1. Evaluation Question 1 - In what
ways does your media product
use, develop or challenge forms
and conventions of real media
products?
Jodie Allen

2. Research
Before beginning the planning of my magazine I made sure that I knew
a lot about current music magazines, I done this by analysing the
covers of music magazines, the contents pages and double page
spreads of the magazines, I done this so that the music magazine I was
going to create would look professional and be able to represent some
factors of a real magazine.

3. Masthead
The masthead of a magazine is one of the most important points, as this is one of the boldest points of the front cover.
When buying a magazine the audience look at the masthead as it can have different connotations, the magazine masthead
needs to represent the genre of magazine and the sub genre of that magazine, for example, as I found in my research,
different types of music magazine have completely different looking mast heads, such as pop magazines, with young
teenage girls as their audience have different mastheads to rock music magazines which have a target audience of male
adults. However, both of these types of magazines have bold and eye-catching mastheads.
This is a magazine front cover which I have
not analysed, the colours of the masthead
are bright, meaning that no negative
connotations are given as there is a
positive feeling which comes from white
and yellow, it also connotes that the rest
of the magazine will be brightly coloured.
If the target audience, which for this
magazine is young teenage girls, are
browsing for a magazine a masthead which is bold will catch
their eye and intrigue them. The mast head is in a large font
which is very noticeable and takes up just under a quarter of
the page, on this particular magazine the mast head is
covering the main image, however on other current music
magazines
This is my front cover, I did not want to use a font which
came across as too serious as I was creating a pop
magazine which needs to relate to young teenagers and I
thought that a font which did not have fun connotations
would not be a good idea as the magazine would then not
have fun connotations and it is not
likely people would find the mast
head appealing. I felt I needed to use a
large font with my masthead as the
main image covers a lot of the mast
head.

4. People
The people in a magazine is also one of the most important points of a magazine, especially in a music magazine, the target
audience for my magazine is young teenage girls and therefore I have used the same age group and gender in my
magazine, this makes my magazine easy to relate to. I have not used any real celebrities in my magazine as they would not
be my own original photos, therefore I took my own photographs and made the images look as professional as I could, I
used a friend to pose as a new celebrity, I allowed her to wear her own clothes and as she is 14 this fits in well with the pop
magazine as she is only slightly older than my target audience and is relatable but still someone the audience can slightly
look up to. I think this has a similar convention as pop magazines because most pop magazines have a similar target
audience to my magazine and use celebrities only slightly older than the audience.
Mise en scene
The only mise-en-scene I have used in my images is the costume, the outfits I have used in
my magazine are a teenagers day-to-day type clothes to represent her age and give the
impression to readers of the magazine that she is just an average teenager like they are and
hasn’t changed the way she dresses and looks because of becoming a celebrity, giving the
chance for the young girls, who are stereotypically very effected by the media and easily
impressionable, to relate to the ‘celeb’. The location I used for the images was a room with a
plain coloured wall as it made it easy to remove the background of the images and made
them look more professional.

5. Written Content
Instead of featuring a story about the new ‘artist’ in my magazine I wrote an interview, The interview started with an
introduction of telling the readers of the magazine who is being interviewed and what the interview will feature, this is so
that the audience do not have to start reading the article before finding out what it is. All current magazines use
introductions to their articles. I have written about a problem my ‘celebrity’ has faced as I think that this would be relatable
to and that the readers would enjoy reading about this as they can sometimes feel like they do not relate to celebrities. I
have written my magazine in a context that will suit my target audience, I have done this my looking at other magazines
and taking notice of the fact that they do not use language which is too complex or too simple for the audience. I also used
pull quotes across both pages of the article as a pull quote is extremely effective to the readers as one larger part of text is
very eye catching, the attention goes to the pull quotes and the reader then wants to know what the pull quotes are
referring to so will then continue to read the whole article.

6. Double Page Spread
It is not often that magazine double page
spreads have a completely white
background, however I wanted to use a white
background in my magazine as I feel it gives
the page a fresh look and is quite unique. I
split the text side of the page into three
columns as all professional magazines use
columns for the text. I wanted to use a classic
layout for this page and therefore I went for
using the image on one side of the page and
text on the other. I used the main image of
my model looking down towards the text/the
secondary image. I used this image as it links
to what the article is about. In the top right
hand corner of the page I used a ‘download at
itunes’ image as it links my magazine to
technology and relates back to the target
audience as it is a stereotype of the audience
to use a lot of technology.