FINAL EVALUATION

Final Evaluation

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

My product develops and challenges forms and conventions of real media products in many ways for instance I researched many other music magazines preferably

R n B, which was my specific music genre. When doing my research I realised that many of the R n B magazines where quite colourful, bright, eye catching and they all had a specific colour scheme such as the ones below. I noticed that most of the magazines used the colour rule of three which made the magazines stand out more to me. With my magazine front cover, I decided to use green, yellow, and black with a hint of white, just like Blender magazine decided to use yellow, black, and blue with a hint of white. I decided to use theses colours because I felt that they worked well together and was not too plain and not too over the top at the same time.

My aim was to try and create my front cover similar to other media products so that the audience knows straight away that my magazine is an R n B magazine and there is no confusion with another genre. By doing this I had to pay close attention at certain aspects from a magazine such as the layout, organisation, contents, cover lines, and images.

The first stage of my magazine was to take a photo for my front cover. Whilst researching R n B magazines I realised that the images were quite sexy poses and the outfits were very minimal in some cases, and in others maybe topless men. Sweat dripping off Trey Songz body on Vibe magazine could connote many different ideas such as, he might have just gone jogging and began to sweat, but the water dripping all over his body signifies a sexual act in this context. Following the typical conventions of this genre I had to make sure that my photo would reach this expectation. First I had to find a model that I thought would best represent my theme. I decided whilst taking pictures for my front cover, that I should also take pictures at the same time for my contents page and double page spread to make it much easier and save time, so I decided to change the outfits around.  Whilst taking my photos I thought about mise-en-scene, the lighting, the makeup, the scene and the composition. One of my photos that I took was inspired by Britney spears’ video next to the schools lockers in school uniform. I decided to take some of my pictures with the school lockers behind it because it could connote to many things such as, the artists worked hard to be where she/he is today or it could symbolise that you can be what you want to be in life and study at the same time.  

Here are just some of the photos I took.

Here is a brainstorm/list of all the words that the public has come up with when talking about R n B music.

Sexy

Fashion

Nakedness

Revealing

Talented

Cool

Stylish

Fresh

Love

Romance

I found a website called http://www.dafont.com/  that had many different writing styles and fonts to choose from. Below is a print screen of what the web page looks like. I found this website very useful because it had a wide range of fonts to choose from. After experimenting with different fonts, I finally chose my font which is called Devil Breeze. 

I chose this font because it reminded me of the Vibe magazine font which is also an R n B magazine, so I thought that the audience would be able to connect with the product more. I tried to design my product similar to other real music magazines by using similar language such as free downloads, tips, gossips and latest albums and reviews. I thought that if I used this type of language then I would be developing and challenging forms of conventions of real media products.

For help when creating my final draft for my contents page I decided to look at Vibe magazines for inspiration and for me to develop my ideas from this source, so I bought and looked at many examples such as the ones below. I focused on the layout and positioning of the text and images and their purpose in relation to each other. I really liked the way that the images overlapped each other and looked neat at the same time as well as organized. I also liked the way that some of the images where bigger than others and had different effects on them. Another thing that I liked was that the writing was mostly on one side rather than all over the page and the colour scheme worked well with each other and was quite colourful for an R n B contents page.

My media product develops and challenges forms and conventions in many ways, for example, I decided that it was important that my colour background stood out and was colourful due to the fact that I never wanted it to be plain because it may have looked like a gospel magazine; not R n B which are usually very colourful and bright. I also wanted to develop the knowledge that I observed from the Vibe pictures, so I edited some of the pictures that I took for my contents page. The first four pictures are the original; the last four images are the final which I used for my contents page. Some of them are only slight arrangements and others I more or less kept the same.

I used Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 to help me create my photos for my contents page. I decided to add boarders around 3 of my photos that I took. Here are the outcomes.

I decided to add boarders around some of the pictures to make it stand out and lift up from the page. I challenged the layout of the vibe magazine contents page by adding fewer images whilst overlapping them. I designed my layout similar to Vibe contents by also adding most of the texts on the left hand side.

My media product develops and challenges forms and conventions of real media products in a number of ways. When doing my research in double page spreads I have to say that I found it much harder to create and find specific media products that I found interesting for R n B. I used Google to help me with some of my research but it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, so I decided to have a look at other students’ media products for help and inspiration that were in my position. I made sure that I looked at a variety of genres for even more ideas. Here are the ones I looked at. There were certain aspects of each double page spread that I liked, some better than others. I chose to look at this magazine in particular because it stood out to me because it looked simple but effective at the same time. The thing that caught my eye first was the bold writing in white that said ‘The Queen of UK R n B on finding her voice, and feeling exposed’. I decided to add ‘THE QUEEN OF UK R n B’ on my media product to remind the audience what my genre is.