The document summarizes the ways in which a student's music magazine project uses, develops, and challenges conventions of real music magazines. The student abbreviated the magazine title to attract younger readers, used rock imagery and articles on the cover and throughout to represent the rock genre. While some layouts were inspired by research, other elements like the simple front cover design challenged conventions. Overall, the project both followed and manipulated conventions to create an original student magazine focused on appealing to teenage rock fans.

1. Media AsMedia Coursework Evaluation

2. In what ways does your music magazine use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real music magazines?

4. Masthead.

5. My MastheadThe full name of my title is Radical Rock Republic. What I have done is abbreviated the first two words to RR. I feel this works really well because now I can just write RR and it gets instant recognition. I used the words Radical because it stimulates that extreme effect, I think this will make the magazine more exiting. I put the genre I am focusing on in, being Rock, this is to make it easy to find and save confusion or any complication. I thought having the third word as Republic as almost a secondary title. I thought this would be a good choice because it almost creates a label for the group that would read the magazine, “a republic”. I used this word as the title for the contents page and I feel this is a cleaver way to separate the magazine and thus being able to spread out into different media groups, like websites, TV etc. In this sense it challenges the real media, such as Kerrang! Who have manipulated there title in different ways depending on there media exposure. I used the font stencil that I found in Photoshop as the title. It served very well, I liked it because the letters are in capitals and bold, the style will attract the younger generation, which is the ground I am aiming at. As you can see I changed one half of the letter R black, this was to create a starting point that shows some sort of contrast, more to the point it fits in well and looks good.

6. Ideas from ResearchThese two mastheads were my biggest influences when creating my own. As you can see New Musical Express have abbreviated there heading to NME. This is really quite a good idea because not only is it catchy and memorable, but it also creates a persona for the brand and it can easily be used to promote and expand on the company itself. I liked Q’s logo because of the colour scheme and the way they use a box. By having the box it fits nicely in corners and so there is always a placing for the masthead on the magazine, this allows the audience to instantly know what and where to find the magazine on a shelf (for instance). I tried to combine a few of these qualities about these two. Although I didn’t produce a visible box, I allowed my abbreviated masthead to fit I with back ground by using the separation line as a focal point. All in all I took ideas from my research and developed them to suite my plan. I think this worked out really well.

7. Mise-en-scne.This is the first photograph of my magazine. It is the main image and background of my cover. As you can see the mise-en-scene of this image follows the conventions of real music magazines. You can see the subject who is playing drums, which is a rock icon, it is a true action shot, with the model starring into the camera expressing emotion. This is what you would expect with a rock magazine such as Kerrang! or Scuzz. Another point to take in is the correlation between this image and my title. I feel the word Radical really goes hand in hand with this photograph.

8. This is the final front cover, and you can see I have cut my image out of the white back ground and replaced it with a gradient. I blended my image in, by partially changing the colour of the drums, this creates a rustic rough effect, like on you might see in a real music magazine. The fact I kept the composition simple, might challenge one of those from a real music magazine, because normally they are packed full with photos and explosive texts, This is a front cover of Kerrang! There are a lot more images and there is no visible background. However you can see the similarities such as the banner at the bottom and the labelling of the main subject.

9. The same idea applies for the rest of my magazine, the mise-en-scene constantly represents my genre of music and the subject. It is all very connected as well, which you would expect from a magazine. For example you see someone playing a piano in the middle of my contents page and directly to the right there is a brief description advertising how to play the piano. At the bottom of the page I advertise links on where the audience can follow us on, here the mise-en-scene changes from music to networking.

10. Costumes and props.The costumes and props I used for my photo shoot are very conventional. Jeans and rolled up sleeves are very expected for a rock band. On the props side, it is exactly the same, I used drum sticks and instruments. These are all icons for the genre rock and I feel this was executed very well in my project.

11. People.I only used one model for my photograph’s. I emailed him and he accepted the request. I chose him because he looked like one from a new age rock band, white, tall and skinny. The clothing choice was all relevant to his body type and suited him very well. I feel this is also quite conventional to a standard rock magazine. However no make up was used and this might have been something to consider if I were to do this again.

12. Written content.My written content is very conventional and definitely goes hand in hand with a real magazine. You can see the similarity from the banner at the bottom. So from that perspective it is very conventional. The whole magazine follows as a real one should. In the contents page the headlines are short and catchy. The double page spread is also standard magazine writing. I found this quite easy to do mainly because I read magazines on a regular bases, not to mention the popularity of them, because they are advertised everywhere. So the research didn’t really help in this part.

13. Music Genre.Through out this whole evaluation I have been constantly referring to the relevance of my genre, being rock. The title of the magazine contains the word Rock. And all through out the, including the photographs are all related to my genre. The musical instruments are one of those to create rock music and textual presence backs up this information. Another point to pick up on is the colour scheme I used. When you think of rock music you think of the colours red and black. These are the main colours I used through out, to try and keep the feel and continuity in my magazine.

14. Layout.I got a lot of my ideas for the layout, from my research.You can see the similarity between my contents page and the Drummer contents page. I haven’t copied I have just used part of the layout in my work. In this sense I have followed the convention.

15. This is my front cover and as you can see I have gone off on my own a little and haven’t followed the conventional way, but more challenged it. However there are still some elements which are similar, like the placement of the masthead and having a main photograph that has been labelled on top with text.

16. This is my double page spread and again I have challenged the conventional way and didn’t really get much inspiration from the research. I think mine worked out really well and I tried to keep it simple and easy on the eyes.

17. Conclusion.Over all I have challenged the conventional way, but also followed it. In some aspects I have used my research to gain ideas and then manipulated into my own work, this was good because it kept to the realised but still being able to keep original. I probably struggled the most on the contents page and so I followed a lot on what real magazines do. In the end I paid off I feel and by having to extents works well and allowed me to succeed in my media product.

18. How does your music magazine represent particular social groups?

19. This is the cover of my magazine and straight away you can see and state what type of social group I am trying to appeal to. The props and costume give of a musical feel, narrowing down – a rock scene. The model I have used it a teenager and he is the icon that represents the age group I am trying to present to. So by putting all these different elements together I narrow down to the social group I am after. The lighting and location are not very important for what I have done because I have focused more on the image and textual input to display my target audience.

20. What kind of media institution might distribute your music magazine and why?From researching the different institutions that distribute magazines I have come across the two that I would consider approaching for my magazine. They are Bauer Media and IPC Media. The reason being is they both produce rock magazines and in that sense they both support my genre choice. This would allow for a common point and would be easy for my magazine to fit in, mainly because there is such a mass market for my genre. However the down with Bauer Media is that they distribute magazines such as Kerrang! And its fine to have a similar genre but I think the competition would be high when it comes to the target audience because Kerrang! Also focus’s on the younger audience. Then there is IPC Media, who distribute NME and the difference with this institute is there target audience is of a much older age and thus there would defiantly be a niche in the market for my magazine. So I would have to go for IPC Media as the distributor for RR Republic.

21. Who would be the audience for your music magazine?In the research stage of my project I set up a questionnaire to find out information from my target audience. I focused on asking both male and female teens between the age of 16 and 18. As you can see from the pie chart my audience defiantly preferred Rock. This was a good start to my project because I knew my target audience would be interested in my genre.

22. My target audience would be ones that were interested in the genre of rock music, through my research I found this was primarily teenage males. They would be of the middle class and this would also effect where I would sell the magazine and at what price I would sell it at.The pie chart shows that the majority of people would comfortably spend £2.00 on a magazine.I would consider selling my magazine at places like Tesco’s and local shops as well as online and in student library’s. By doing this I would be targeting the places where my audience would be. By having the magazine price set quite low, I would be able to get more frequent customers because students don’t often have much disposable income and so if I set my price high, not many students would be able to afford it. This would compromise the magazine because it is not aimed at the elder generation.

23. How did you attract/address your audience?There are several things that I did with my magazine to address my audience. As a start I chose a specific font for the mast head because of the look and appeal. The font is called stencil and it is very bold and stylish. As my target audience flick through the magazine shelf they will see this and the idea is that they are interested in it.The next thing you will notice is the age of my model, he is young. This is designed to create relevance to my audience, so they can feel a connection between them and the magazine. Finally the colour choice. What you will notice is that it is very bright and bold. I have done this intentionally not only to fit with my genre being rock but also to create an eye catching look that will attract my target audience.

24. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?These are the programs I used for this project. I used Adobe InDesign and Adobe Photoshop to edit and create my magazine its self. I learnt a lot from these two programs, such as cropping out images, changing the exposure, contrasts and levels. Also creating different backgrounds to your taste such as the colour and gradient. They were very useful programs and a lot more advanced to say something like Microsoft publisher. Finally I used Microsoft Publisher to view all of my work. I used this because I was able to convert these files into my blog. Slideshare is a website that I used to convert my PowerPoint presentations so they could be viewed on my blog. I had to create an account but after that is quite straight forward and despite a few errors it seemed to work well. Blogger is the website I used for my blog. I again had to create an account, but I got the hang of the lay out and was able to import my Slideshare files.

25. This is the tripod and camera that I used for my photo shoot. I took the images to use for my magazines. Because this is my equipment I was able to use it well and being a photograph student also help me achieve my goal.I used a tripod to create a sturdy base for my camera so I could take good quality shots and this also allowed me to change the shutter speed to create some good effects, such as the drumming.

26. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

28. I definitely learnt a lot from doing my preliminary task. By doing the preliminary task I was able to learn how to use the programs such as Photoshop and InDesign. It also allowed me to test some ideas out. I found my colour scheme by doing this. As you can see the red is the same in both and so is the white, however I added the shades of black in the real magazine.You can also see the improvement on the front cover with the bottom banner. The second one looks more professional and is more simple and sleek. However for the contents page I almost like my preliminary better than the real thing, I think it is something to do with the layout. I like the clock and how it rolls of the masthead, its nice on the eyes and flows really well.Finally the masthead on both contents pages are similar because I experimented with the preliminary and I found it worked really well. All in all I feel as though this project went really well. I really enjoyed using all the different programs to create my magazine. Doing all the research took quite a long time, however it seemed worth it in the long run because I looked back and was able to gain ideas for my plan. If I were to do this again I would give my self more time for each task and have better forward planning.