Preliminary task:

Our preliminary task was to design a front cover and contents page for a schools magazine. It had to include a mid shot of a pupil and display all the conventions of a proffesional magazine i.e. a suitable title, masthead, cover feature and contents page. We had to annotate and analyse both of these describing the features we had displayed. We also had to produce an evaluation of the task to point out where we had struggled with the objective, what we had done well and most importantly- what we could improve when we moved on to the main task.

Rejected Pictures

These are some pictures i took for my magazine cover but i have now rejected because they do not suit the theme and audience of the magazine, The magazine (entitled Feedback) is a more heavy rock music magazine and the images with the acoustic guitar are too soft and give the wrong impression of the magazine.

a useful link:

We were given this link in class by our teacher, i had a proper look at it over half term and its full of really helpful links! http://www.petesmediablog.blogspot.com/ 

Audiences (2)

The most important thing in the media is probably the audience. It is the audience who reads, shares, pays for and supports the media so it is very important that we understand the audience. We looked at Audience engagement, expectations, foreknowledge and identification which explain how an audience reacts to a peice of media, whatever it is.  

Photography

I find this section of the course quite interesting, i've never done any photography other than messing around at gigs photographing a few bands when i wasnt playing so learning about it in more detail was really fun. We looked at all kinds of different camera shots that make the image look different such as high and low angle shots. We also looked at a few basic editing techniques like cropping, exposure, lighting, filters and focal points. I learned that lighting is a massive part of photography and can make or break a photo. It is used to create shadow, highlight features and many other jobs besides.

Basic Audience Profiling:

Basic Audience Profiling-
This is a massive part of the media, it detirmins the price, subject and language of the magazine depending on the social status of the individual. There are 6 classes ranging from A (Upper Middle Class) right down to E (Those at lowest level of substance.) We also looked at 'Magazine Suicide' which is a study of different aspects of a magazine that would completely destroy its sales and reputation such as:
- Crude Language
- Too many adverts
- Un-professional design

Another aspect of audience profiling we looked at was the two different types of audiences (Niche Audience- specialist magazines e.g. 'Carpworld') and (Mass Audience- general magazines e.g. 'Cosmopolitan')

Media Studies- 1.

In our first two weeks of the AS Level Media Studies course we have been looking at analysing the presentation of various magazine covers. We studied the style of the magazine to work out its target audience based on colours, text and language. We learned how to describe the layout of a magazine front cover using technical vocabulary e.g. masthead, dateline, selling line, coverline and model credit. We also looked at basic audience profiling. Finally, we began work on a magazine presentation in Powerpoint, we chose a magazine each and described it's target audience based on its press pack (found online at http://www.icpmedia.com/) and how the magazine attracted its target audience. I chose to work on a presentation on Kerrang! magazine, a weekly underground music scene magazine.