1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
From the two different magazine covers above you can see how I tried to use some of the effects that were used on the George Clooney magazine with my Dukebox edition. The main two similarities between the covers is the font in the background of the image this gives the reader an idea of what is in the edition of the magazine but in a different way than normal. Esquire have used a variety of different sizes and fonts which will draw the readers eye towards it whereas on mine I choose to have the font slightly bigger at the top then to become a little bit smaller each line that we go down, also esquire did not have a sub heading for George Clooney across the image of him they’ve put the image just to the left of his head. I thought that it would work better if I were to put the sub heading on top of the image in the same colour as the banner at the top of the page.
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
I would say that product as a magazine does not particularly aim a one social group, but is more towards the alternative indie, the reason I said this is because there will be some other music genre’s involved but they will not be the main focus off the magazine. I have an exclusive interview with Pat Mills and how band member Harvey turned to the drink when times got hard for him but they pulled through with the help of everyone close to him. My magazine Dukebox has the reviews of latest gigs which have been and then also has some forthcoming events in, there is a small section for the breaking news in the world whether that be music relevant or not. This is because I think that the audience that I aiming to attract would find this part of the magazine use full, younger people are never stopping so a small update will be easy to read while on the bus to college, eating breakfast before work etc. I took some photos for the magazine but I thought that it worked better with the single man from the band, because the images that I used were of two people so would not as worked as well, I still used one of the images for the contents page of the different band Eskimo Clan.
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Institution that might publish my product would be Hearst Corporation, an American media company that is privately based in the United States, being one the largest publishing companies in world publishing 14 us titles and over 200 international titles as well 20 titles from the united kingdom. The only reason for me choosing this company over any other is that it published Esquire the magazine that I took ideas from and put them onto my magazine. But then again It could also be linked to IPC the leading UK publishing company “IPC Media produces over 60 iconic media brands, with print alone reaching almost two thirds of UK women and 42% of UK men – almost 26 million UK adults – while our websites collectively reach over 20 million users every month IPC diverse print and digital portfolio offers something for everyone, with a focus on three core audiences: men, mass market women and up market women” because of the content that is inside of the magazine, IPC publish music magazine NME which does really well in the United Kingdom so I think with the mix of the esquire cover and then the content inside the magazine being similar to the NME magazine.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
My target audience for my magazine is going to be mixed gender, aged 14-24years. This is a young audience to aim at but should be easier because I fit in to this band so I know what people want to be reading, seeing because I'm around these people because this is my age group. Therefore the content of my magazine would not involve to much text because people of this age do not want to be reading that much, there will be reviews on latest bands and interviews where we will find out about all the secrets that know one knows making people want to by your magazine to read into them.
5. How did you attract/address your audience?
To attract in the audience for my magazine I researched a lot of different magazines that had already been released, looking for what the magazines, which are successful, do different to and un-successful magazine. There were loads of magazines to choose from but how did I know that the magazine cover had been successful. The main things that I looked for in a magazine were a clear title so the reader would get used to the layout of the magazine and also the layout was simple so would also make it a bit easier.
6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
From constructing this product over around 2 month period I have learnt a few things about the technology that can and is used to create this sort of product. My magazine consisted of very basic skills that I used with Photoshop, which is a Photo editing program released by CSS. This is the only editing programme that I used to create effects on the images I took. For my image of Pat on the front cover I started of by using the magic tool which if you click on the background, depending on the tolerance of the picture. I found out this can be very frustrating as I had to keep changing that tolerance so that it would not cut out parts of the photo that I wanted to edit. Once that I was happy with the line round the edge of photo that would erase the background from the image then I could delete that and check for any bits around the outside that had not been deleted. This is important because there still may be parts of the background on the image and when you drag the photo onto your other canvas then will stand out. So I went round the image with the eraser tool checking for little parts of the background also smoothing of the edges of the photo because some of it looked quite rough. This took some time to get this all how I wanted it to look but I got there in the end. After cutting out the background from the image I was going to have a play around with the brightness, contrast etc after playing around with some of the different settings that are available. I decided to make my images black and white because I thought that it fitted in well with the colour scheme that I used which is very basic.
7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
Looking back at the whole time I have been designing and changing the magazine to get it how I wanted it, one of the big points that I found quite time consuming was the title of the magazine. If you have watched the pitch then you will see that I thought of a name but was soon to realise that I had made a spelling mistake, but thought this could be good because if it is different then it might appeal to the audience which I am aiming at who will generally go for the unusual content. I thought that it was spelt “Dukebox” but you already know its spelt “Jukebox” but decided to keep the name of the magazine, I had already put together a few models for what I wanted the header to look like. The prelim also gave me an idea of the time scale that was going to be needed for the final design of my magazine because Photoshop can be very time consuming and frustrating trying to edit an image. This made it easier because I planned out when I needed to of have the photos taken by to allow me enough time on the changes that I was going to make.
