Feedback 23/11/09

A promising start Joe - but you are a little behind the other students - you need to do more work at home on this blog - and try to be more detailed in your posts/ analysis also.

The first genre you should be analysing is music magazines - outline the conventions and then look at covers, contents pages and feature articles and think about the following questions...

- Do they follow typical conventions of music magazines? If not why?

- Who is the target audience (GRASS) and how have they been made to appeal to them?

- Do they successfully make the audience want to read on? ( Cover and contents?)

- why do they work?

In research you need a little more on audience - who is your target audience (Demographic - GRASS and psychographic profiling - Young and Rubicon) Also how will your product appeal to its audience - use MAslow too.

questionnaires are needed - to your target audience - and feedback on this - charts and graphs are always good!

Go onto the ABC website to find out audience/circulation figures for magazines too - is there a market out there for your product?

Now move onto planning this week - ( see the last two sheets on the 'before you blog' handout) Start your mood boards, rough mock up of pages, props list, shooting schedule etc....

The second thing i had to do for my preliminary task was to design a contents page.

I think the general layout of the contents page worked and i also think how pictures were scattered around the page with no real structure worked as well. The bold headings were easier to see from the rest of the page, which was the idea so to entice the reader into looking at a particular story. The headings are straight to the point as to give the reader enough insight into the story as to want them to read on. I think the humour makes it informal and friendly.

I think to make the magazine look better it would obviously need colour and to have bolder writing. You can see the lines i used to write on and there are no pictures except for a cartoon picture. The writing in some places is hard to read and therefore would be a turn off for readers.

I liked the idea that my cover had a theme (A Spanish theme). I did this by using the colours of the Spanish flag, which are red and yellow and typical Spanish writing fonts. This tied up with the person holding the Spanish dictionary on the the front cover and the sub heading "student wins national spanish prize". The picture shot the library because i wanted the student to seem conscientious and shows the college in a good light, also my shot was in focus. The title 'SMC Today' is to the point and i think catches the readers eye straight away.

However, the lighting in the shot i used for my background picture was not as i hoped, i think the lighting is too dark and the pose of the person isn't exactly what i wanted and she has red eye in the picture which makes it seem less professional and more rushed. Ideally i wanted a shot that didn't have a library in the background. I believe the he sub heading is too hards to read and too small.

I will make sure a do not make the same mistakes with my main front cover.

Preliminary task

Introduction

My name is Joseph McCreadie and i am creating a new music magazine for my Media coursework. It will be based around the Indie - singer songwriter genres and will be for British audiences.