Media Coursework AS
VOLUME MUSIC MAGAZINE
QUESTION 7
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
I believe I have learnt a great deal about how important research and planning is when I look back over my preliminary task to now. The preliminary task that I completed was very amateur and very unorganised. The style, structure, format and content was all rushed and the overall product did not look like a magazine front cover and contents page, but a poster instead. When I compare my preliminary task to my final product now, I can clearly see that the research that went into my final product made a great difference in the overall look and content that went into my magazine.
For example in my preliminary work, my front cover included a main cover headline which read 'Too Much Stress!? pg 4'. This main cover line does not really entice the audience into wanting to make them buy the magazine and find out more, it just asks them a question that they can think about. Whereas in my Final Product, the main story headline read, 'Izzy Hennessy Takes On The World'. This is more like a professional magazine headline as the story is about somebody else instead of the audience who are reading the magazine, because overall the audience wants to buy a magazine to find out about other people and their lives, not their own lives.
Also the masthead on the front cover of my preliminary work is not very dominant and bold and is not the first thing that the audience see's which is not what a masthead is intended to do, it is supposed to be the first words that the audience reads so they immediately know what magazine they are reading.
Also the puff used on my preliminary work is quite distracting to the audience's eyes as the red is too bright and the font is not bold therefore the audience cannot really read the puff and what is has to offer.
The main feature article used on my magazine front cover is not structured / placed in a professional manner as the image does not cover up more than half of the page and the quality of the photo is quite amateurish, as there are no effects used on the photo e.g change in contrast, colour, vibrance, spot healing, feather, sponge etc... which makes the overall photo look amateur and unprofessional.
Also there is quite a lot of white space that is not covered up on my preliminary exercise front cover which again makes my magazine look unprofessional. The structure of my cover lines would have been spread around the main image much better, which would in turn emphasise their image, much like real professional magazines do like NME and Q.
I also believe that I have learned a lot about how important research of contents pages is when it comes to creating a magazine contents page. This is because on my preliminary exercise, the research that went into this was quite minimal therefore I had no real inspiration of what I wanted my magazine contents page to look like. Therefore the contents page has a lot of faults within it.
For example, the colour scheme used on the font is a different colour to the colour scheme used on the front cover which is very poor as the house colour has changes which is not what professional magazines do, they stick to a house style and colour throughout their magazine which makes the magazines look proficient. The font on the contents page is also different from the font on the front cover which again does not stick to the house colour and style of the magazine.
On my contents page, there is no feature article, which makes my magazine contents page look very plain as the audience would not be addressed or enticed by any images and would therefore be bored of just reading the same plain text.
The font size of the page numbers and titles are far too big on my contents page as they cover up the majority of the white spaces which is not what professional magazines do on their contents pages, they make the page numbers and titles much smaller so they do not take away the importance from the main title or the image.
Overall I would say that my preliminary exercise / work gave me a great understanding of how important research is within my coursework and how following the mainstream and convential way of how magazines are structured, organised and the contents that goes into them, can make the magazine look much more professional and realistic.
As you can see, the difference between my preliminary exercise / work, a professional piece of work and my final product is uncanny. I believe that the overall affect that the preliminary exercise had on the audience is that it looks like a poster which is not a good look for a magazine front cover, and the overall affect / as soon as you see the real product that I have created, you immediately think that this is a magazine.
For my final product, I also did a lot more research into the target audience and who I wanted to aim my magazine towards. Whereas with my preliminary work, the research into the target audience was very minimal which makes the magazine look like it could be aimed at anyone rather than a specific target audience. However, for my magazine front cover final product, I had more time to research the target audience of teen to mid twenties (17-25) indie rock star, therefore I could aim my magazine towards this group of people more specifically which can be seen by the content on my magazine e.g the main feature article, the cover lines, the skyline etc...
Overall, I would say that I have learned that research into target audience, getting inspiration and organisation are all important factors that need to be addressed when creating a music magazine because without research you would know who you are aiming your magazine towards, without inspiration, you would not know what a convential music magazine looks like and how to structure it and without organisation you would not have enough time to meet the deadlines set and you would also lose track of what parts of the magazine you need to complete and what tasks you still have to complete.
