Evaluation

Final Magazine

Process: Removing The Background

 This is a video presenting how I was able to remove the background from the images I took of my model Vanessa. In this example, I removed the background of my cover image on Photoshop, using a selection of various tool inluding the 'Magic Wand Tool' and the 'Eraser Tool'. As you can see, it was clearly very easy to do and proved to be beneficial for the duration of my project. The skills I have learnt on Photoshop will also help me in the future with other media related products and similar software.

Final Cover Comparison

 These are further improvements I made of my music magazine front cover. In my 'Cover Drafts' post which I posted before, I presented the transformation of my cover page - from my sketch version to the third draft however I made it clear at the end of the post that I still needed to make improvements in order to create the best cover I possible could. These are two final drafts of my magazine cover with the absolute final version at the bottom. You can see that even after many versions of my cover, I still continued to make significant changes whether it was the font/size of the sell lines, adding extra sell lines, making the image bigger or even changing my magazine's name. As I have mentioned before in my production dairies, when improving my magazine I changed many of the serif fonts to sans-serif fonts which you can clearly see from the two images above. I also created the sell line 'Free Lawson Poster Inside' which I personally believe is another sell line that can attract my target audience. Overall, I am now happy with my final front cover even if it required many improvements and a variety of different ideas.

Production Diary

01/03/14 - Finishing My Project

 Today and over the past week, I have been constantly improving my magazine and finishing off my evaluation - this includes copying my answers to the questions in a magazine format and adding pictures of where I got my ideas from, what software I used, comparisons and extra pictures of my model . I am also making sure every other post is complete and up to standard. I have also made a post of my audience feedback to show what they liked about my magazine and what I have also done to improve it in order to create my final draft magazine. Overall, I am now happy with my completed magazine as I think it looks realistic, interesting and represents the indie genre well.

Audience Feedback

 This is the feedback I gained from my target audience who assessed my magazine and told me what they thought were the best parts as well as what I could improve. These results were from a survey I created on the website 'Survey Monkey' where my audience answered questions about my magazine. I then took the responses on board, carrying out any final improvements I could to make my magazine better plus creating this survey was also an opportunity to present what people thought about my product and how successful it might be.

Production Diary

20/02/14 - Final Touches To My Magazine

 As it is leading up to the deadline date, I have been focusing on how to make my magazine look as professional as it can. I have done this by looking at all of my survey responses I have collected from my 'Audience Feedback' survey over time and also taking into consideration my teacher's feedback he gave me before.
 Some of my improvements included changing some of the fonts from serif fonts to sans-serif as these are more common in magazines. I have also made some of my images and pull out quotes larger in order to change the look/layout of my magazine because this was one of the main aspects my audience touched on that I needed to improve. Furthermore, I have also added more box out texts to separate some of my article's text and to make it look more like a realistic and interesting magazine.

Production Diary

15/02/14 - Creating My Evaluation

 During this week, I have started to change the format of my evaluations into something a bit more interesting. Personally, I believe the best way to do this would be to make my evaluation in a magazine format similar to my actual music magazine. Therefore I will include the same type of fonts, colour scheme and extra pictures of my model I took in my photo shoot. I think this is a good way to organise and present my questions about how I have created my magazine and my ideas throughout the project.

 I have started to create my evaluation on InDesign (the same programme I created my magazine as I have already learnt how to use this programme efficiently) and have started off with a simple cover including a large picture of my model I haven't used before as well as a masthead and a main sell line. I then moved onto the contents page where I made the text bigger than usual to fill up the whole page about where the different questions are in my evaluation magazine.

Production Diary

07/02/14 - Collecting Audience Data

Penultimate Version

Production Diary

30/01/14- Adding To My Blog & Improving My Magazine

 This week, I have continued to organise my blog by adding more posts such as my 'Cover Drafts'. I thought it was appropriate to create a PowerPoint showing the transformation of my cover page from my sketches to the various different drafts as I changed my ideas a lot. For example, I was unsure how to lay out my sell lines as well as being unsure about my cover image. This PowerPoint explains why I have changed my ideas and displays all the other ideas I had (including the selection of images).

 I have also continued to improve my magazine, for example I finally added some social media content to my content page. I added a way my audience can get involved with my magazine via Twitter and Facebook and also added both logos so my readers can clearly identify with the opportunity. I have also started to include headers and footers on each of my double page spreads to make the overall page look more interesting/more typical of a real life magazine.

Cover Drafts

This is the transformation of my cover page including my sketches and previous ideas. As you can see, my ideas about my cover page have changed a lot, yet this is still not the final draft as I feel there is still room for improvement to make it look more like a realistic music magazine.

Image Manipulation/Process: Before and After

 

These are two of the images I used on my third double page spread. The original images were in colour however I edited them in my magazine to make them look more original. On my double page spread, I include five photos of my model with the second and forth image being in black and white to contrast with the other images in colour. I managed this effect in Photoshop by first of all removing the background and then turning the image black and white. To remove the background, I used the magic wand tool and to change the colour I went onto the layers section to create a new fill or adjustment layer. I then selected black and white. I found removing the background the hardest task because of the way my model’s hair was styled – this meant I had to go in between the gaps to remove any excess background.

Production Diary

 
21/01/14 - Organising My Blog

This week, I continued to improve the posts on my blog as well as creating ones I hadn't yet posted. I made sure each blog post had the appropriate label such as 'Audience' or 'Research' and added any relevant information to explain each of my posts.

I also created another survey aimed at my target audience, asking what improvements I could make and what they liked best about my draft magazine. I personally think I still have a lot to add and improve so I will consider all comments and feedback that I receive. Personally I think it is important to contain some sort of social media that my audience can use to get involved with my magazine so I will add this to my contents page.

Audience Feedback Survey

Click here to take survey

This is the link to my survey that I will use to gain feedback from my target audience about my music magazine, including what parts of my magazine I could improve and what parts they liked best. I will send this survey out to my friends and my fellow media students who can give me their own range of ideas as well as constructive criticism and feedback. I will also interview people about my magazine as part of my feedback so I can ask them my own questions face to face.

Chosen Images

Production Diary

04/01/14 - Completing My Evaluation

 During the holidays I have been working on my evaluation as well as improving some of my blog posts and overall keeping up with my blog. For my evaluation, I have completed all seven questions in draft form and plan to edit them later on. I made sure all my answers were lengthy and included as much information as possible to explain why and how I made my music magazine. I also had to research some magazine companies and publishers for some of the evaluation tasks as well as looking back at the equipment I used and comparing my preliminary task to my final magazine.
 After I had completed my evaluation I continued to add other posts onto my blog. I made sure I added my sketches and wrote about them - explaining about what I drawn and I also added the first draft copy of my magazine. At this point, I can see a few improvements I can make so when it comes to posting my final draft I know my final magazine will look significantly better however at the moment I am happy with what my first draft looks like.

Evaluation Draft

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression

from it to the full product?

Since my preliminary task, I feel like I have learnt a lot on how to successfully create a magazine. For my preliminary task, I created a magazine for my school which included a cover page and a contents page. When I created this in September, I created a simple magazine name, used a main cover image and sell lines. However now that I look back at them I feel like I could improve them so they looked professional. At the time, I didn’t take into account the type of font I was using or the size therefore I feel as though the layout didn’t look right, especially on my cover page. However for my music magazine, I took into account the layout and tried to make it look as professional as I could by the selection of tools I used on InDesign. The guide lines and columns helped me achieved this however I failed to use these for my preliminary task.

 Although I thought the contents page for my preliminary task looked much better than the cover page, I still feel my full product looks a lot more effective and more like a realistic magazine. This is because the overall look and different conventions I included were more suited to my audience such as the headings, the editor’s note and the wide selection of interesting images. Even simple things such as the font and house style made my final product look better therefore my overall progress was more recognisable. I’ve learnt about what is typically seen in a music magazine and while researching my audience I have considered what I will include in my own music magazine. I felt like I considered my audience a lot more when creating my final product as this is shown through the type of style my music magazine is.

 During this project, I have also gained a lot of skills on how to use particular software and what to expect when creating music magazines. This is because I used a wider variety of tools in my final product such as learning how to create different paragraph styles, how to change the style of the text and also how to wrap it around images. I feel this has given my final product an overall more professional look; making it look more like a realistic magazine. However, during the making of my preliminary task I didn’t change the style of the text as much, keeping it quite basic and simple. I didn’t include any different paragraph styles and when it came down to the layout, I kept everything very simple.

 For my preliminary task I also feel the images I used weren’t very interesting and the different shots and angles weren’t taken into consideration as I didn’t think they were important. On the other hand, now I realise that having a good set of images plays a big role into the production of your magazine and are one of the main aspects when looking at how realistic and successful your magazine is.  For my final product I also used a much better camera, allowing the pictures I took to be in seen in high quality on my music magazine. This wasn’t the case for my preliminary task however as I used the camera on my phone, rather than using a professional camera that is vital to use in photo shoots for real life magazines. Without  a doubt, the images I took for my final product were much more entertaining as the facial expressions and clothes my model wore were very unusual which helped engaged the audience more, unlike the first set of photos I used for the school magazine.

  I also planned by music magazine a lot more than my first school magazine I produced. I was given a lot more time to organise and think of interesting and new ideas that I could use in my final product. In this time I was able to draw rough sketches of what my final magazine might look like, come up with different name ideas for the magazine using different name categories and think of my own colour scheme that I would use for my house style. All of this made it a lot easier to create my final magazine instead of having to come up with lots of random ideas on the spot without much time and thought.

Another skill I gained was researching real music magazines, whether this is researching the cover pages, the contents pages or the articles. For my preliminary task I failed to do this therefore my end result looked very unrealistic. Yet, when I looked at magazines such a ‘Q’, ‘NME and ‘Kerrang’, this helped be a lot when starting to think of ideas for my own music magazine. This way I was able to think of a similar layout and style and also make sure I included every type of convention that was necessary to create a favourable looking magazine.

 In conclusion, it is clear that I have made a lot of progress in both the planning and the making of my final magazine and you can see this by looking at the differences between my preliminary task and my final task. This obviously was helped a lot by researching my type of magazine as well as the various skills I learnt throughout the project. 

Evaluation Draft

 6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?

 Throughout the making of my magazine, I have mainly used the software Adobe InDesign as it is much quicker and simpler to use than Photoshop. At the beginning, I created a simple template on InDesign with the help of the guide lines which I used for columns throughout the different pages of my magazine. As I went on, I started to fill this template in with my own ideas for the content. Creating the basic template was very easy. As soon as I set up the page, I used the shape tools to create boxes and then filled them in with certain colours with the specific editing tool at the top where you could choose what colour you wanted from the options or indeed find your own. On InDesign you could also save specific colours that you wanted to use again as colour swatches. This helped me with the house style of my magazine and also made it easier to click my colour instead of having to find it again. These boxes that I made for my template would later be images which I would choose and edit. I also created text boxes for where my text would go; again the columns and the guide lines helped me.

 When I later placed my images and text in, it was extremely simple. All I had to do was go to ‘file’ then press ‘place’ and choose my image I wanted in the boxes. Placing the text in was just as easy; all I had to do was copy and paste the text I had written in the text boxes and if there was any leftover that didn’t fit, I could simply put it in the box beside. On my front cover I also used the shape tool to act as a border for my names of different bands I listed. On InDesign it was also easy to change the size of the text as well as move it up or down and side to side. I found this particularly helpful when creating my sell lines as I wanted some parts of text to be bigger than others or more spread out. For my specific magazine, I also created a paragraph style that I could use on my contents page and for pull quotes. Creating this would simply put a red line under my text if I selected it however if I didn’t want it to appear I would simple click the normal paragraph style option. This was a much faster way to design my magazine, especially my contents page instead of having to make a new red line for every page.

 Software I also used for my magazine which I used a lot before during GCSE was Photoshop. I used this for editing my chosen images and removing the backgrounds of them so there wasn’t a white box surrounding my images. I edited my photos by airbrushing them and adding effects to others. For my last double page, I used black and white images of Vanessa and these were accomplished in Photoshop then placed into InDesign. Although Photoshop is ideal for editing my images, when creating my entire magazine I feel as though InDesign was much more useful and quicker.

 The hardware I used was the equipment I used during my photo shoot. The camera I used was a Canon SLR camera as this took high quality photos which would later make my magazine look more effective and professional.  When I was taking my photos I could also adjust the focus to blur out the background and make my model the main focus. I also used lighting during my photo shoot and changed the positions of the lights depending on the type of shots I took. All my photos were taken against the white screen to make it easier to edit them later on. 

Overall, it is clear that InDesign is very beneficial to use as many popular magazines use this Software when creating their own media products. Using this type of technology will also help me design and create other media related products later on plus the different effects and short cuts I have learnt throughout this project will make my work easier and quicker.

Evaluation Draft

5.         How did you attract/address your audience?

 Personally I consider my target audience as one of the main focuses of my magazine as this will ensure whether or not my magazine will sell. I used different features within my magazine to attract my audience and made sure I did this successfully by looking back at my survey results to see the certain features and aspects of my magazine that people would like to see. I made sure the people who took part in my survey were as similar to my target audience as possible by getting my friends to take part and also posting it on my twitter. I feel these types of people will have the same if not a fairly similar style to my audience and also listen to the same type of alternative and up to date music.

 As I mentioned in my last question, the model that I used for my cover page and my main article will be a big selling technique for my product. Not only does she persuade males to buy my magazine as she is attractive, she can also be a role model towards females through her style and confident approach. This will therefore cause my audience to buy the magazine, especially if I use quite unique and eye catching images throughout and on the front cover.

One of the features I thought was important to include in my magazine would be reviews. I feel these will play a big role in persuading my audience to go ahead and read the magazine, therefore making readership statistics higher. From reading reviews, my audience will gain a wider knowledge in different bands and artists, perhaps impressing their friends and helping them decide on which specific gigs and festivals to attend. This in particular will help my audience build relationships with their friends and maybe even family as they can go on to tell the opinions and suggestions expressed in the reviews to help them choose which concerts they can all attend plus making the reader feel they are more aware of events taking place within the music industry. This also makes reviews a perfect source of information for my audience.

 On the front cover, my magazine will also contain a list of artists. I feel this is also a great way to persuade my audience to buy my magazine as from my research; my survey results show many people would want this as a sell line. The list of artists presented which will then be included in my magazine gives the reader an exclusive insight to what they may expect. I also believe including a fair amount of different bands will further make the reader more interested as they may see more than one of their favourite artists. However, seeing a particular artist they haven’t heard of may also make them intrigued so therefore make them want to find out more about the musicians they have no yet heard of.

 Competitions will also play a massive role in the selling of my magazine. These will attract and address the audience personally as the type of my prizes that will be on offer in my music magazine will be tickets to a range of festivals. As my target audience enjoy going to festivals and taking part in these types of events, this type of reward will be ideal and many of my readers will enjoy taking part for an opportunity to win. Every time these types of competitions are presented in my magazine, there will always be two of more tickets on offer, meaning they can take their friends who have the same music interest as them along. This can further help build their relationships as they can both attend the festival together.

 Throughout my magazine, I have also included various opportunities for my audience to reach and contact my magazine through the use of new media such as different social networking sites like facebook and twitter. I feel my target audience in particular use these sites on a regular basis therefore attracting my own audience through these will be a successful way of promoting my magazine. On these sites my audience will be able to leave their own comments and opinions as well as find out information about the release and content of the next issue. In terms of the uses and gratifications theory, my magazine’s own facebook page and twitter account will supply my audience with information such as ways to enter competitions, who the next cover star will be and a summary of the next issue. I feel both these sites are also a fantastic way for my audience to interact with my magazine so they feel more involved so overall new media is another way to address my audience personally.

 Moreover, using new media I will also have an own app for my magazine that my target audience will be able to access available on all smart phones and tablets for a small price. This app will allow my audience to read some of the main articles included in my magazine and a small preview of the cover star’s interview. This will therefore persuade my audience to go ahead and buy the magazine themselves if they like what they see. Also in the app, there will be quizzes and competitions for the users to take part in. This will be about the music industry and any current or upcoming bands. This is again an excellent way for my audience to get involved plus challenge them to see if they really know their music. Furthermore if they get a good score, it may make them feel good about themselves – this could act as a persuasive tool, therefore making them buy and read my magazine. I think this will attract my audience as people within their age range will most likely own a smart phone or tablet and will be able to take part in these activities on the app. I also feel my target audience lead pretty busy and hectic schedules so having an app they use while they are travelling or ‘on the go’ is ideal. This app will be mentioned throughout the pages of my magazine to make my audience so my audience are aware.

Overall, mentioning the uses and gratifications theory again, my magazine will attract my audience through personal relationships. This can be by discussing the magazine with people who have the same music interests or indeed attending festivals together when winning competitions. My magazine can also help my audience build their own personal identity as they may feel the music they read about and the style they see presented from the different artist and music bands in my magazine can help them shape themselves. They may aspire to be like these artists and even see them as their role models if they reflect similar values to their own. Through entertainment, my audience may enjoy reading the magazine as it is a way to escape their real life worries temporarily therefore they will continue to buy the magazine to create this type of enjoyment. Information also plays a big role in my magazine as I have already discussed, through reviews and different features that give out lots of detail. This could be gig listings or features about a range of artists.