Making Tweaks To My Creative Pieces - Double-page-spread

Making Tweaks To My Creative Pieces - Contents Page

As you can see I made some tweaks to my magazine contents page after hearing the feedback from my target audience. I made the word 'win' more obvious and bigger as this is a feature that will draw a lot of the target audience to the magazine.

14th March 2016

I have now finished half of my AS media journey. It is now onto the theory side of things! I have had a lot of fun creating my media product and I hope to be able to progress even more next year to get the best grade possible. The best part of this coursework has been finding out about the media industry and how magazines make money. So, by bye for now but I will hopefully be here next year to create some more media products for the A2 part of media studies.

Evaluation Number Seven

https://goanimate.com/videos/0cjTWO2-Y1fc?utm_source=linkshare&utm_medium=linkshare&utm_campaign=usercontent

This is the link to my evaluation answer number 7. If this does not work the content is written below.

 

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

Firstly, the preliminary task has been very helpful in the process of creating my music magazine. I have used it to gain skills, experience and confidence in the programmes that I ended up using to perfect my final media product. It has also taught me about the importance of market research and how the conventions of a magazine catch the attention of the target audience. I didn’t know how many common characteristics that there are on a magazine until I started the preliminary task. Some of the most important conventions of a magazine include the masthead and placement of it; the central images and how the central image is anchored (usually by a cover-line).

It was only until I had carried out extensive research that I was able to produce a contents page that was more than just eye catching with a list of content. As you can see, I would not rate my preliminary task contents page at all compared to the final product; however, it was by doing this preliminary task that I was able to see my errors and change the way that I was doing things. The aim of the preliminary task was to produce a school-based magazine with a mock-up contents page.

The first thing that I did was carry out a photo-shoot with a chosen model; I chose my brother as he fit the target audience that I had chosen for my school magazine. The outcome of the first photoshoot that I did for the preliminary task showed me that I needed to concentrate much more on the background of the photos that I was taking, as they were mostly the back of my garden which made it hard when it came to editing the picture. I made my brother wear school clothes to add to the mise-en-scene of the photo; as the pictures that I had taken were on an apple phone, they did not come out in the quality that I had expected, which led me to updating the camera that I used to a lumix in the main tasks.The fonts that I had used on the school magazine cover now look to me to be boring and dull, with little or no variation to them. This defiantly changed as I progressed through the course as I managed to download some new fonts specifically for my magazine cover, that would attract my audience. I then realised that the reason my school magazine was looking so poor was due to me not doing enough research into the magazine industry and the conventions.

The contents page for my preliminary task proved to be very disappointing whilst looking at it now as I do not think that I had the knowledge to make a decent looking contents page. Luckily for me, I conducted more research into contents pages that I liked and gave me inspiration so that in the final contents page, I had enough skills and knew enough about the variety of contents pages, to create one that I was proud of. The contents page for my school magazine just ended up being a mere list of articles that were in my magazine and did not has any visual satisfaction to the reader whatsoever.I did not use any typical conventions on the school magazine that I made which would have made it very hard for the reader to be attracted to reading the rest of the magazine. This taught me that in the final contents page I needed to use more images of the main article in the contents page and split up the text into different sections to make it more exciting for the reader to look at; in addition to this I also used callouts advertising competitions in order to engage the target audience which will entice the young audience who are on a budget.

I did not use any typical conventions on the school magazine that I made which would have made it very hard for the reader to be attracted to reading the rest of the magazine. This taught me that in the final contents page I needed to use more images of the main article in the contents page and split up the text into different sections to make it more exciting for the reader to look at; in addition to this I also used callouts advertising competitions in order to engage the target audience which will entice the young audience who are on a budget.I did not use any particular colour scheme in my school magazine cover making the magazine look a bit messy and there did not seem to be any sort of organisational structure whatsoever. Luckily, I noticed this when I had finished the preliminary task, because it then lead me to include in my questionnaire what sort of colours my target audience would like to see on the magazine. I then decided to use a primary colour to attract the target audience. In addition to this I used many of the magazine conventions that I had learnt from the preliminary task to make my final product.

In conclusion, the preliminary task gave me the basis for progression and allowed me to learn from my previous mistakes and act upon them. I now know that in order to produce a professional looking image there is a need for layout and planning in a photo-shoot, including considering booking the perfect photography venue, planning out the shots, camera angles and how you are going to represent the model in a way that the target audience can relate to.

Evaluation Number Six

Evaluation Number Five



Evaluation Number Four

'Who would be the audience for your media product?'

To fully understand who the target audience would be for my magazine I carried out a questionnaire on a few people of different ages. This helped me to get a rough idea of what kind of things the target audience would like to see in the magazine and roughly what ages liked what types of thing. I have decided to aim my product as teenage girls aged 17-20 as these are the types of people who would be able to relate to my magazine the most. This is the ideal audience as the images in my magazine are of teenage girls at the age of 17.

The girls that would often read my magazine would enjoy keeping up with the latest trends through clothing, music and common interests with her friends. They would be typical teenagers that like to gossip about celebrities and this is why in future magazine issues I would include some celebrities to draw in the audience even more.