2. To attract my audience I mainly adhered to the
cliches of the genre, using commonly used texts,
and photography styles. The high contrast black
and white was inspired by the early album art of
bands like Darkthrone and Burzum, although I was
limited by shutter speed affecting the lighting I
could photograph in. The audience studies showed
a preferred reading was taken, and the genre was
quite recognisable as that of extreme metal.
3. Evaluation of research
• My research seems to have been
reasonably successful, as my magazine
seems to have fulfilled its purpose as
an extreme metal magazine. It has the
correct looks for example the
medieval style text was one that many
audience members approved of, I
recently noticed its actually one of the
texts used on the cover of
Darkthrone’s Panzerfaust album. This
homemade effect actually work quite
strongly in my favour when making my
magazine, as it’s a defining feature of
the black metal genre, and done
deliberately as a rejection of the
mainstream over produced direction
metal was starting to take in the early
90’s, as before then it was very much a
live music scene, and the records were
considered less important.
4. • I felt I was successful in attracting my target audience.
When I showed my magazine to a mixed group of both
metal fans and non fans. Both of groups found it instantly
recognisable as a metal magazine, and the metal audience
was able to pinpoint the specific sub genre being targeted.
The similarities between my magazine and other metal
magazine were recognisable in some areas, but the sub
genre of black metal as far as I know is far more of a word
of mouth genre and a specific magazine targeting it is yet to
be made. In this way I challenged some of the conventions
of the standard metal magazine by making it more niche
and specified. However it succeeded in recreating the very
rough and ready deliberately simplified production values
of black metal, for example the simple black and white high
contrast photos, and the forest photo’s used on the
contents page.
