evaluation: addressing audience powerpoint

evaluation: conventions powerpoint

evaluation: institutions

Media institutions are companies that deal with the marketing, distribution or regulation of media products. Many companies do a combination of these things. An example of a company that does this is:     The British Broadcasting Corporation     http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/

The BBC produces its own media, markets its own products and also self-regulates what it produces. The company doesn’t commercially advertise products on their channels but have ranges of DVDs for sale. The BBC doesn’t have a magazine to represent the company itself but it does market a range of magazines that are linked to programmes they show.

  BSkyB                                                                           http://corporate.sky.com/

Sky is another example of a media institution that deals with the production and self-regulation of media. The company that owns sky is BSkyB and they generate a large portion of their income from advertisement.

Bauer Media

Bauer media is a leading publisher and deals with magazines such as Kerrang, Heat and FHM. It is a large company aimed usually at mass market but also has some more specialized magazines such as ‘your horse’.

My magazine is akin to ‘Kerrang!’ so the choice would be between choosing Bauer for its experience in marketing a magazine similar to my own, or choose a different media institution due to the competition that ‘overdrive’ would have against ‘Kerrang!’

As Bauer is a large company, it has a large reach of audience and can pay to advertise my magazine effectively and for this reason I would use Bauer to publish my product. The experience and power of this institution outweigh competition with another magazine. Also, being a high profit organisation, they can afford to take a magazine on such as ‘overdrive’ and pay for its establishment until it begins to make profit.

Negative points of using this media institution are that in the nature of the company having power, this takes power from you the creator of the magazine. Also, being 1 magazine out of 300 means you are just a small part of the company’s portfolio and not the institutions priority.

Bauer media profile:

·         Bauer media is a worldwide media empire offering over 300 magazines in 15 countries, as well as online, TV and radio stations.

·         The company stretches back to 1953 with the launch of Angling Times and the acquisition in 1956 of Motor Cycle News, both still iconic brands within Bauer Media.

·         Bauer Media is a sister company of H Bauer Publishing, publisher of the UK's biggest TV listings, Take a Break and Bella.

Brand potential:
As the magazine ‘overdrive’ covers a large array of genres (within rock and metal)
it could be developed into a brand that could be seen on CD’s, DVD’s and potentially serve as a body to hold award ceremonies and tours. Also, with the ‘overdrive’ masthead being quite distinctive, it could be sold as an emblem on t-shirts, rucksacks and wallets etc
The magazine i have based my product on, Kerrang!, remains the market-leading music weekly with a devoted audience of rock fans driving sales of 60,289. This shows that Bauer has enough experience with this type of magazine to successfully publish and distribute my magazine.

                          

evaluation: progression

Q: looking back at my preliminary task, what do I feel I have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

A: in my preliminary task, the front cover was not nearly as planned as in my final piece. I simply thought of a simple image of a friend on a Christmas theme and took a partially blurred image and overlaid it with cover lines in a standard, default font. I have realised since producing my final piece that one must address conventions at every stage of creating a front cover, contents and double page spread.

My preliminary task’s pages were created using publisher, which is basic software, more suited to creating leaflets and business cards etc. However, the full product was produced on Photoshop, which I had no previous experience of. Photoshop is used by professionals in order to create high quality publishable material (that would include CD covers, DVD covers, promotional material and magazine content)

The key skills I have learnt in Photoshop are: cropping, arranging text, layer manipulation and selecting appropriate fonts to suit audience. With the help of tutor support and my determination I was able to become competent with Photoshop and use this to my advantage.

Another key comparison to draw is to the differences in layout. The layout I chose to use in my full product was more thought through and organised than in the preliminary task. The pictures I included in my full product were planned and many of them were taken in a photography studio. This held another situation where I learned a new technique, as I had to find the right lighting to produce pictures I could use.

Conclusively, in the transition between completing my preliminary task and making my full product, the main thing I have learnt is that time must be taken over a piece in order for it to be of any respectable quality. This is evident as we were given a week to complete the preliminary task and 13 weeks to create the full product. I spent little time thinking about or researching my preliminary task cover or contents and was of considerably lower quality than my finished work.

evaluation: represent

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

All media products portray people in them in different ways. Masculinity and femininity is a big part of this.

All magazines including music magazines generally exploit female’s bodies to sell their issues. I have also an example of this on my contents page:

The girl in this photo is standing in a way that suggests the person who is viewing the image should be drawn to where her hands are placed. There is a covertly and occasionally overtly sexual nature to most female imagery. As the picture is taken at eye height, the girl is not being empowered by the camera angle, but she gives off the notion of innocence, despite metal attitudes.

This picture is theoretically a poster inside the magazine which would serve as like a ‘pin up’ for the mainly male target audience.

This picture quite loudly says masculinity, the clenched teeth and angry brow, wide jaw and piercing stare embody this artist as a very alpha male style ‘leader’ in music with the characteristic long hair. This picture’s connotations are that the man in the photo is who the demographic aspire to be. He is a male stereotype in the same way the cute pose above embodies femininity.

Class:

Even though rock/metal seems more suited to a grungy and less educated social class, metal is not confined to this at all. In fact, it is more likely that Overdrive will be bought by the middle class who can afford to regularly splash out on treats such as magazines. The mainly featured class in my magazine would be middle class, as the people featured within it would be on high wages making them on middle class earnings. This is reflected in the way going to gigs is expected of the reader whereas working class buyers of the magazine may not be able to afford to visit venues very often at all.

Ethnicity:

The imagery in my magazine is entirely of white British people, this was not intentional although it may have something to do with black stereotypes being interested in rap rather than rock/metal conventionally. If I were to continue to publish overdrive magazine I would have an equal mix of races in the magazine to promote racial harmony. Despite these points i believe that the majority of the target market for my magazine is white.

evaluation: target audience

Who would be the Audience for your media product?

The audience for my media product is a stereotype associated with the rock/metal scene. Judging by the stereotype, it is evident why the predominant colour in my magazine is black. Red is also a colour linked to this group. My magazine is aimed at the mass market so it will actually be bought and read by a large variety of people, this may include readers linked to the emo, scene and Goth sub-cultures.

However, my reader profile matching the average reader of my magazine will be:

Aged between 14 and 25 and will most likely be striving to be unique whilst subconsciously trying to adhere to their chosen genre. Overdrive will be read by men and women but the majority of readers will be male. My reader will most likely wear all black if not mostly black clothing. This links in with the attitudes of the sub-cultures that display this style of dress. Bands that he (my target audience) will listen to will be: Pantera, Slipknot and other outspoken, loud bands. People that buy overdrive are most likely to be musicians themselves though this is not the sole reason for buying it. Other interests of potential buyers will be skating as this ties in with certain areas of rap metal and other similar tastes. This can potentially act then as an advertising space for skating based companies and other distributors such as clothing lines and accessories.

As well as skating and biking etc, the typical overdrive reader is an avid fan of bands to the extent where they will spend a lot of time and money going to gigs to see their favourite artists in the flesh.

evaluation: technology

What have I learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

I used much technology to create my final magazine at all stages during its production- research, planning, production and evaluation. I was familiarised with programs and software I had never used before, one of these programs was Adobe Photoshop.

 Whilst using Adobe Photoshop I quickly got the hang of using it. Specific things I have learnt to do are: layer manipulation, cropping, font modification etc. This is very effective software for creating high quality pieces of work.

 

I used a website called surveymonkey.com in my research to find out about colour schemes people associate with rock/metal magazine and how much people value interviews in magazines etc. This was also new software to me and helped a great deal as I was able to gain a large amount of helpful information very easily.

Before doing this coursework, I had only a vague concept of what a blog was or what it could be used for. During this process of making the magazine however, I have got to grips with blogging and am now competent on the subject. Blogging is fast becoming industry standard for media products so that a record can be kept of the progress of a magazine for example. So it is a valuable skill to have learnt.

Photography studio:

In the photography studio I used lighting to achieve the best possible photos. I also had to consider backdrops and poses etc. I feel that more props in my pictures would have been beneficial. I also would have benefitted from a practise session in the studio to get used to it before hand. Overall I really enjoyed using the studio as it was a new experience for me. 

Technology now plays a large part in everyday life and technology’s ability to aid human achievement is growing with every year. I feel that I could have made a magazine without using any technology at all but I feel it makes everything much easier and quicker.

I could have done without using survey monkey.com as the answers I got to my questions were what I thought they were going to be. I feel the Photoshop software was perhaps the most important piece of technology for me besides the hardware of the camera or the computer itself as it is surprisingly easy on Photoshop to achieve professional looking material.

Here is a list of the hardware and software i used in my project:

Hardware:  

Camera – production
Computer- production, planning, research and evaluation

Memory stick- production

Studio lights- production

Software:

Publisher, word, Photoshop cs3, blogger.com, dafont.com, facebook.com, surveymonkey.com, PowerPoint, blackboard academic suite.

Positive points of using technologies such as blackboard, and virtual environments, are that you can access and work on your documents from any computer, making it so you don’t have to carry hard copies of things around with you.

Other positives include ease of use, no artistic skill needed to use a computer; also mistakes can be tweaked and adjusted so they can be corrected easily as opposed to pen and paper.

Negative points of using technology are that files can corrupt and this happened to more than one of my files during the production process. Also, you do need to be at a computer to be able to do work whereas a hard copy can be laid out on any table and can be progressed upon.