Target Audience

My target audience for my music magazine will be round the age of 16-25. My magazine will be directed towards females, as the new bands that will be featured, colour schemes and arty feel to the magazine will probably be more female orientated. My audience will be interested in indie rock and enjoy discovering new bands, as well as going to intimate gigs. Their favourite bands would include bands like The Libertines, Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes, newer indie pop bands such as Two Door Cinema Club or Peace, and also older bands such as The Smiths, The Cure and The Clash.  They may also be quite artistic, due to the more artistic features of the magazine (such as the photography) but they would find music a very important aspect of their lives, listening to it every day. I think it is important for me to design a magazine that I would actually want to buy, which means that my target audience would probably be aimed at a 17 year old girl who loves similar music to me. 

Media Theory - Male Gaze Theory, Star Theory and Moral Panic Theory

Laura Mulvey's Male Gaze theory

Today, many feminists would see most media output as a product of a male dominated order. In 1975 Laura Mulvey, a British feminist film theorist, created the 'Male Gaze theory'. She stated the cinema audiences look at films in 2 ways; voyeuristically and fetishistically. In turn, this leads to 2 side effects; the 'objectification of females' and the 'narcissistic identification' of the ideal image on the screen. Her theory confirmed that the media was created for the satisfaction of males, with women merely being 'objects of desire for their visual pleasure'.  

Richard Dyer's Star Theory

Richard Dyer noted that a star is just an image created for audiences, not a real person - they are commodities produced and consumed on the strength of their meanings. The 'star image' is based on 2 paradoxes; they must be both ordinary and extraordinary, and they must be simultaneously present and absent. 

Cohen's Moral Panic theory
In this theory, Cohen says that within the media, certain groups of people are portrayed as a threat to society by people in power (such as the government), and this is played on, causing a moral panic among the public. The panic among the public turn them against the certain groups of people, turning them into 'folk devils'. Major examples of this is seen today within the media, where newspapers have turned many British people against immigrants, and turned many Westerners against Muslim countries and all people who live in them. 

Edited photographs for school magazine

These shots photos are some of the better ones from the photo shoot that I will be likely to use in my school magazine. I have edited them in Photoshop, and have included the originals on this post.

You can see from this pictures that the editing process was very subtle, but by editing it, this photograph looks much better. The original is the top photo, with the edit underneath. I boosted the brightness and contrast very slightly, and then using the clone stamp tool, I removed the clock and random 'happy birthday' banner from the top right hand corner. 

Again, the editing on this photograph was minimal, however just by increasing the brightness and contrast of this image, it has improved it greatly. I am particularly pleased with the shallow focus on this image. 

With this photograph, I first cropped the image slightly, removing the head and shoulders of the student in the top right corner (his expression was a bit strange, and his face was a bit dark). Then, I increased the brightness and contrast of the image, and used the clone stamp to remove the burn marks off of the mat that the Bunsen burner was sat on. I also removed the bag that was sat on the desk behind the students in the middle of the left hand side of the image. I am quite pleased with this image, and I may use this photo for the front cover of my school magazine. 

This took me quite a while to edit, as after I had cropped the plug socket and box of folders out of the image, I used the clone stamp and spot healing tool to take the bag and soap out of the photo. It was quite difficult to edit this so it looked relatively realistic. I also removed the burns from the mat again using the clone stamp tool. 

Photo shoot for Prelim task

A few days earlier, I organised an hour slot for me to take some photographs around school for my prelim school magazine. I used my shot list that I had made as it gave me a frame to base my shots around. I asked some students from lower down the school in year 9 and asked them to fill out a release form in order for me to take photographs of them, and then took them to classrooms that I had made sure were free the previous week. All together I took 58 photos with my own camera, and i managed to get some decent ines that I will be able to use for the magazine.

I got some shots of the students in several different locations, and then got some shots of the front of the school. As you can see, some of the photos did not turn out quite right, either being too bright/ dark, not being in focus, being blurred due to movement etc. In some of the classrooms there was also an insufficient amount of light, meaning I could not get the right exposure. I may also get a few more photographs on a different photo shoot, just to get a few more shots that I did not have time to take previously. 

Photoshoot shot lists

These are some shot lists I made previous to the photo shoot I took for my school magazine. I have added annotations which describe the shots, and also explain why these shots would fit in with my ideologies that I want my school magazine to convey.

Newsletter mockups

This is an initial mockup of my prelim task newsletter that I created in Microsoft Publisher. I still need to consider what features I want to include within it (so I can add the cover lines) and I need to think of what headline I want to include. I will also think about possible colour schemes and images I will use.

I have decided to include an image of a year 9 student taking part in a science experiment, as it backs up my ideology that Deyes is a traditional school, with traditional values (that students are academic and happy). I will use my own camera for this, and I will use my younger sister as a model for this photograph. Hopefully I can get a professional looking image, which will take up the whole background of the cover, as it would do on typical magazine. I have also used the masthead 'Deyes News' - I may change this in the future, but I think this simplistic title will be more professional than perhaps a typical 'cringey' one (such as a play on words with the word 'Deyes' as in our actual school newsletter here at Deyes - 'Deyes of our Lives'). I will also use the school logo on the cover, which will help with my colour scheme. The school badge is red, black, white and blue, however, the colours are very vibrant. I may tone down these colours, as I have previously seen on the two newsletters that I have analysed, bright primary colours can make a newsletter look a bit immature and unprofessional.

This is my mockup of the contents page of my newsletter.

Contributor Release Forms for Prelim School Magazine

These are the release forms that I got my models to fill out for permission for me to take photographs of them for my preliminary task.