My Final Products

For my AS Media Foundation Portfolio Resit I have redreafted all of my products from my music magazine.

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

Evaluation Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Evaluation Question 3: What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Evaluation Question 4: Who would be the audience for your media product?

Create your own user feedback survey

Here I have created a survey with 5 questions about my music magazine, it includes questions that could help me further improve on my magazine, with things like if I need to add more feature stories or add things that would adjust my stereotyping of my audience to make it better etc.

This is the email I sent to the students that took my original survey.

Evaluation Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience for your media product?

Specific details that will appeal to my audience:

The plug on my magazine will appeal to my audience because my audience is young (14-21) they may all be interested in the proliferation of brand new digital technology, presuming to include Apple devices like the iPhone 6S which is the newest piece of hardware Apple released. 

This is the skyline of  my front cover, I included some of the most influential indie/alternative rock bands at the moment, I feel that this will also appeal to my audience because they are fairly current  bands and popular with the indie genre fans at the moment.

I put these social media examples into my contents page in order to appeal to my 14-21 year old audience, this would be effective as social media is extremely popular with the younger generations and even some older generations.

Furthermore the use of featuring current, popular bands in the indie/alternative rock genre may attract the fans of these bands and encourage them to buy, however I also featured older bands that aren't in the that popular with the younger portion of my target audience as some of the 17-21 portion of my target audience may not listen to or like the newer, more popular bands, an example on my magazine's contents page would be the cover story "Kings of Leon, the greatest?" and "White Lies as special guest on KoL tour". One thing I could've improved on is putting bigger names on the front cover of my magazine as this could have appeal to people more than a smaller less well-known band would.

In order to find out what my audience likes and what they wanted to see I conducted an survey and posted the questions and results on one of my blog posts entitled 'Content Questionnaire', I also recently conducted another survey this one more as a sort of audience satisfaction survey to find out if the people I asked originally liked and were satisfied with the content of my magazine.

Here are the questions and results of my audience satisfaction Survey:

Another thing I did in the making of my magazine was look at other magazines to model my magzine around, this appeals to my target audience of 14-21 year old people interested in indie/alternative rock because it will be similar to that of the magazines I researched, NME and Q. I used similar bands that often appear on the magazines e.g Kings of Leon and Arctic Monkeys, I thought that this would be especially effective because NME and Q are very popular magazines so if mine resembled that of these magazines and feature similar bands and stories it would appeal to more people that like those magazines, these magazines also have very large audiences so a magazine similar to these would automatically have quite a large possible audience. 

Evaluation Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

I have used a lot of technology in the production of my music magazine and a lot of hardware and software in order to create and to edit my products as well as I can/have. I have used the Haiku Deck presentation software to display this technology.



Technological advances for me. - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires



Other examples of technology that used are memory sticks for sorting my files, and transporting many of the images into my main products. With the Sony 1200D I used 8GB SD card, for storing the pictures I took. When editing my front cover, contents page and double page spread I only used the PC's in college as they were the only devices with Photoshop, I also found them easily accessible in terms of transferring images from my SD card to my product, as other computers throughout college didn't have SD ports for me to do this.

This is an Polygonal Lasso Tool that I used when cutting around all of the images on my blog in order for them to look more realistic to conform to conventions of real magazines by making look like they're actually printed on the magazine instead of them having little bits of the background of the picture.

This is the spot healing brush tool, I used this tool to clean the images up so that my model doesn't have any blemishes at all, which is a convention of all the magazines I looked at to make the audience want to look like that person on the cover.


This is the drop shadow effect window, I always selected 'normal' in the drop down menu at the top in order to match the same colour and textures for everything that I used the effect on, I would then set the opacity which effects how dark and prominent the shadow is and the distance, spread and size of the shadow. I stayed away from the noise as turning it up made it more grainy an unrealistic.



Another technological aspect that I used and learnt about in the production of my music magazine was the the lights in the green room, I used the various different lights in the green room in order to make my pictures as good as possible, learning how to light up the black and white screens without excessive shadowing, which actually came in handy as I would be adding a more effective drop shadow effect in Photoshop anyway.

In this whole project I have used my 8GB USB stick to store all of my Photoshop files on, this has been the main way for me to transport all the files in working on different computers around the college, (April 2017 Re-Submission)  it also contains my planning and research on it which has allowed me to work on my post material any where in college or outside of college as I have also used my HP Laptop to open such files like the Microsoft Office programs to work on posts that I had later posted on my blog 

Another technology that I used in this project was my iPhone, although I don't have examples of this, I used it to communicate with Max, the model for my music magazine by using iMessage I would message him about what costume he had to wear and what time that we were doing the shoot.

Evaulation Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do your feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full prodcut?

What I have learned:
From the beginning of the year doing my preliminary task of making a college magazine to now; finishing my music magazine, I feel that I have learnt a lot. The first thing i feel that I have learned is the conventions of music magazines and how many there are actually are, I feel that this has help me with a lot of things in this module including a lot of my posts especially in LIIAR analysis and my evaluation. Another thing I have learnt is that i can work to deadlines to finish a certain amount of posts, I feel that before the start of the task I wasn't that good at keeping time and meeting deadlines but with the amount of work I have improved this and balanced my work at the same time. I also learned how to use Photoshop in this process.


What I have developed:
I strongly feel as though I have developed my Photoshop skills quite a lot from the start of the year editing my college magazine to now and doing three different types of pages, I have gotten better at using certain tools like the polygonal lasso tool; used in order to make my images neater and look more realistic on the page to further the authenticity of my magazine, the spot healing brush tool; used to clean the images up so that my model looks flawless which is a convention of all the magazines I looked at to make the audience want to look like that person on the cover. Finally, I used the drop shadow effect quite a lot in producing my front cover and contents page, however I did not use it that much on my double page spread. The drop shadow effect makes the feature stories on my front cover and contents page stand out, it also makes it a little easier to read. With images this tool also gives a realistic shadow, this was useful with the picture of my model as putting a shadow behind it makes it look as though it was actually been taken on that background and not just on stuck on the magazine.





























Another thing I feel that I have developed are my time management skills meaning I have generally kept on top of the work for this module and my posts have been fairly up to date all the time. Finally, I have improved/developed my photography skills as I took all of the shots in the magazine myself around my college, I used the green room in order to get the best lighting for my main image and the image used on my double page spread.

What I would change: 
If i had to change anything about the process of making my music magazine it would probably be going back to plan the actually written article on my double page spread, I feel as though it was a tad rushed. The next thing I would change if I could go back is that I would purchase the Photoshop software that is on the computers in college as I often wanted to get on with editing outside of college, I feel that this would have put me to advantage as I would have been able to finish the products faster. The final thing I would change if I could go back is going back to when I was shooting my model for my front cover, I used a bass guitar as a prop, but the as seen on my front cover the bass guitar is not plugged in and I feel this looks rather unrealistic and shows that I have just taken photos of my model posing holding a prop bass guitar.

Why the preliminary task was useful:
The preliminary task was useful to me for a few reasons. The first of these reasons is that it gave me more chance to go over the conventions of magazine and just what I can include in my magazine in order to get good marks and target exactly what my teachers and the examiner will look for. Secondly, I also feel as tho the preliminary task allowed me to was get used to using Photoshop, through already having a magazine template for my preliminary task I could follow what I had already created but change - into the style of my music magazine - and make it better through editing it sufficiently to match the conventions of the magazines I looked at to model my magazine around i.e. NME and Q. Next, the use of the camera and green room prepped me for the music magazine project because doing that made me more confident in my photography skills when being told that I had produce at least 4 original pictures to display in my magazine.

What skills and knowledge I developed in order to produce my music magazine:
As stated above I developed my skills and knowledge on Photoshop as producing my college magazine I even unsure about how to open a new page on Photoshop as I was unsure of the sizes and paper to type in, however I now know and am able to use different aspects of Photoshop with great ease. I also developed my use of the cameras I used when taking my photos of my artist, bands and equipment that I featured in my magazine, I used a Sony 1200D camera.... (April 2017)  in the green room of my college, I wanted to use this camera because I wanted the best, clearest image for my magazine and in my opinion I got just that; this also meant that it was easier to make my picture look better on my front cover as it wouldn't be bad quality and harder to cut out, the lighting rig really helped in this situation again meaning there were no shadows on my model like there was on the picture that I used as the main image on my google mock up music magazine (https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4898738924969108064#editor/target=post;postID=2477400553078494069;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=21;src=postname) making it look more realistic.

April 2017 - AS Media Foundation Portfolio Re-submission

From the time of producing my college magazine to the time of completing my music magazine I feel like my skills had changed quite a lot, I started to learn the conventions of music magazines, especially from the indie genre, examples of this would be the way I place the masthead in front of my model in the main image on my college magazine, after my research and planning I found that it is more conventional to put the mast head behind the artist as people already know what magazine they are buying, what they want to know is whats happening in this issue and who is the main article about and hiding this feature behind the masthead isn't going to help catch the consumer's eye.