Tuesday, 4 January 2011

7. Looking Back At Your Preliminary Task (The School Magazine Task), What Do You Feel You Have Learnt In the Progression From It To The Full Product?


Fonts
As you can see from my preliminary task I have used more of a variety of font sizes in my final task. This adds more interest to the pages. I have also branched out and searched to use more professional looking fonts rather than fonts you would find on Microsoft Word... I found these fonts on a typeface downloading site name 'dafont'. These typefaces give a better appearance to my final magazine pages. I also feel my fonts have been arranged better on the pages, as they look more aligned and arranged better.


Mode of Address
The cover lines and contents in my final task; when comparing them to my preliminary task, are far more detailed which help attract my audience more as it gives more of a detail into the content. Even though  my preliminary task and my final production task had different ideologies behind them ( the ideology of 'REWIND' being to deliver music news to young people and the ideology of 'CLIQUE' to inform sixth form students of school news) I feel it is more effective to have a short but more descriptive description in contents pages and cover lines to act as a lure. Even though in my preliminary task I really liked the original idea to have the page references in clock numbers, I feel that, looking back, this may be unclear to the audience what the page references are and requires them to think when both of my young readerships in both tasks have a short attention span so would prefer a clear, conventional way of presenting page references, which I took on board. The use of sections also gives a clear way of presenting a casual way of speaking to the audience. From my preliminary task, I have still opted for a casual language, with no slang.
Layout
From my preliminary task I learnt that I need to follow flatplans I make, which I did so in my final task. This saves time and allowed me to plan images and a really effective layout which was successful. This was as I could use the space of the page effectively whether I wanted a look of visual clutter or white space. Using photoshop in my final task allowed me to have a better more professional look with the whole, overall pages but especially helped me with the layout. I also did far more planning and looking at real products, which allowed me to relate more to real media products.

Photography
A big improvement I made since my preliminary task was my use of lighting. For my preliminary task I did not consider the importance of lighting, but for my real task I used a real professional lighting setup and a better camera so the images did not have pixels shown ineffectively. I also used natural lighting which was successful as it was at a time of the day where photographs would be successful and could be taken without a flash - which was not successful as you can see from the image of books on my preliminary cover page. I learnt about the rule of thirds, which I used in my final task to attract the eye to the point of interest, I did not do this in my preliminary task. I feel my images were appropriate in both tasks, but in my final task they act more as lures and are more meaningful as they can anchor with specific contents. In my mise-en-scene, I kept that I used the house colours of my magazine in the clothing to add a set theme to the magazines. I learnt how to edit photos by using more than the cropping, contrast, brightness changes in my photo editing. When cutting out the clock in my preliminary task, I had to crop around the edges using a less advanced programme called 'Serif', which was very time consuming and still was not perfectly cut around in the end so I decided to use Photoshop.  I learnt how to use the hue and saturation tools on photoshop which allow me to change the colour of objects by selecting the edges with the lasso tool and selecting a colour ( phone box). I also learnt how to use the lasso tool to cut out objects and put them on a different background, like a did in my album cover in my final contents page. This editing I used to add more interest to the photographs used, as my preliminary task photos lacked editing.
Overall my preliminary task helped me to practice using technology and make decisions about what changes I should make to planning, technology used and  photos taken 

6.What Have You Learnt About Technologies From The Process Of Constructing This Product?

Monday, 3 January 2011

5. How Did You Attract/Address Your Audience?

In order to assure my music magazine would please my target audience, I did some market reasearch to find out what there views were on what they want to see in a music magazine. I conducted a survey using 'Survey Monkey' and put it on 'Facebook' so my target audience would take it I also conducted a questionnaire. This allowed my to see which colours, prices, genres, models, poses, language etc, were prefered so that I could cater for their needs.
To create a magazine you need to know your target market back to front in order to sell, so I created a reader profile showing what my ideal readers tastes are and the majority of gender and average age etc.
After I made a draft of my features page, I presented it to a small focus group of my target market to see if what I was creating from past market research was pleasing for my target audience. I was then given feedback in order to improve my features page. This was useful as my potential readers could give me their opinion and I could learn from this.
I feel the unique selling point of my magazine is that it is well priced, has a variety of genres and uses a unique house style consisting of more bright house colours of blue and red, and steering away from the classic, red and black music magazine house colours; this makes it appeal more appeal to a . I think my magazine is similar to 'Q' magazine, but uses a mode of address that is more suited to a younger audience, has a cheaper price so is suited to a younger audience making it individual in the market.

4.Who Would Be The Target Audience For Your Media Product?

3. What Kind of Media Instituation Might Distribute Your Media Product And Why?

2. How Does Your Media Product Represent Particular Social Groups?