Almost finished first draft of magazine...

I have now almost completed the first draft for my coursework, I have done article and cover analysises, my questionnaire and it's analysis, practise college magazine cover and contents page, and my cover, contents and two double page spreads for my music magazine. I must complete my evaluation over Christmas. To the right and below are my complete first drafts.

Double Page Spreads...

I have almost completed both of my double page spreads now, I have taken more photos for my second article and am sticking to the conventions of a rock music magazine.

Main draft for music magazine...

I have been working on my main drafts that include a front cover for my music magazine, a contents page, and two double page spreads. I have to keep to the guidelines set by my questionnaire. So far I have completed my cover, contents page and almost one double page spread. I have taken photos of some friends of mine posing as a band, and another friend as a solo artist. I had to keep to the conventions of metal band pictures.

Preliminary task...

For our homework we were asked to complete our preliminary task which meant producing a practise magazine cover and contents page, we had to use the new skills we had learnt on photoshop to produce this. It had to look like a cover of our college magazine Z.I.N.E. We had to use a mid shot of a student from the college as the main picture and talk about college events in it.

Photoshop...

Our lesson today was our first on using photoshop, we learnt what most of the different features do and manipulated a picture of a celebrity of our choice. We leant how to cut out a picture of someone and put them on a new background to change it or make it look more proffessional. This will be really helpful when it comes to creating our own magazine cover.

Questionnaire results...

I handed out a questionnaire to 12 people to fill out. 8 of the people I handed my questionnaire to were in my target age group (15-18 year olds) which was good as now I know what my target audience would want in a magazine. It was also helpful because it has helped me to decide what to do with things I wasn't sure about for the magazine, for example, I didn't know how much money I would charge for the magazine but my results showed that the majority of people would pay £3 for a music magazine. One of the pie charts in my questionnaire results analysis is shown to the right, it shows how much people would be willing to pay for a magazine.

Questionnaire...

We have started creating questionnaires so that we can hand them out and have information to back up why we chose to style our magazine in a particular way. At first we were asked to create a draft questionnaire with 8-10 questions.
We have done this and are now updating our original questionnaires so that they will be more useful for us, for example in my draft questionnaire I had the question 'Do you like reading magazines?' which I have now changed to 'Do you like reading music magazines?'.
I have also completely changed one question from 'What attracts you to music magazines?' with a gap for writing underneath, to 'Which cover style most appeals to you?' with visual options underneath. This will make it easier for a person to answer, will make the questionnaire look more interesting and the feedback will be easier for me to interperet. To corresond with the visual question I added the question 'Why did you pick that magazine cover?' on to the end of the questionnaire.
To the right is a picture of my final questionnaire.

Analysing magazine articles and current work...

We have moved on to looking at magazine articles, and analysing them, which will help us when writing the articles for our own magazines. I have analysed 4 different types of magazine article which were, a review from Kerrang!, an article about an up and coming band from Kerrang!, an interview from Top Of The Pops and an article about a famous artist from NME. I found them quite challenging but I now understand a lot more about magazine articles.
Today we recieved our magazine cover analysis drafts back so we could see what we did well and what we need to improve, my feedback is very positive and I will be making improvements to them soon.

Analysing magazine covers...

We were asked to analyse four music magazine covers in detail, I have now completed this task by analysing a cover from Kerrang!, NME, Rolling Stone and Vibe this I now have a good idea of some things I could do with my own magazine cover- analysing Kerrang! and Rolling Stone was particularly helpful as they are of the same genre to the magazine I want to create. Below are images of the covers of Rolling Stone and NME I analysed.

So far in AS Media coursework...

We have been learning how to analyse music magazines which has helped us to learn the good qualities of current music magazines. We have updated our magazine briefs and I used what I learnt from analysing to make my own magazine brief better, I have also decided on a name for my magazine which is CRASH, I got this idea from the use of onomatopoeia in Kerrang! magazine and think it reflects the genre of magazine I want to create.

Introduction to AS Media coursework...

We have been introduced to the course, we have to create a music magazine for a genre which we think there is a gap in the market for. I wrote a brief for a rock music magazine which is more open to all types of rock music than current magazines, so this is the magazine I will be creating. The brief includes why people would want to buy the magazine, the target audience and other information. So far I am feeling quite confident about what we have to produce.