Evaluation 1st Draft

Evaluation – Joel Macauley



This is the evaluation to my media products that I have produced by myself; first of all I produced two contrasting magazine covers for my pre-production. The first one I produced was a music magazine which was called ‘IMN’ and the second one was a film magazine called ‘Take2’, I followed all the codes and conventions you would expect to see on these types of magazines.

At first I was undecided on whether to create a music magazine or an album cover so I decided to look in to existing products. First of all I looked at indie music magazines such as NME, Q and Rolling Stone then I looked at some album covers of bands such as Courteeners and Kasabian. After having a think about what I was going to do I decided to make a music magazine due to my knowledge of the codes and conventions of them. Once the decision was made I started on my pre-production which started with me creating a music magazine which was made easier following my research into other music magazines and helped me follow the codes and conventions of this particular genre of magazine. My second pre-production was a contrasting magazine genre of film which I struggled to follow the codes and conventions of as I wasn’t familiar to this type of magazine so once again I decided to do some research into some existing film magazines. I looked at Empire and Total Film, I found that this research considerably helped me to follow the codes and conventions of film magazines. Following this research I feel as though I have done my best in order to try and make my pre-production products to look as realistic as possible as I focused on denotation and connotations of magazines and also the colours which are usually found on these magazines. I then looked at IPSO which handles complaints about breaches of the Editors' Code of Practice, I did this in order to make sure my magazine covers followed the rules of IPSO. Once I had done this I researched Time Inc. the product portfolio they had and the background to the company and I found out that they own the magazine NME. I started to research who my target audience would be for my pre-production , my demographic audience would be males and females who are aged between 16 and 25. Then I decided my psychographic audience would be people who are fans mainly of indie/alternative music. I then decided to ask someone who fits into my target audience a series of interrogatives to find out what they would expect to find on a music magazine, I found that they would expect to see an indie band who are quite small at the minute but are going to get big soon, or a big band who have just released an album or are about to start touring also they expected to see quite dark colours such black and blue with a bit white. Following this I then went back to the pre-production I had already started and I then started to change some things about it such as the colour scheme and the content on the cover.

Following this I started to focus on my actual production of a indie music magazine. First of all I looked back over my pre-production and all of the stages I went through in order to make my magazine look as realistic as possible. However where my pre-production was just to create a magazine cover, the main production would be to create a front cover but also a double page spread inside the magazine. As a result of this I once again decided to look at some professional examples of magazine double page spreads from magazines such as NME, Q and Rolling Stone, and I found this very useful in helping me create my double page spread. After I had done this I started my front cover and I tried to address my target audience by following the colour scheme that they would expect to see and then I focused on the cover star which was a new band which is on the verge of becoming big. I feel as though this has hit the needs of my chosen target audience. Following the completion of my front cover I moved on to my double page spread. For this I decided to conduct an interview which was of the cover stars the reasoning for this was because from the research of existing music magazines there tended to be lots of interviews in them. As this only covered one page I had to create a second page and on this page I decided to put a large picture of the band and below this was tour dates for them, tour dates is another thing I found that was heavily used in professional magazines. Throughout my double page spread I addressed everything that my target audience would expect to find in order to make it look appealing for them. I feel as though that my production followed the codes and conventions of a typic indie music magazine, i believe this because my front cover had a indie band on it and surrounding it was sub articles of music which is usually found on this type of magazine. I also feel this is correct with my double page spread as well because interviews are heavily used in music magazines and the questions I asked were all related to music and the band, also the tour dates that I gave are also prominent features in music magazines.

My magazines has many strengths to it but it also some areas where I could improve it. The strength of my magazine cover is the layout of it as I feel as though it does look rather professional which is what my main aim was, furthermore the content of the front cover is also professional as I have shown knowledge of the music genre I am focusing on and also the style in which I have wrote my articles and sub articles is professional. Moving on to my double page spread I also feel that this is professional due to the content of it because what has been wrote wouldn’t look out of place in a professional magazine such as NME. However there are areas of my production which different from professional standard. I believe that the fonts used on my front cover are different from the ones used on professional ones, I found it difficult to get my font right in order to match professional standards also I feel that my images used could have been of a better standard to make my magazine look better. My double pages spread layout could have been better because I feel as though the image used doesn’t look like it fits in properly on the page.