Magazine analysis

Here I have started my secondary research, I have analysed a music magazine because it will be different to the style of magazine I will be making for my project therefore I can point out the differences and similarities to help me get a better understanding of techniques to use.
I have chosen to aim my magazine or leaflet at teenage girls, to reasoning for this is because I will be able to focus on a certain theme, for example to colours and font; I can imagine it will be different to Kerrang!

This magazine is more similar to the one I will be creating. This has more text than the music magazine, it is also more colourful. I think this is because of the audience it is aimed at, which is mostly women/teenage girls. However similarly they both use interesting subheadings and buzz words to grab the readers attention. It's quite informal therefore makes the reader feel as though they are having a conversation with the writer which is ideal for a gossip magazine.
If I could change anything about this magazine page spread it would be how amount of text of the pages; I think it looks quite busy and untidy, I wouldn't know where to look first or what to read whereas the text on the contents page on the Kerrang magazine is more broken up and clearer.

Flash symbols

Today on flash practised making a symbol. Firstly I clicked on insert, then new symbol and I named mine 'house'. Using the pen tool I drew a house. After this I duplicated my house by pressing CMD then D. After this I made a new layer to put the row of houses in, I changed the size of them and the lighting to make it look more realistic, then I added key frames at the beginning and the end of the timeline on each layer so that the street would stay how it was throughout the clip.

Recce

I went out to the locations I will be filming in. The first two pictures show the outside of college, I will be filming the middle section of my film here. I think this is suitable because my script contains a car park and luckily there is one just outside of the media centre. The bottom two pictures show the media studio, I will be using this because my film contains a hall/conference room and I think this is a good setting because it has a large space for the actors and it is generally used for media purposes anyway so it will be good to film in.

These two locations are good because they are both in college therefore they are easy for my group and I to get to so we don't have to waste our time travelling, we can just go straight to filming.

Practise shots

Today our group went outside college to film some practise shots however before that we went into the studio to learn about the importance of ISO, shutter speed and aperture. ISO levels and aperture change the lighting of what you're filming, if you are filming inside it may be more time consuming when trying to make sure the lighting is correct however when filming outside the natural light will be useful. Our group filmed outside therefore we did not need to adjust the ISO levels and aperture as much, the only thing we did change was the shutter speed which we made 50. The only problem we had when filming was the light outside, as you can see it started to get a little dark.

I now understand that it takes a lot of time and effort to film each individual shot, we have to make sure that the camera is eye level with the people in the shot, we also spent a lot of time making sure the camera was in focus; we did this by focusing on their faces and zooming in until we were satisfied with the focus.

Political Poster

For this task we had to design a poster for on InDesign, we designed a poster on paper and we based the work on that. My poster had speech on it saying, ‘40% of teens do not access political information’ and ‘20% do not know where to find political information’. The larger triangle at the top right hand side shows the 40% and the smaller shows the 20%.

First I make 1 triangle by clicking on the shape tool and changing the settings and changing the settings to 3 sides, I then copied the shape all down the side of the poster to make a long rectangle shape. After this I coloured in a chunk of the triangles to again represent the 40%.

Before doing this task I wasn't very confident because I still struggle when using InDesign because there are so many tools and I don't know what each one does. However I'm glad I knew what my design was so I knew exactly what to do and where I was going with the poster. During this task I learnt how to duplicate shapes and how to arrange layers. If I were to do this task again I would spend more time thinking about the colours I will use and why they are effective because I have used blue, green and black however with no meaning behind it.

In a group we did a survey around college, we asked students questions about their political knowledge. When we had finished the survey we had to arrange our results on a document then for homework we chose a question to focus on and made a factual statement from the results. I chose mine to be ‘40% of teens do not access political information’ and ‘20% do not know where to find political information’ I used these statistics because all of the other results were mainly just 50/50 or unsurprising so I thought this would be interesting.
In the following weeks we looked at a lot of different art forms. In pairs we focused on one art form and presented our new research to the class, by doing this it was a quicker way to understand different art forms because we were taking notes when other groups were presenting. I decided to base my final poster on Swiss Style. This specific art form has a clean layout, it is easy to understand and read, finally it uses many shapes. I have included some triangles and a rectangle in my poster. I thought this was a good style to base my poster on because it is simple yet it gets the point across and it looks tidy. Swiss style also helped me come up with the idea of having one triangle bigger than the other purely because the text in that triangle included a bigger percentage.
At the beginning all of my writing was the same size font and I was going to leave it like that however I was thinking about what to improve and I realised that it might look more interesting if I made the percentages larger than the other writing, demonstrating that they are the most important parts of the sentence. My design that I did on paper is also slightly different than my final photoshop poster because when doing it on the computer, I realised that the colours would look better if they stood out more, that it why I included black in the triangles and white wring over the top, on my paper design the triangles were white and the font colour was green.
Although I am getting a lot more used to photoshop I still struggle to use it because it has so many tools and don’t know what each one does so it was difficult at times when I wanted to do something to my design but I didn’t know how to get there. For example I didn’t know how to put triangles into the corner of the page but I finally realised that I adjust the shapes to fit the page, it took me a while to realise that however I remembered what we did in class a couple of weeks ago and that triggered my memory. I think this task probably was how I imagined it to be, it was quite challenging however it gets a lot easier the more you get familiarised with the tools, luckily to original design wasn’t too difficult to I didn’t need to change much apart from a couple of colours.
After printing it out in A3 I have realised that I have made a couple of mistakes, for example the triangles in the middle are wonky which could make the poster look untidy. Some of the edges are not straight which I didn’t realise before printing it. If I were to do this task again I would make sure I zoomed in a lot to make the edges and triangles to look neat. Overall I am happy with my poster however as I said before I wish I spent more time perfecting the edges.

Codes and conventions of a magazine notes

Codes and conventions of a magazine

Cover Page (one main images)

• Usually the main feature article
• Studio photographs usually in medium close-up or mid shot
• Direct address

Title (masthead)

• Has, a trademark unique font
• Usually one or two words
• Fills the width of the cover, or is in the top left corner
• Positioning statement (strapline)
  
• Puff: Offer something else to the magazine such as free giveaways
• Buzz words: Usually with the main feature article. Used to attract attention e.g ‘’Exclusive, Free, Plus’’
• Barcode: This will be positioned at the bottom right
  
  
• Strip: Across the top or bottom containing lists of items which feature in the magazine
• Colour: Small amount used with a simple colour scheme that can vary per issue-often to tie in with the cover shot.

Codes and conventions of a spread

• Logo’s of the band tells people who cannot recognise the band who they are
• Quote marks from what the band themselves have actually said
• Small information box describing the caption in the photo
• Often another photo will be shown among the text
• A separate piece of information giving the reader a brief idea of what the article is about. This is called a stand first.
• Drop capital is very popular with magazines and is used to tell the reader where to start reading from.
• The name of the article writer

• Sometimes there could be a icon of some sort to make it noticeable that it is regular content
• Facts and upcoming important information about the band/artist
• Quotations within the article
• The headline is the biggest text on the page which is usually around 14pts

Contents page

• A contents page is actually the summary of the magazine
• It tells us about what’s inside the magazine
• Multiply images
• Sneak peak

Research Report

Research is the investigation into sources in order to find new knowledge, finding out new research allows us to educate ourselves on certain topics. There are many different types of research, for example quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data is a more logical type of data, it gives a measure of what people think, you can collect a large amount of quantitative that can organised for analysis. To collect this, questionnaires and surveys are mostly used in order to collect specific answers, this sort of data can be flexible as it can be carried out in many different ways, including online, post and possibly over the phone. This is different to qualitative because it allows us to gain statistical knowledge because we can gain numbers and figures from it. However qualitative data is based around opinions, what people think and how they feel. Qualitative data can’t be changed and changed or measured, unlike quantitative data for example your shoe size can increase as well as your height. This type of data can be led by discussion which is a lot more casual.

Primary data is new data that can be found out by yourself, it is used to answer specific problems and overcome issues. This can be found out by doing questionnaires and surveys to find out the opinions. Primary data will be more costly than secondary because you need yourself and maybe other people to conduct research and could take a lot more time.

Secondary data is research that has already been carried out by someone else, it involves a collection of existing research, for example finding information online, in books, on TV etc. Secondary research allows us to get a better understanding of certain subjects, you could say it is an educational type of research. Secondary data is in some way more simpler than primary because you can collect information offline and in books and it doesn’t take as long to conduct whereas primary data includes a lot more preparation. However the secondary data may not be exactly what you want to find out, it may be close but not specific enough.

Market research is finding out information in order to know how successful a particular product will be. As part of this you will need to find out what the consumers needs and preferences are. Using a focus group is a good way of carrying out market research, it allows the potential consumers to have an input into the product however it is quite hard to put into graphs because you are gathering peoples opinions and that may be more difficult to put into statistics. Questionnaires and surveys can be used, similarly to focus groups we can find out what the customers are expecting of the product. Audience research is gathering information about the audiences attitudes, preferences, interest, knowledge etc. The reason this is carried out is so we can get a better understanding of the target audience, it would be pointless making something that won’t appeal to the right people. Knowing the people you want to target the product at will make it have a more successful turnout. Questionnaires are good in audience research because they are quick and easy to do and they allow us to collect a lot of information about the target audience. Interviews are good because to public can describe what they would like to see, what works and what doesn’t. Online reviews and ratings are good because people can judge the product and express how to improve it. On the other hand this sort of research may not be exact enough, the questions asked may be leading questions so the answers may be biased. If the interviewer is not skilled enough to ask these questions properly the results will not be reliable.

Production research allows us to identify what resources are needed to launch a final product, and whether the product will be suitable and profitable to the market. It will give us an idea of what factors will affect the production of the product. The controllable factors will be, pricing and promotion and uncontrollable factors will be technology, competition, economic changes. Examples of production research are pre-production and post-production because they both give the producer knowledge of important aspects that need to be thought of whilst the product is in production. When making a media product such as a magazine, you will need to think about the who the target audience is, so what colours, font, theme will be successful.

To conclude I think all types of research because it allows us to gain knowledge and a better understanding of what we want the end product to be like, who it will appeal to  and how well it will do on the market. We will also have an understanding of the costs and of the income and how to organise to create best possible financial results from release date.