background from my images farther than using Microsoft' PowerPoint. I learnt much about Clipping Magic and how to use it as there was a step-by-step instructions available when you first visit the website. from this website i have also learnt that it is possible to remove the background from an image but keep the hair in, so that it looks natural and not like huge chunks of the model's hair is missing. Below is an analogy of what I learnt from the website.

  From working on the music magazine I also developed my skills of working with a camera. I decided to use my own camera for the photography because I am more familiar with it and how to use it as oppose to the school cameras, for this reason I felt that my own would be easier to use, in addition the school cameras are camcorders so I felt that that may make using a school camera more complicated. When using my camera to take the pictures I noticed that square shapes focused on the models faces which was useful in capturing the girls' facial expressions.
   During the production of the product I have also developed skills and knowledge of Microsoft Word and Publisher. I found it easier to type text into a Word document and then paste it into the Publisher document that I used to create the magazine. I found it very easy to use Publisher to produce my music magazine. From the process I have learnt that Publisher gives you the opportunity to add pages to the one document, enabling me to produce the whole magazine in the same document rather than numerous ones. I also discovered that Publisher gives you the opportunity to  create a double page spread within the document which makes it a lot easier to work with, it does this by placing two single pages next to each other.

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

  I feel that since producing the preliminary task at the start of the year I have drastically developed my photography skills and editing the images that I have taken. In September I joined the media class later than the rest of the pupils and have never studied media in the past, for this reason I felt like I had been thrown in at the deep end as pretty much straight away I was presented with the task of producing my school magazine. One factor of producing the magazine that I was particularly worried about was producing the images to a professional standard. before I took the images however, in class we studied camera angles and shots and were given the opportunity to take our own pictures demonstrating medium close ups and low angle shots for example. We were also told that the lighting was an important factor to take into consideration when taking our photography, however, at the time I don't think that I fully took on board how important the camera angles and lighting would be for the final presentation of the magazine and I did not appreciate how much of and impact they would have on the representation of the magazine. Below is an image of my book and what we were told to do for a strong photo.

  I took the images that I have used for the school magazine in  one of the school's classrooms and used a  white pull down projector screen as the background because I thought that it would be the perfect background as there would be no glare reflected off it from the lights and I believed that it would present me with a perfect white background that would be easily removed. However when I came to add the images to the magazine I stumbled across numerous issues. the first being that because I had not managed the lighting correctly the background was patchy and cast a shadow behind the models. This then turned into an issue when I wanted to remove the background from the images, because the background colour was not one block colour I was unable to remove it using Microsoft PowerPoint. I spent quite a lot of time attempting to resolve this issue however after a while I decided to search the internet to try and find a website to help me complete this task. The website that i found was called 'Clipping Magic'. Looking back this was much easier to used than attempting to remove the background using Microsoft PowerPoint. Below is a screenshot of the website and an image that i was editing using the website.