1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
After looking at existing magazines and doing a questionnaire, I decided that I wanted to base my genre on hip hop music. I was excited about doing this because I know a lot about this music genre as it is the type of music that I am into and listen to myself, including RnB and Rap. The questionnaire that I did before starting to do my magazine helped my figure out the age group to base it on. Many people that said they were into music magazines were in the age group of 15-25 and they were of all genders so therefore I came to the decision of making my hip hop music magazine for ages 15-25 of all genders and when I came to making my magazine, made it clear throughout all the pages that it is a music magazine. The colours grey and yellow or sometimes red often represent hip hop in magazines.
When I planned my magazine I intended it to be like my Hiphop weekly magazine. I intended to focus on two main hip hop magazines, XXL and Hip Hop Weekly. However my design turned out to be quite like Hiphop weekly magazine and exactly how I planned it to be. The aspects of design I wanted to use from it were the colours such as the yellow,grey ,blackand white fonts.
In the contents page I included names of hip hop singers such as Wizkhalifa and Nicki Minaj . These are existing singers which a very popular and famous to people who listen to hip hop music, I believe that they are a success in the music industry so therefore I added their names on my contents page.
The features that I have used challenge forms and conventions of real, existing music magazines, and most importantly, something that all existing magazines do is to Photoshop ,i had a challenge on how to crop an image on my previous front cover but this time i tried my best to crop it the right way.For my front cover and contents page I used photoshop to edit my main picture ,but for my double page spread I used an app on my iPad called pick-stitch with different collages and effects.
However there are some differences as I didn’t intend to use two people in my front cover like the XXL magazine and the cover lines are spread out differently from the real magazine.i decided to use one person to make look classy for a hiphop magazine and I did not use many different colour and many pictures because I thought it was going to look clumsy. Also another difference is that I didn’t use the black and white effect because I personally think a colourful front cover is more eye-catching than a black and white one.
Looking at my feedback I realised that I’ve made many improvements compared to my first magazine.
2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?
The genre of my music magazine is hip hop and my made up artists are called TTD and Sydney Duffield.The real life artists I based them on were Eve,Missy Elliot and Nicki minaj. They are interesting because They all represent hip hop as they are really good role models. And especially Eve and Missy Elliot they are known as the legends of female Hip-Hop
The models I chose were Tatenda Chipamaunga and Jane Duffield . I chose them because Jane looks quite like Eve, as she has similar hair and skin colour, and the same reason with Tatenda .The setting was in a photo shoot studio, with white backgrounds and different lightings and the other one was out side where there was green vegetation.The clothing I included were heels , blazers,and tops and pencil skirt as it’s a hip-hop trend, and Eve mostly mostly wears tight pencil skirts
3. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Harry Publications is a magazine publisher of many magazines including a lot of hip hop magazines such as XXL. I think that Harry Publications might distribute and publish my magazine because it is a music magazine of the genre hip hop and they have published hip hop music magazines in the past such as XXL so they have experience.
XXL is a successful publishing company because it’s the number one selling music magazine on the news stand, and very popular amongst the hip-hop culture. On its website XXLMAG.COM it says that it has maintained its status as the most respected hip-hop music magazine, by both consumers and the industry.
I will profit from them as my publisher because it will be read by a large amount of audience and advertised largely across the hip hop culture, and large companies as XXL are very well paid, as their average income is $56,571.
4. Who would be the audience for your media product?
The age range of my target audience would be between 15 to 25 year olds and they’d mainly be male as there are mostly male rappers, but there are some female rappers such as Nicki Minaj. Regarding their race they’d be black Americans, as most of the rappers are, and they would be classed as middle class.
Their hobbies would tend to be going out and drinking, fashion trending. in terms of the other media texts, they’d consume they would like expensive and popular phones such as blackberries and iPhones, magazines such as Vibe,hip hop weekly and XXL, and movies such as Stomp the Yard, which features popular hip hop celebrities such as Chris Brown and Ne-Yo.
Looking at information in my XXL media pack, they’d be similar to their target audience because it contains statistics of the average buyers which are male and the average age, which is similar to my target audience age. Judging by what I learned from my questionnaire, their main desires for a music magazine would be for it to have three main matching colours, and to have an effective front cover picture.
5. How did you attract your audience?
I attracted my audience by having a female model. This is so that female readers look up to the hip hop model and so that males get attracted to it and lead it to buy the magazine. The colours of my magazine also attract female and male audiences because it is colours they both genders like. My cover stories are very interesting so I think that that is a way of catching my audience’s eye.My masthead is also black and big along with my main picture it can catch someone's eye.
My typical reader probably would pick up that there are typical attitudes and ideas in my magazine such as the slang language used and how the character is looking at the camera with a direct contact.
6. What have you learnt about technologies through the process of this product?
I used many techniques in technologies in the processes of constructing this product. Before I began this project, I was not very good at using Photoshop and this project has definitely helped me get better at it. I used tools such as cropping, cloning, and brushing and many more which I am much better at.
I also used an app called picstitch which is a simple way of using Of using difference collages and effects on a picture, I also used the software InDesign for creating my double page spread and I found it difficult at first because it was slightly harder than photoshop, I never intended to use it, since I started experimenting with different tools and reading about it I started learning until I created my double page spread, even though I am not an expert, I managed to learn the basics. For my front cover I used Photoshop to edit my main picture and cropping and applying filters and creating mastheads and different types of effects. For my contents page I used Photoshop to edit the picture and put a different effect on it.
I used my Ipad to take photo shoots of my models that I used in my magazine. I also used my iPad to send pictures . I also used the internet to use my blog and upload my work to it; I used different types of programmes such as Slide share . I also used dafont.com and experimented with different kinds of fonts to use for my masthead.
