Evaluation 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation 1 on Prezi

 The title of the magazine

For the masthead of my magazine I used a font from the Dafont website and then changed this in order to suite my magazine. This made it make look distinguished from the main image, and would hopefully attract readers as it is coloured in red. Further more, I made the masthead have a black border which many real magazine do such as NME. The use of my colours follow magazine conventions because they continue to have a the same coloured scheme of red, yellow, blue, black and white throughout the pages which I felt was important.

Mise-en-scene of images, costumes and props  

I have followed codes and conventions by using one person for the front cover in a medium long shot looking straight at the camera. However for the double page spread, I challenged codes and conventions where I kept the background of the mise-en-scene of the forest where as most real magazine will take out. The costumes and props used throughout “INDIvidual” are conventional. This is because the band in my magazine wore costumes which included a leather jacket and guitars. All of these items could be found and are commonly used in real music magazines. I wanted each of the models in the band to have their own identity which relates to my magazine.

Title font and style

My font choice was reflected throughout my magazine because I continued to use the same type colour scheme, which was red, blue yellow, black and white; in order to create a sleek and professional look giving my hous style. I created the title “The Wombats” by using a brush tool in Photoshop and then adding a drop shadow to it. The title is conventional in the sense that it has the largest font size on the page, apart from my masthead, and it’s bold and I coloured it in yellow to make it stand out even more. In addition to this, the way the title has the slightest of rough on the edges is similar to real music magazines like the ones I analysed at the start of the project.

Written content

The written content of my magazine follows the codes and conventions of a real music magazine by covering similar topics in the article. Similarly to other music magazines, the article promotes The Wombats new album which is the main feature in my magazine and also explained more about what we can expect in the coming months and how the album unfolded. This follows magazine codes because many readers will purely read an article to find out when an artists next piece of work is scheduled for release. I included exclamation marks to emphasize certain points. The contents has a few words which I feel only the young generation will understand and get what the lead singer is talking about which I hope will appeal to the audience.

Music genre and how my magazine suggests it?

The music genre for my magazine is the Indie genre hence the title ‘INDIvidual’. I included many artists from that genre such as The Joy Formidable, The Vaccines, Everything Everything, Arcade Fire and many more to appeal to as many young people as I could. I followed a number of magazine conventions when I thought about genre. Props were vital for my magazine, and I felt that I followed conventions of the Indie genre by using guitars, different style in clothing and facial expressions gave a sense of cheekiness to  members in the band. I feel that the use of Red, yellow, black and white colours, the wording of the title and the mise-en-scene emphasizes that ‘INDIvidual’ is an Indie magazine. Real music magazines suggest their genre by the mis-en-scene of their images and the bands included, therefore my magazines follows the codes and conventions.