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

Many of the conventions of a magazine help to create an identity and personality if you will of a magazine, they help identify an audience for that reader, thus the conventions appeal to that reader. This is called the brand identity.
For example the masthead is one of the main ways in which a magazine can help grab the attention of its audience. weather its just for an impulse buyer, someone who just wants a quick read, or a long time reader, who needs to recognize your masthead in order to be familiarized with your product, must see and recognize your signature masthead. My masthead helps recognize a target audience, mainly by the name of it, but the font gives some idea of whom may purchase this magazine but also what it may contain inside.



The word AMPLITUDE, is the word Amp, usually related to rock stars and such, and attitude, which suggests the type of content that maybe inside the magazine. So from this one can identify the magazines genre almost, a hard punchy font has been used with a an edgy feel with the spattered broken up text. This again links in with the theme and genre of the music magazine and again matches with the name and feel of the magazine.
The Genre of my magazine is a mixture of heavy rock to alternative sounds my audience research helped me decide which kind of genre to choice, because i had such a wide variety of heavy death metal to acoustic rock i decided to create a kind of hybrid genre to help cater to a large amount of consumers, this way i could be able to spread not just to one type of person, but a much more wider audience.
I got the idea for this kind of genre from my audience research but mainly i was influenced by the magazines Rocksound and Kerrang. They include my genre of music and hold the same conotations as my magazine does itself, same fonts, colour scheme and language used in the articles. I was more influenced by the style of music within these magazines and it helped me take my photos, pick the bands i would mention and the font colour and style of my DPS,frontcover and my contents page.


My magazine layouts all follow closely to the common conventions of magazines. I've already spoken about my masthead, what it connotes and how i represent an audience with that. The Mis en scene of my photograph helps establish the artist i am covering in my magazine, its a mid shot of his whole face, him holding and playing an accoustic guitar. i feel this gives an intimate feel as to who is going to be the main article in my magazine, what kind of person he is, and what kind of music to expect from him. This is the original photograph of Joe, once i placed it on my magazine cover i felt there was too much in the background so i used Adobe Photo shop to make the photo more suitable. So i used the croping tool on photoshop and made Joe lighter and more the point of focus. Like so.

the front covers mis en scene is very minimal, the photo of joe takes up most of the front cover. The contents page contains photos of joe in a park bench in gorleston with grafiti in the background.

I feel this gives an gritty attidue feel to the shot and theme of the article/magazine. Othe images include my concerts ive attend in the past and a photo of my self just to add to the contents page. the colours match well with the brigtness of the front cover and the main image if Joe in front of the pink grafiti.

The photo for the double page spread is joe walking from a dirty gritty brick wall. he is in focus and brighter than the brick wall which is the background for the whole DPS. This also helps the text of the article stand out along with the musician himself. I took both photos seperatly and then merged them together using photoshop.

here are the two original photos.

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The people in all my photos are between the ages of 19 to 30 which would usualy be the target audience for my kind of magazine. when i did my survey the age group who chose this kind of music genre and magazine.

The placed my masthead on my front cover in this position because i seemed to be a common place where mastheads could be seen from a resonable distance and made room for the photo, and things that could be in the magazine also, plus i left extra room on the top of my magazine for more information for my readers.

The written contents includes an intimate interview with Joe Soanes and how he became famous and his music insperation. My interview seemed longer than expected to i wanted to make sure that on the second page it directed to continue reading on the page. I wanted to a long interview because i feel my audience who enjoys reading about music and how its created and who creates it would want a legnthy detailed description of a muscians life and how he makes his music. although my use of language is a non formal standerd english through out, with the odd swear word to keep the audience connected on a personal level.

The genre of music is a mixture of accoustic rock, to metal, hard rock, classic rock m anything to do with a heavy guitar rift, but a mixture of it, i feel that the use of a accoustic artist in a general rock magazine gave this feeling throughout. the use of other "heavy" rock bands also shows the variety within the magazine.

The Contents pages holds many simular conventions to a regular contents page, it has a list of what it involves, pictures accopanied by page numbers, the date of publication and is clear and easy to read. It has photos which link with the genre and idea of the magazine, and the main story has the biggest picture on it. It being a full body shot of joe perched on a park bench. The lay out begins with the word CONTENTS

on the top left hand side of the page, then the date of publication. Then a small picture is next to that, with a page number placed above it with photoshop.
Here is the photoshop contents title and date


and here is the orginal photo and the photoshoped photo.




Underneath directly is the full body large image of Joe(main feature) i felt being in the middle of the page this can now be the main focus. underneath Joe is a few more photos from my collection, one of me and one of a band i saw a few years ago. All have clear brightly coloured page numbers on them. The colour of the background is a plain white one however helps the "blood" splatters have more effect. this help relates to the style and theme of the magazine. also included is small list on the bottom left hand corner of the less important features in the magazine. Everything on the contents page has been placed on the areas in which the reader would pay the most attention, Joes picturing being the biggest and the center helps it become the center of attention to the reader and so on.
the finished Contents page


The double page spread holds the common conventions of page numbers, pull quotes ,drop caps and i use a quote from the article as the title of the article. I used the whole photo as the background to make it easier to read the text in front and i i used different fonts and colours to highlight my pullqoutes and drop caps etc also.