Questions 1, 2, 3, 4 are due in on March 24th.
Questions 5, 6, 7 have to be answered by April 11th The ultimate deadline date is 22nd April
evaluation is worth 20% of the final mark
research is worth 20% also
People's blogs to looks at Chloe Allenby (Group D1) 92% (20/20 research, 60/70 product, 19/20 evaluation)
Daniel Taylor (Group B)
Beretta Swift (Group D1)
On the right is my preliminary task (College Magazine) cover and on the left is full task (Music Magazine) cover.
Conventions
Photography
Mise en Scene
How would I further improve my Preliminary Task?
To further improve my preliminary task I would add more Mise en Scene to the image to make it appeal to the target audience and I'd improve the photography by using studio lighting and not just the built in camera flash. I'd experiment with different colour schemes to see if any looked better. I'd also make the text more legible.
At the end of this interview I received some feedback from my target audience.
I also used other software in the planning and evaluation of my media product, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Powerpoint; as well as online software including (but not limited to):
Prezi
Slide Share
Google Slides
'Full Page Screen Capture' - Chrome Plugin
Blogger
Survey Monkey
YouTube
Adobe Premier Pro
Quicktime Screen Recorder
I made a few screen recordings of some of my photoshop work which you can see below:
Photoshop I used photoshop to edit my images because I was already quite familiar with the whole adobe master collection because of my job. Photoshop is also the industry standard image manipulation and (along with Adobe Illustrator) graphic creation. Although there are alternative free versions to photoshop, such as Paint.Net and Gimp, I used photoshop as I already had access of it at both college and home, and in my opinion it's a better software with more features. One of the first things I learnt was about how to set up a page for print in Photoshop. I learnt that when creating a new file, I needed to set the preset to custom, and the size to 210mm x 297mm, which matches the aspect ratio of A4 (1:1.414). I learnt that I then needed to change the resolution from 72 pixels per inch (PPI) to 300 ppi. Although this does mean that the file size is increased nearly 20x its original (from 1.34MB to 24.9MB), it's important to do this as a lower resolution would not be sufficient for printing. Higher resolutions on the pictures used to create the magazine cover, coupled with the industry printers, the colour tones are richer, there is more depth and detail to the picture and it's less pixelated. The reason Photoshop uses a default 72 ppi is because most computer screens display pictures at this resolution, so for things like online media, this is perfect, as it's detailed enough to be crisp on a screen, without the file size being unnecessary and wastefully large file size (which in this case would take up server space and/or slow the loading of the web page that the photo is on). If I kept the resolution at 72 ppi, when the magazine is printed the reader would be able to see grain, fuzziness and the actual pixels that make up the image, which would look extremely unprofessional and unattractive to readers. The industry standard for printed media (including photos, magazines and posters) is 300 PPI. I had to set the colour mode to 8 bit RGB, which again is the industry standard for print media. I set the background as transparent to save a bit of time during the creating process, and also remove and bias a totally white/black background might cause. I needed to leave the Colour Profile and Pixel Aspect Ratio on their standard settings because the default selections are suitable. I also learnt some short cuts in photoshop that I didn't know before, for example:
Shift + CMD + N Creates a new layer
CMD + Shift + I inverts a selection
CMD + D deselects a selection
CMD + T allows you to resize, rotate and warp a selection
There's many more shortcuts I learnt, but I won't list them all. You can see in detail all of the editing methods I used in the video above in the video, including the use of almost every tool, 3D effects, shadow effects, masking, puppet warp, and a lot more.
Here's an example of one of the edits that I did for the magazine:
I went through a lot more in-depth step by step analysis of the different things I did within photoshop to create my Google Mock up on the Google Mockup page.
I learnt to label layers, to use layer masks and to put layers into folders to help organise them and speed up my workflow.
Apple Aperture and iPhoto
I used iPhoto and aperture to quickly import, sort and do minor edits on all of the photos I took on the photo shoot. I found it easier to use these two softwares than to import and sort all of the photos manually within folders on my laptop. Using these programs helped speed up my workflow and really helped later on when I could search for different shots using previously added keywords. Camera I used a Canon 600D camera to shoot most of the pictures on my magazine, although I did use my iPhone camera for some of the test and live shots. I found that the main problem I had during the photo shoot was not getting the lighting right, I'd never used photography lighting before (although I had quite a bit of experience with setting up and controlling Theatre lighting from when I was in a production tech crew) so the lighting is quite obviously off in many of the pictures. You can see on the picture above of my three models that the exposure and lighting was far too low, this meant that the quality of the photo was dramatically decreased. The photo looks noisy and out of focus and unprofessional - I corrected this as best as I could in photoshop, and I'm actually really pleased with the end product, because if fits with the scrap-book, amateur sort of look I was going for with me magazine. I started by setting up the camera and shooting area for the double page spread shot. We used two lights, one with a red gell and one with a blue gell, and positioned them precisely. Here's what our setup looked like. I used two different coloured light to the left and right of the model to create a contrast between the two sides: For the cover shot, we used a three point lighting setup, I think the problem was the aperture and exposure on the camera were wrong, and the lights were too high.
This setup was the way I achieved the studio shots:
Canon 600D specs and why I chose to use it instead of my iPhone.
Sensor Resolution
18.0 Megapixels
The high megapixels means the photos can be printed out largely and not lose any detail or quality. They can also be cropped down and still be printed at the highest resolution the printer offers. It's also easier to Photoshop high quality, more detailed photos.
This is better than the iPhone camera, which is 8.0 Megapixels, which is why I chose to use the DSLR. I used the iPhone for draft shots as it shoots in lower megapixels, so the photos that weren't going to go on the magazine, but were to help me plan, would take up less memory.
Image Recording Formats
JPEG, RAW, RAW + JPEG
Being able to shoot in raw means that the photos aren't compressed by the camera. When you take a picture on the iPhone for example, it's compressed from 14bit/16bit to 8bit, whereas shooting in RAW format keeps the photo's data at 14/16 bit. This means that the photo is much higher quality, and it's much easier to edit it in the future on programmes like Photoshop. A downside to this is the fact that it takes up over 3x the amount of space as a normal file format.
The iPhone does not offer this file format, which is another reason why I chose to use the DSLR to shoot my images. I used the iPhone for draft shots as it shoots in a more compressed file format, so the photos that weren't going to go on the magazine, but were to help me plan, would take up less memory.
Lens
3 x zoom lens - 18-55 mm - f/3.5-5.6 III Canon EF-S
I used the 18-55mm Canon kit lens to shoot most of the photos on my magazine. I chose this lens because it has a good focal length, can view up to a 74 degree angle - which is ample for the shots I wanted - and has +3x optical zoom. Unlike the iPhone lens, the Canon lens's focus can be manually adjusted, this means I have more control over what's in and out of focus when I'm taking the pictures.
The iPhone lens doesn't have an optical zoom, so I didn't use that as zooming in would mean decreasing quality a huge amount (it would be the same as cropping the photo as it's a digital zoom), whereas the DSLR lens has an optical zoom, so no quality is lost when zooming in.
View Finder
Optical
The Canon 600D has an optical view finder, this means that even in high light situations, I can still see what the photo is going to look like, unlike on the iPhone where the light would make it hard to see what's on the screen. The canon also has a digital screen that can allow me to view my taken photos and what I'm about to take, meaning it beats the iPhone again. One positive of the iPhone is the screen is a higher resolution, meaning the previews of the image would be more crisp. The Canon screen is also only 3", whereas the iPhone 6+ screen is 5.5" HD retina screen.
Weight
570g
Just the camera body weighs over half a kilogram. This makes it quite immobile and hard to carry around. On the other hand the iPhone 6 is just 129g, making it much more portable and easy to carry about. This is one of the main benefits of the iPhone over the DSLR. I decided to still go with the DSLR as the majority of my shots were taken on a tripod in the photo studio, so I didn't need to worry about carrying around a large camera.
Here are some of the ways that I attract and address the magazine's audience on the front cover
On of the main ways I address the readers in the magazine is on the contents page with the 'Letter From the Editor.' This is clearly addressed to the readers has the function of creating a personal connection between the magazine and the reader. The readers are addressed in an informal, friendly way to further strengthen this personal connection. This is important as it helps promote customer brand loyalty.
The audience for my magazine were both males and females mainly aged 15-21, but the magazine is appealing to all ages above 15. The magazine is aimed mainly at students (about 50%) and ABC1 (about 50%). My magazines main audience is similar to that or Kerrang:
As you can see, Kerrang's reader profile is very similar to the reader profile of Savage, my magazine.
To find out more about the sort of people my audience would be, I did a survey of 10 questions (3 demographic and 7 psychographic).
The first thing I noticed was that almost double the amount of females took the survey then males, this showed me I should be aiming a lot of the content of my magazine towards females, but have content that males can also connect with as a third of the readership would be males.
I did this by having quite uni-gender aimed content, I chose bands to feature in my magazine that are popular with both boys and girls.
Over half of the people that took the survey were 16, with none under 15, and a few 17, 18, 19 etc. respondents. This shows that I needed to aim the content at people that are older teenagers, and feature issues and situations that older teenagers may find themselves in. In order to fully captivate my audience I needed to have content that appeals to them, some ideas I had were to include:
- More mature music (rap etc.)
- Artists talking about when they were teenagers
- Free concert tickets - Fashion in the Music Industry - Information on Tours
The average income for a British family with two adults working is £40,000 a year (Source). The average (midpoint mean) of the respondents of the survey is £55,000, which is £15,000 above average. This shows that my readership would have, on average, more disposable income than the average population, meaning that advertisers of normal (as a pose to inferior) products would be interested in advertising in the magazine, and also the readers would probably be better educated and higher up in Socio Economic Grouping (ABC1)
100% of the respondents told us who their favourite artists were, showing that they're passionate and loyal to their favourites. I put the results into a spreadsheet, and through the use of a scoring system and algorithm I ordered the submitted bands and artists in order of popularity amongst my respondents.
You can see the full list of responses in order of popularity on the spreadsheet midway through this page.
On average people's top 5 favourite artists/bands were:
Arctic Monkeys (Indie Rock / Post-Punk Revival)
Bring Me The Horizon (Metal Core / Punk)
Vaccines (Indie Rock)
Oasis (Rock / Brit Pop)
Halsey (Electro Pop / Indie Pop)
So looking at the genres of people's favourite music, Rock came up three times, so did Indie, and Punk came up twice, so I based my magazine on Punk Rock in order to attract the majority of the readership to my magazine. A magazine that features these best is probably Kerrang, which as shown in Question 5, is the second most popular magazine amongst my respondents, followed by NME, which features these genres in it's magazine (but does not specialise in them). In terms of gender, the top bands/artists are predominantly male - but in my magazine I'd like to have a mixture of all of the top 5 artists in order to appeal to the most potential readers. I asked 20 of my friends (10 boys and 10 girls) if they saw two magazines, one with a female rock/indie/punk artist and one with a male rock/indie/punk artist on the front, here were the responses:
Artist
Gender
Male
Responses
Female
Responses
Total
Female Artist
4
3
7
35%
Male Artist
6
7
13
65%
So, as you can see by the responses of this sub survey showed that the overall possible readership would prefer a female artist on the front of the magazine, which interestingly juxtaposes with the favourite artists, this could be because of an array of different reasons, like sex appeal for men and women relating to the female artists. From the information I got from this mini-survey, I'm created a band, 'Paralel', which featured a female lead singer, and two other male band members.
The most people (nearly a third) use iPhone. And none of the respondents said they didn't have a phone, this shows that my readership is 'Tech Savvy' and part of the teenage technological generation. This showed me that I needed to include a website in my magazine, and I also created a website, so that my readership could read the magazine online instead of buying it, which is increasingly going out of fashion:
The results I got from this were:
Brand Name
Description
Frequency
Android
Technology (e.g. HTC)
1
Now TV
Online Film and TV streaming
1
Apple
Technology Brand (e.g. iPhone)
9
Fossil
Clothing and Accessories
1
Nike
Clothing and Sport Accessories
3
Doc Marten
Shoes
5
TopMan/TopShop
Highstreet Clothing Shop
5
Zara
Highstreet Clothing Shop
1
Hollister
Highstreet Clothing Shop
1
New Look
Highstreet Clothing Shop
1
Vivienne Westwood
Designer Fashion
1
River Island
Highstreet Clothing Shop
1
Converse
Clothing and Accessories (shoes)
4
Urban Outfitters
Highstreet Clothing Shop
1
Samsung
Technology Brand
2
Levi
Clothing Brand (famous for Jeans)
1
Pretty Green
Clothing Brand and Store
3
One True Saxon
Clothing Brand
1
Adidas
Clothing Brand
2
Vans
Clothing Brand (Famous for Shoes)
4
Macbeth
Shoes
1
H&M
Highstreet Clothing Shop
1
We Are Cow
Vintage Clothing
1
Asos
Online Clothing Shop
2
Fred Perry
Designer Clothing Shop and Brand
1
Ralph Lauren
Designer Clothing Shop and Brand
1
Drop Dead
Designer Clothing Brand
1
Asylum Industries
Emo' Highstreet Clothing Stop
1
Sony
Technology Brand
1
Bellfield
Designer Clothing Brand
1
So the most popular brands were:
Category
Brand
Technology
Apple
Shoe Brand
Doc Marten
High Street Shop
Top Man/Top Shop
Clothing and Shoes
Vans/Converse
Other popular brands were Pretty Green, Nike, Samsung, Adidas and Fred Perry.
I've created a mood board for the responses:
I've tried to include as many of the brands that my responders said they liked so that I could make an accurate mood board from my possible readership. This shows the sort of products the audience of my magazine would be interested in,
The mode was 2, and the mean (average) was 6 (5.85) and the median was 3. Some people say they went to 'too many to count', one responder said '40' (I found the person and they said that they went to 'a gig in Hull almost every week, at Adelphi, Früit or another music venue'). This showed that a majority of the readership like live music, so articles, adverts, competitions and other content about music venues, music festivals, upcoming tours etc.
With this information I could conclude that the majority of the audience of my music magazine are very into music, and interact with it physically by going to gigs and live events to see music.
The average for this was £120 (£117.60) The average for this was a lot higher than expected, so thinking it was an error or anomaly I found some of the people the answered my survey and asked them why the amount they spent was so high. It turned out that due to the way that I worded the question ('how much did you spend last month..') and it turned out that people had a lot of money during the month of September because of a few reasons, firstly a lot of people had money from summer jobs, people were spending the money they'd saved for summer but hadn't spent, people had bought an unusual amount of new clothes/makeup for college (as they wouldn't be wearing uniform), and also a lot of 16 year olds got money for their GCSE exam results. I did this survey question again, asking 27 of my friends what they spend on non-essential items (so excluding food, drink, transport etc.) on average each month, and the average was £45. Although this was an error, it did show me that the average amount people spend per month changes every month, and that different products should be advertised depending on what month it is (e.g. normal products when people have a high average monthly spending, and inferior products when peoples average monthly spend is lower). And maybe articles about how to listen to music for free (e.g. spotify and youtube) and free music events during the times when people have less money to spend.
My Reader Profile
So, using the information I have gathered with my survey, I have designed and created a simple two page Reader Profile / Media kit / Media Pack.
What is an institution?
A Media Institution is a company or organisation which funds, produces, distributes and market media products. Many media institutions have a large range of different products spreading across different genres. In business this is called having a large product portfolio, and offers some protection over changes in consumer tastes and preferences; if one genre goes out of fashion and no one buys or reader the media products associated with that genre, the media institution won't go under because it has other media products of other genres to support them.
Media institutions also seldom have two magazines that compete against each other in the same genre, for a multitude of reasons ranging from the fact that the genre fashion change protection concept would be invalid, and also the fact that revenue could be lowered and the target market for one magazine may be limited by the other.
My magazine would also be available digitally on both desktop computers, tablets and mobile phones. I found that most of readership has either an iPhone or an Android, so I made a mock up website that can be viewed on Android and Apple phones, and also PCs.
Through my research and reader survey, I found that my readership were about male 1:2 female, slightly above average wealth and liked Bands:
The first thing I noticed was that almost double the amount of females took the survey then males, this showed me I should be aiming a lot of the content of the magazine towards females, but have contact that males can also connect with as a third of the readership would be males.
In order to achieve this, I created a 3 member band, with both male and female artists. I had the female as the lead singer - promoting a strong female connotation that young women (see age section bellow) could relate to. The band was based off the popular Punk Rock band Paramore (see Band section).
Over half of the people that took the survey were 16, with none under 15, and a few 17, 18, 19 etc. respondents. This shows that I need to aim the content at people that are older teenagers, and feature issues and situations that older teenagers may find themselves in. In order to fully captivate my audience I will need to have content that appeals to them, some ideas could be (but not limited to):
- More mature music (rap etc.)
- Artists talking about when they were teenagers
- Free concert tickets - Fashion in the Music Industry - Information on Tours I used this information to tailor the content of the magazine around a younger adult audience. I used the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test to make sure the wording of the magazine was easily readable for the age group, and I also picked topics to write about that more mature teenagers would be interested in to make my magazine seem more desirable. I used the demographic information from my survey to know what social group to represent. The group was slightly older, middle class, white teenagers.
The average income for a British family with two adults working is £40,000 a year (Source). The average (midpoint mean) of the respondents of the survey is £55,000, which is £15,000 above average. This shows that the readership would have, on average, more disposable income than the average population, meaning that advertisers of normal (as a pose to inferior) products would be interested in advertising in the magazine, and also the readers would probably be better educated and higher up in Socio Economic Grouping (ABC1)
100% of the responders told us who their favourite artists were, showing that they're passionate and loyal to their favourites. I put the results into a spreadsheet, and through the use of a scoring system and algorithm I ordered the submitted bands and artists in order of popularity amongst my responders.
The scoring system works by multiplying the frequency of people that picked the artist by a number, the number changes depending on weather the people chose the artist as their number one favourite, or second favourite and so on.
- If someone chose artist x as their 5th favourite, the artist would get 1 point.
- If someone chose artist x as their 4th favourite, the artist would get 2 points.
- If someone chose artist x as their 3rd favourite, the artist would get 4 points.
- If someone chose artist x as their 2nd favourite, the artist would get 7 points.
- If someone chose artist x as their 1st favourite, the artist would get 11 points.
The scores go up by 1 (between 5th and 4th) and then by 2 (between 4th and 3rd) then 3 (between 3rd and 2nd) and then 4 (between 2nd and 3rd).
I put the results into a web page so that they could be displayed on my blog:
To see the spreadsheet in full size, or if it isn't displayed above, please click here. Take the time to look at it.
As you can see by the spreadsheet, on average people's top 5 favourite artists/bands were:
Arctic Monkeys (Indie Rock / Post-Punk Revival)
Bring Me The Horizon (Metal Core / Punk)
Vaccines (Indie Rock)
Oasis (Rock / Brit Pop)
Halsey (Electro Pop / Indie Pop)
So looking at the genres of people's favourite music, Rock came up three times, so did Indie and Punk came up twice, so I will base my magazine on one (or more) of these three genres in order to attract the majority of the readership to my magazine. A magazine that features these best is probably Kerrang, which as shown in Question 5, is the second most popular magazine amongst my respondents, followed by NME, which features these genres in it's magazine (but does not specialise in them). In terms of gender, the top bands/artists are predominantly male - but in my magazine I'd like to have a mixture of all of the top 5 artists in order to appeal to the most potential readers. I asked 20 of my friends (10 boys and 10 girls) if they saw two magazines, one with a female rock/indie/punk artist and one with a male rock/indie/punk artist on the front, here were the responses:
Artist
Gender
Male
Responses
Female
Responses
Total
Female Artist
4
3
7
35%
Male Artist
6
7
13
65%
So, as you can see by the responses of this sub survey showed that the overall possible readership would prefer a female artist on the front of the magazine, which interestingly juxtaposes with the favorite artists, this could be because of an array of different reasons, like sex appeal for men and women relating to the female artists. From the information I got from this mini-survey, I'm going to probably have a female artist on the front cover of my magazine. After doing the research, I know I wanted to do a Punk Rock band.
Existing Punk Rock Bands
Green Day, Rise Against, My Chemical Romance, Blink 182 and Paramore are all examples of punk rock bands.
Here's some pictures of 5 popular Punk bands. You can tell they're Punk artists because of the clothing they're wearing. They often wear black clothes or clothing with very little colour. They usually have quite serious facial expressions. Paramore's (bottom right) lead singer goes against both of these popular conventions, in this picture you can see she is smiling - which isn't usual in a punk band picture, and she also has bright hair. Unlike pop bands, Punk bands often look more scruffy, with bland clothing and untidy hair. Although Photoshop is almost definitely used on the images, it is not as drastic as its use on pop bands. Very little makeup is used, but sometimes the men have slight black eyeliner and skin whitening foundation like My Chemical Romance.
Clothing
The use of black clothing is more apparent in modern Punk bands, older bands would wear black with vibrant colours. But the all black is now the norm
I wanted my band to wear all black none branded clothing to represent the genre, as it is conventional for the band members to wear all black, usually just a regular black T-shirt and black skinny jeans. I found pictures online of different articles of clothing and photoshopped them into one band picture, and then I shot the picture, and edited it to look a similar style as other band pictures in the Punk Rock Genre. Here's the process: I've decided to have my models wear all black in the front cover. I wanted one of the guys in the back to have a leather jacket on as well. This is the type of clothing that people that listen to the Pop Punk music genre would wear. I chose Jack as one of my models because he has a stretcher and a very 'scene' look. 'Scene kids' love this sort of music genre so I consulted with Jack on what sort of clothing my models should wear. Here is how I want it to look, I hadn't chosen all of my models when I made this mock up so I made their heads the heads of my favourite animals, this is a convention in high street fashion (see more here):
Here's the photoshop 'Google Mock up' version of how I wanted my models to be dressed.
Here's the photo we actually got
Here's the video of me editing the photo I got to make it look more like what I wanted. I edited the faces and hair of the models, and I also made their clothing look more like what I had planned, I did this by removing tshirt graphics, and also changing the colour of one of the model's jeans from blue to black.
