1. Media Studies Coursework Evaluation Lucy Davis

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

3. How does your media product represent particular social groups? As my media product focuses on a more niche music genre its readership is also quite specific. Due to the attitudes, identities and representations my magazine conveys my target audience can be specified to fit into a particular social group. This social group is predominantly made up of middle class students or career women who identify with “the independent woman”. Lucy Davis

7. What have you learnt about technologies during the process of constructing this product? During the process of constructing my media product I have used the assistance of digital photograph software, desktop publishing programmes and internet blogging. Of these the one I learned most about, and probably the most technical of the programmes, was digital photography (on Photoshop). The majority of images featured in my magazine pages are main images therefore I manipulated them in detail in order to achieve an effective final product. Through use of Photoshop I developed many technical skills, such as: cropping, manipulating brightness saturation and contrast, cutting out an element of an image, eliminating red eye and removing blemishes. Below is an example of an image I have improved via manipulation: Before After I have sharpened, extended height of background, increased brightness and contrast, replaced eye colour, cropped and flipped this image in order to create and more striking and fitting image for my media product.

8. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? Before I set out on my actual media product I completed a preliminary task (on left) which enabled me to experiment my ideas on magazine design, gain practice at using computer software and also to detect improvements that could then be made to my plan for my final media product. I believe that upon comparing my preliminary task with my final media product it is clear to see I have learnt about and improved on many aspects of design and construction of a magazine. Following this initial task I observed both unsuccessful and successful features, some of which I changed completely. For example, the main image on the front cover of my preliminary piece features a background as part of the image. However I decided this distracted the eye from the subject and generally looked unprofessional therefore on my final piece I cut the main image away from its background and used a neutral fill in its place. On the other hand, I maintained some successful features such as the contents page’s layout that followed the principle of thirds. I decided to replicate this left-hand-third column in my final product as I believed it successfully created an organised and appealing layout that would attract my target audience whilst also balancing the weight of the main image I chose to use on my final contents page. Finally, I also adapted unsuccessful features that I thought needed improvement. For instance, I kept the idea of integrating a coverline into a stamp format but with developments to the original such as adding shadows, layers, a fill and softer tones - which together created a more professional looking stamp that worked effectively with the rest of the design.