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

Music Magazine                                 School Magazine         

Looking back on my school magazine task it is apparent that I have made various changes and improvements to my style of magazine creation. Both my magazines share some regular conventions of a magazine such as a masthead placed at the top left of the page, a barcode at the bottom right of the page, an issue number, a date of the issue, a price and tagline located under the masthead. These features illustrate that I did have some understanding on the regular codes and conventions when I created my first magazine, the school magazine task, except this also shows how I have improved my knowledge on the features of a magazine front cover. The realistic subheadings I have on my music magazine portrays that I know the differences between a normal magazine and a music magazine. The background image of the artist doesn’t immediately indicate to the audience that it is a music magazine, but the text around it does. I decided to do this so that the image will attract my target audience to my music magazine front cover, then the text around that image will attract them to read my magazine.

There are many things that went well during this task. I believe production was the highlight of both tasks as I got to explore and learn more about Ulead Photoimpact 10, which is the photo editing software that I used throughout the coursework. In both magazine front covers I manipulated the dominant background images. For my "Citylife" magazine background image I used a black & white cartoon effect as I wanted the image to be distinctive and not plain. For my "GRIME TIME" magazine I added a grey fill effect in the background to make the artist's colourful clothing/costume stand out against the plain grey background. I already knew how to manipulate images before this project but I believe my photo manipulation skills have improved. My photo taking skills have also improved which is shown in the professional appearance of the image on my "GRIME TIME" front cover.

Real magazines on display in a shop

I used 2 of the same fonts in both of my magazines. "aaaiight" font is used for the masthead in my school magazine and used for the main story heading in my music magazine. The "Berlin Sans" font I used for the issue numbers, prices on both magazines. I have developed more understanding of the codes and conventions of the media products e.g. I specifically placed my magazine mastheads on the top left of the page, this illustrates my understanding of magazines as I know that the arrangement of magazines in most shops allow the reader to only see the top and left side of a magazine. I believe that all of these skills have assisted me to become the intelligent, talented media student that I am today. I didn't experience many big problems during this project. The only big problems I had was the difficulties of uploading my video to Youtube. When I found a way around this problem the evaluation questions became quite easier to answer.

School Magazine (Citylife)                              Music Magazine (GRIME TIME)

EVALUATION Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Media Technologies on Prezi

EVALUATION Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

In this video I interviewed many people from my target audience. I asked them 4 questions specific to my music magazine to see if I had attracted and addressed them properly with my three magazine products (Front Cover, Contents Page and Double Page Spread). I decided to create a video to answer this evaluation question 5 to show my high level of IT skills as I know this will ensure I get a high grade in this coursework. The four questions I asked them was....

EVALUATION Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

EVALUATION Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product? on Prezi

EVALUATION Question 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

I believe IPC Media would be a suitable institution to distribute GRIME TIME. IPC Media produces over 60 iconic brands like Nuts and NME. IPC Media's launches of these to magazines were both extremely successful. Nuts, which was released in 2004 was IPC Media's biggest release to date. This shows the brand power that IPC Media has in the Media Industry. I know that magazine distributors usually have their own house style when it comes to the genre of magazines they distribute. I would be happy for IPC Media to distribute my magazine without me having to change anything to suit its house style because I would like my magazine to stand out and be unique.

As I stated before the high quality of IPC Media's magazines, like Nuts & NME, will assist the initial sales of my magazine. This is because their brand is well known for distributing popular magazines so people will always look out for their new products. I would like my magazine to be disturbed all around England but I would expect the majority of my magazine sales to be in London because the Grime music genre is based in London and created by a London MC, Wiley. On the whole IPC Media are a reliable distribution company and this is illustrated with their successful magazine brands. This is why I would like IPC Media to distribute GRIME TIME.

EVALUATION Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Rewind Magazine, GRIME TIME (My magazine) and HONEY Magazine

I believe that my GRIME TIME magazine represents many different social groups in a positive manner. My magazine is aimed at young people aged 16-21 who are in education and possibly have a part time job. Throughout my 3 magazine products I haven't included any negative features or stories. This is because my magazine represents positive young people and I would like positive young people to purchase it as they are my target audience. The importance of my target audience being in education or having a part time job is so they can afford to purchase my magazine monthly. If they are in education they may be receiving EMA which is an income that can make them more independent and less dependant on their parents or guardians. On the other hand if they have a part time job they can also be financially independent. My positive representations of young people are similar to the representations of RWD magazine and HONEY magazine above. I believe my front cover portrays a cool, young person with a sense of fashion which is similar to the RWD magazine and the HONEY magazine.

I did notice that these 3 front covers all contain young black males. This may be that these magazines are all trying to change the negative perceptions of young black males in the media. Even though my magazine features a young black male on the front cover, this doesn’t mean that my magazine is only targeted at those specific social groups. As I said before GRIME TIME is aimed at young people, boys and girls aged 16-21. My magazine shows the positive representations of young people and some good things young people can do when they are optimistic. I hope that this will attract the positive young people (my target audience) to read my magazine and also attract the negative young people out there to change their pessimistic ways. Maybe even people who don't listen to Grime or Rap will be attracted to my magazine by my front cover and then read my magazine to find out more on these music genres.

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

Firstly, the name of my music magazine is GRIME TIME. Me and the other member of my group decided to call our magazine GRIME TIME because it clearly states the main genre of music that will be featured in the magazine. We agreed that I would create the first issue of the magazine and he would create the second issue. I didn't want to base my music magazine solely on one genre of music as this would give our magazine a niche market or target audience. So we included other genres in our magazine like Rap, Hip Hop etc.

The name GRIME TIME is also short, straight to the point and it rhymes which would also attract our target audience. We chose not to have a fixed colour scheme for the magazine because we wanted to adjust the colours to match the colours of artist’s clothing in the dominant background image. This would give our magazine a unique style/flavour to differ from other magazines. This idea was inspired by our research of RWD magazine as this music magazine shares the music genres of our magazine; Grime, Rap & Hip Hop.

FRONT COVER:

I decided to follow some of the regular conventions of music magazines when creating my own products. The masthead is featured at the top of my magazine which is usual for all magazines. Throughout the magazines I have used only 3 different fonts to keep some sort of house style. I believe that the font style "Dumbnerd" combined with the red font colour and black outline is effective in portraying the boldness of the magazine through the masthead. The words crisis with the graffiti type font "aaaiight" and the red glow works with the masthead to draw the audience to the magazine. For the issue number, date, tagline, price and caption "Young rapper from North London..." I used the "Berlin Sans FB Demi" font. I believe this font is effective in contrasting with the graffiti fonts I used so that I didn’t have monotonous graffiti on the front cover. I have a price (£1.99), barcode (bottom right corner of my magazine), issue number (bottom left corner of my magazines), date (next to the masthead), story headlines (3 lines across the background image), background image of the Grime artist featured in my magazine (Crisis) and a tagline/slogan (UK's hottest Grime & Rap magazine!). I used all of these features to illustrate my knowledge on the standard codes and conventions of music magazines, so the majority of my front cover doesn't challenge the conventions. The first story headline "is your swagger on point" relates to my target audience as the word "swagger" is a slang term meaning style, attire or dress sense, so that word is something my target audience will recognise. The second story headline "exclusive: interview with crisis" will attract my target audience to read the magazine to find out about this new artist (Crisis) in the Grime scene. The third headline "rapper giggs meets 50 cent" will also attract my target audience because Giggs is a well-known UK rapper and 50 Cent is a famous American rapper. All these 3 headlines do not start with capital letters. I chose not to include some capital letters to make my magazine less formal and to suit my young, cool target audience.

This is how I composed the front cover photo….

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE

I also added a colour fill effect in the background whilst I was editing the photo to give it a more smooth appearance and make it look professional. I chose this location as I believed the setting was ideal for the effect I wanted on the front cover. I wanted a plain background so that the person in the photo (the artist) would be the main focus of the image. I also believe that bright colours would contrast well against a plain background giving the audience a nice visual experience.

CONTENTS PAGE:

Even though I chose IPC Media to distribute my magazine, I decided not to follow the house style of IPC Media's magazines. This is because I wanted to develop my own style to be associated with my own magazine and this would be another way that I challenge the conventions of existing magazines. The colour scheme I believe my contents page has a more elusive layout than my front cover but the colour scheme of red, grey, black and white is shared on my front cover and contents page. In most real magazines the colour scheme of the front cover is different to the one on the contents page or the appearance is very different. My idea of sharing the colour scheme and fonts gives my magazines contents page a similar appearance to my front cover and creates a unique style, which is what I am aiming for as I stated before.

My contents page includes realistic page numbers, story headlines, a good mix of images and text and. I stated that my page numbers are realistic because each story is a couple of pages at least, giving my magazine a minimum of 45pages. Existing magazines usually contain 50 pages or more to give the reader a variety of things to look at and I believe I achieved this. If my magazine only had a few page numbers this would make it look unrealistic and unprofessional and the magazine would be very thin as it would only be a few pages. The story headlines are also realistic because they relate to the topic of the magazine with the page numbers beside them to inform the audience of the page that a particular story is going to be on. The images on my contents page relate to the story headlines due to the page numbers on them. These page numbers on the images also associate the images with the story headlines. My contents page has a mixture of 50% images and 50% text. I believe this is effective in giving the audience a good visual balance because too many images would make my magazine looks like a picture book and too much text would bore my target audience. (click on the image to enlarge)

DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD:

Like most existing magazines, my double page spread has its own theme and colour scheme which doesn't look similar to any other part of the magazine. As you can see I did keep my main idea of matching the colours on the page to a colour in the image of the artist, in this case the purple and white logo on Crisis' jumper matches the purple and white text I used throughout my double page spread. My double page spread contains one page dominated by an image and the other dominated by text. I believe my double page spread is roughly 50% imagery and 50% text because the page on the left (page 10) is taken up by a large image with a small amount of text, while page 11 is mainly taken up by columns of text with a small image of 'Crisis' in the studio. I used this image here with the text to break the monotony of having just text filling up a whole page. The page numbers on these two pages also relate with the page numbers I stated in my contents page which is why my magazine is realistic.

The mid-shot of Crisis on page 10 should attract my target audience to read about him as they will not recognise him (because he is a new Grime artist on the scene) and they will want to find out about him; this is how I aimed to draw the reader in. I used this image on the left page instead of the right because people in the UK read from left-right so the first thing they will notice when opening the magazine to page 10 is the large image of Crisis. I added the interview section next to the page with the image of Crisis so that the audience automatically know who is going to be interviewed in this article. I came up with all of the questions myself with the help of my research on the Double Page Spreads of RWD Magazine.

I believe that my double spread also had a good balance between text and images, just like my contents page (as I stated before in the analysis of my contents page). All the questions in the interview section are related to music, with a few personal questions about the artist's life/background appeal to reader so they feel like they are getting to know this artist/band in a way they couldn’t find out about him anywhere else hence the term "EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW:". An example of a personal question that I included in the interview of Crisis would be "Is there a Mrs Crisis in your life?" Although this may not relate to music members of my target audience (mainly his fans) will want to know a little personal information about Crisis.

My double page spread also includes a quote from the artist on the artist's image and an album release date. My idea was to put a quote from an artist/band next to an image of that artist/band. I wanted to make this a regular aspect in the double page spreads of my magazine issues because the audience will read the quote before they read the interview section. This quote will give the reader some idea of who the artist is before they begin to read question and answer section (interview) in my magazine. The album release date bubble is another feature I wanted to make a regular aspect in my magazines issues, so that every different artist or band that I interview can immediately inform my target audience on their latest single, album, mixtape or music video that is out. I believe these two features do not challenge the regular conventions of real music magazines because current music magazines have similar features to this.

Overall, my double page spread follows and doesn't really challenge the conventions of a normal double page spread in a music magazine. On the whole, all 3 of my magazine products (front cover, contents and double page spread) don’t challenge the regular codes and conventions of music magazine because the majority of features I have used on them are usually found in real magazines.

This is how I composed the photo for my double page spread...

 

Examples of Photo Editing

Screenshot of editing process

Edited Photo

Crisis is wearing a jumping and a baseball hat which is the typical dresscode of a Grime artist in the UK. Fans of GRIME would refer to this as "GrimeWear". Using Ulead Photoimpact I inverted the colours of the orignal image and I added a lightening effect. I believe these effects show the underground side of the Grime music genre. The edited photo connotes that this music artist is posing for a photo in the night or that he is an underground artist because the underground UK Grime artists are usually played on pirate radio stations during the night unlike the Mainstream artists who are played throughout the day on well known radio stations like Capital FM, Kiss or Choice FM. The animated font below is an example of the font I would use if my music magazine had its on website. The animation looks like graffiti, which is also associated with Grime music.

Original Photo

As you can see Chris hasn’t got the average look of a rapper. His dress code is the different from the ones of rappers therefore he is breaking the conventions of the clothing associate with the Rap music genre. I told Chris to dress smartly for this photo because I wanted to illustrate that there are many different sides to the way rappers dress, not all rappers where baggy jeans, hoodies and baseball hats. This makes his "swagger" unique and different which is why I used this photo in the 'IS YOUR SWAGGER ON POINT?' section of my magazine contents page. He is also wearing Dr Dre's 'Beats' Headphones whilst listening to music on his Blackberry Smartphone. These two gadgets are highly popular amongst young people (my target audience) so this will attract them to read about this. Using Ulead Photoimpact 10 to edit this photo aswell. I added a 'DiffuseGlow' effect to this photo to enhance the brightnesss of this photo. This distinctive glow gives the impression that he is shining like a star, or that he is a star in the music business.


Edited Photo



Music Magazine FINAL DESIGNS

Contents Pages FINAL DESIGN

Double Page Spread FINAL DESIGN

Music Magazine SECOND DRAFTS

Double Page Spread SECOND DRAFT

As you can see in my first drafts, I didn't follow the original flatplans of the 3 main elements of my music magazine. While I was creating my first drafts, my creative instinct told me that I needed to alter the actual layouts of the drafts to differ from the original flatplans. The transparency of the first draft titles illustrates how unique and niche the Grime music genre is.

Avatar/James Cameron Notes

• CGI was used to create the film
• December 2009 - Premiere in the UK and USA
• It is the highest grossing film ever
• Its the best selling 3D film
• Many different specialised cameras were used to film the movie
• Film critics describe this film as an "Innovative Sci-Fi film". This means that the film is ahead of its time or it has done something different that other Sci-Fi films haven't done before, so it changed the way Sci-Fi films can be made
• It took James Cameron 15years to produce Avatar. From the initial idea to the release of the film
• James Cameron also directed Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986) and Titanic (1997)
• The film's budget was $237,000,000 and its Gross Revenue was approximately $2,800,000,000
• Cameron was also a CEO of a Visual Editing Company when he was creating a film called Brother Termite (1993). The film wasn't completed but James Cameron released 2mins of footage from the film showing the 'Performance Capture' technology which was used to create it
• This technology was also used in the creation of Avatar
• 20th Century Fox (Film Distribution Corporation) supported (funded) Cameron with Avatar for over a year
• Cameron wanted the characters of Avatar to be “animal like” but still be physically attractive to the audience
• Most of the jungle set in the film was based on landscapes in China, Venezuela and New Zealand
• There was deep and detailed research during the creation of the film. For example Cameron hired botanists to help with the design of the plants in the film so they could be digitally created to look realistic
• This showed that the process of creating a film involves much more different factors than just hiring actors and writers
• WETA is a special effects company, based in New Zealand, who helped produce Avatar
• During the creation of Avatar, 20^th Century Fox kept insisting that the film needed a famous actor/actress to star in the film for it to be successful
• So they hired Sigourney Weaver, who was a notable actress from Aliens (1986)
• Cameron also hired a linguist to assist with the making of the main language used in the Avatar plot to create a unique language for the characters to use
• Captured Performance is a technology used in Avatar
• Cameron also hired an actual soldier who fought in Desert Storm to train the actors/actresses (Method Acting)
• It took two years (2005-2007) for the film producers to master the performance capture technology
• Reference and Visual Cameras were used to film Avatar
• Most of the film was filmed using virtual environments/backgrounds
• The production wasn’t easy as the hardware/software used by the film makers would often crash as they were pushing the boundaries (doing things that haven’t been done before-innovative)
• There was 140 members of the crew
• The different sets (live action with the humans) and the CGI with the avatar characters made the actors/actresses feel like it was two different films, which shows it was a lot more hard work than a usual film
• Cameron also hired a helicopter pilot to assist with the flying scenes in the film
• Fusion camera – shoots actors and live action on 3D Sets. It was designed to be a state of the art cinema camera
• Virtual camera – more like a monitor because it displays all the different angles of the references cameras scattered around the set
• RIG programming controls how facial expressions are shown in the animation of the film. This was used to make the Avatars facial expressions/body gestures extremely realistic
• It took over a year for WETA to animate a section of the film (Feb 2007 to May 2008) to animate 10/11 shots of the film
• The film consisted of 2600 shots in total
• Took out 40mins of film at least as some bits were too long to be kept in the film
• From 2008, Avatar became even more difficult to make as the set deadlines kept getting missed whilst the film release date was coming up only a year later
• As WETA got used to the type of animation for the film it became easier for them to animate more shots in less time

Music Magazine FIRST DRAFTS



Front Cover FIRST DRAFT



Me and the other member of my group decided to choose the Title/Masthead "Grime Time". The image on the left illustrates my first attempt on creating the frontcover for our magazine. Our teacher informed us that every member of each group had to produce their own version/issue of their magazine, so me and my partner had to create 2 issues. I will be using Ulead PhotoImpact 10 throughout this media project to create my magazine. As you can see my first draft has many of the key conventions of a music magazine front cover, like the masthead, tagline or slogan, date, background image of a music artist, price and a barcode


Contents Page FIRST DRAFT


My Contents Page may not look like the average contents page but it follows the conventions of a contents page for a magazine. I the different sub-headings on differents sections in my magazine to give the readers easy access to the stories they want to read



Double Page Spread FIRST DRAFT



Research for Music Magazine

These real magazines will give me some ideas on the codes and conventions of a regular music magazine. Analysing these magazine products will assist me when I am creating my own music magazine.

Original Photography for Music Magazine