Evaluation

1. Evaluation of my media product Liam fisher

2. In what ways my media product uses, develops or challenges forms and conventions of real media products & How my media product represents a particular social groups? My media magazine is targeted at teenagers that are at college or starting to work, so 16 to 18 year olds; this may be reflected in the price which is £2.50 this is cheaper than average music magazines as many are not priced below £3.00. This challenges the convention of most music magazines, although I think the price is suitable as the the target audience may have to rely on funds from parents however according to the audience feedback it still seems to cheap for quality and amount of content it offers. I also challenge key conventions by targeting both genders and a variety of music types this may be seen by the use of colours that range from black and white to purple and blue. The majority of music magazines do no do this, for example kerrang is a rock magazine and as such the target audience is older males. I have followed many key conventions of magazines such as the headline, price/bar-code, logos and the free posters (on the front cover) although my audience feedback said that my front cover looked a bit bare, I have added more content and I think it now looks more like a real magazine, also the crowded looking contents page filled with approximately 4 pictures and a lot of text each accompanied with page numbers. The double page spread has a main title and introduction then filled with three columns of text and the main image overlaps onto the other page these are also key conventions, I used these as I think they work well. The language that I have used is common to 16-18 year olds such as slang, although it does not include the swearing as I believe this to be a stereotypical view, I have also targeted this particular age group by picking the main feature band that is of the same age also I have included other bands on the contents page that would typically be of interest to them. Overall in the whole magazine the amount of text and the amount of images is almost equally balanced this is so that it is suitable for all people. I have also used a title that will mean things depending on which side of the targeted age group they are on this can also be a play on words as the name 'AWE' may be seen as a shortened version of awesome but also it may be interpreted to represent big artists and stories that the audience may be in 'awe' of.

3. The kind of media institutions that might distribute my media product & How my product attracts/addresses my audience? Institutions that may distribute my magazine would be colleges as the magazine is appropriate to the age group and both genders, it also covers a wide range of genres of music this makes it more likely to be popular as many magazines only cater for one gender and limited genres. Larger institutions that may publish and distribute my music magazine are Bauer consumer media as they distribute and publish Kerrang and Q also future plc who published metal hammer. My magazine is rather like Q that covers a large amount of genres and because Bauer already publishes Q they may be a gap for future plc to rival Q with a magazine like mine. My magazine attracts the audience using highly contrasting colours i.e. The black and blue on the front cover this is one of the factors that is attractive according to my audience feedback also other things that attract my audience are the free posters and feature bands of the magazine which give the reader an idea about the genre of magazine and also it makes them want to look inside. The magazine has many pages and is cheaper than other magazines although it still manages to remain the type of monthly magazine that readers would collect, this is shown by the attractive front cover and the thickness of the magazine which makes.

4. What I’ve learnt about the technologies while constructing this magazine To create my magazine I have used a large range of technologies and software. I have learnt how to take photographs in a more suitable way to represent the magazine as well as how to edit them further using programs like G.I.M.P, by doing this I edited the content to fit better into my product. To arrange and edit the pages I largely used publisher which helped to organise writing in columns and also arrange the amount of images and text into and attractive layout. While doing this I have also learnt how to use blogger to a greater extent by using polls and questionnaires to get audience feedback, blogger is also useful as it saves partially finished work so that I can go back and finish it or edit any finished product, this means that I do not loose any work and is also a useful because I can directly upload my photographs and images. I have also used the website da.font to help create my magazine logo as well as band logos as it allows the user to enter desired text that is displayed in a variation of different styled fonts. Other internet tools I used were poll.com which ultimately mad it easier to create polls with ease.

5. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? Looking back at the previous task I believe that I have acquired a better idea about what looks good and realistic on a magazine. For example the layout of font and images on pages make my current media product more realistic when compared to the magazine in my preliminary task I have actually used more cover lines to help fill the page and a headline to advertise as well as the magazine logo. This is also visible with the contents page as the colour scheme I have used stands out more and represents the magazine identity like the genre and target audience where as the previous task I used a colour scheme more purely because it was attractive to me. Overall I think that I have learnt how to effectively represent the target audience in a professional way.