In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

I spent a large amount of time taking the main photos for my magazine, my model Becci painted her hands and used red make up to make the pictures much more eye catching and kind of copies the indie style (you'll often see indie kids wearing bright makeup or glow in the dark makeup, over-the-topness is key.) The photo I used on the front cover has Becci with her hands out in front of her, I really like the perspective of this picture, when I used it on my front cover I had her hand over the front of the masthead, I think this gives the cover a sense of distance as apposed to being a flat image.

The clothes and style used in the photos are quite typical of the indie genre, her hair is stylish, but not overly worked, and this attitude of not really caring what people think is representative of the genre. Generally I tried to keep the front cover fairly simple. I looked through other music magazines (real ones and ones made by other students) and found that a large amount looked very crowded and messy due to too many cover lines and other pieces of information on the cover, sometimes so you barely even noticed the cover image. Because of this I made sure that my front cover used a very minimalist approach, and I think I achieved this; It looks eye catching and informative without bieng over crowded. I tried to develop ideas that I thought were effective that i had saw in other magazines, for instance in Blender they often have the cover image overlapping the masthead slightly, I think this helps create a sense of space and depth to the image.

I read through a few double page spreads from magazines like NME, as these would be quite similar to what my target audience would want to read. I wrote my article about a band that I had made up, and how they were going on tour after releasing a new album. The article is quite chatty, has a lot of quotes and is quite informal, I made it like this because I guessed that a young audience wouldn't really want a super formal account of a band; they want a fun, quirky personal view of the band. I have tried to find a image with a similar aspects and found this one. The main similarities in these photos are the shot distance, being a close up (although the other magazine's one could be considered more of a extreme close up in comparison), both the images have a fair amount of light on the faces making them quite clear and easy to look at and both have striking flashes of colour on them (both have red lips for instance).

Something that I really enjoyed about my image was how the background turned out. Having a completely black background makes the other colours seem much more vibrant and also allows me to carry the black colour scheme across the page and work with negatives (white writing in the article est.). The pose she is using on the photograph is sort of a cross between smiling and shouting, you can imagine her doing it while in a gig or playing in front of people, shouting out to the crowd, it reminds me of an action shot, I think all these things help to make it look more appealing and eye catching. I think a big factor which would dictate the distribution of my magazine is the fact I decided to make it free.