1 - In What Ways Does Your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge Forms and Conventions of Real Media Products?
The title of the magazine, 'Plug In', is a phrase quite often associated with Music. I chose this name for the magazine as it helps keep the variety of music covered by the magazine quite wide.
The masthead was designed to attract the attention of anyone passing it by, perhaps on a news stand. It keeps to the three colour rule, a convention of other music magazines, such as NME.
I chose the way I wanted my photo shoot to look myself, asked Georgie to dress like a rock chick and found the locations for the photos myself. It was also down to me to arrange when we did them. I also edited the photos on the double page spread to make them darker, to fit the mood of the magazine and the artist I was portraying better. I also enhanced them because some of the shots were too bright or blurry. For example, the photo on the left is one too brightly lit.
The style I have used for my magazine is a clear, organised style. This will help my readers easily locate as specific piece within the magazine that they might be interested in.
I have used the same font, Galaxy BT, the whole way through. This font will appeal as it is clear, bold and strong, like the music I am publicising. This follows the conventions of a music magazine as I have kept the same style and font throughout.
I studied several interviews from popular music magazines such as Q, NME and Kerrang! so as to get an idea of how to strucutre and style my interview as well as what questions to pose and how the artist may respond.
The music genre is a mixture of pop and rock music, which I chose as I believe it well appeal to a wider audience.
This is suggested in my magazine by the colour schemes and the images I have used.
My colour scheme of predominantly black and yellow shows this genre as the colours are quite strong and dominate the page.
Georgie is dressed very similar to how a pop/rock star would dress, and her photogenic style is very similar to that of pop/rock stars. Alot of how she will be portrayed can be seen through her facial expressions. Right, is a particularly convincing picture of Georgie, which I used for my front cover.
My contents page follows the conventions of other music magazines because I have included a commonly seen headings such as 'news’, 'reviews' and 'features' that readers will expect in each edition.
In my contents page, I have used a boxes to split the different sections up. This also helps to keep the contents looking smart and organised, similar to the NME one I based it upon here.