Evaluation of final media product

EVALUATION OF MY FINAL MEDIA PRODUCT!

Q1. How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

The media product that I created for my main task was a Women’s Health magazine, which revolves around the conventions of a health magazine; ranging from the size of all the reference magazines i.e. self, women’s health, shape etc, simple and colorful fonts that represent positivity and give an active feeling of happiness.My health magazine is one that conforms to the simple conventions followed by most magazines in order to be identified as such. As most popular health magazines such as self, women’s health , my magazine includes puff, a masthead, featured article, a main image, barcode, the issue number and date- however the codes I have integrated in my health magazine tend not to follow the same codes used in other health magazines, as they may have a different target audience. I have chosen a different name in order to communicate with my target audience.I found that choosing a smart figure model and name for a health magazine was quite strange. One of the reasons behind this is that in today’s society, media audiences have changed due to social and informative media becoming integrated into our society’s everyday lives. As women today are becoming lazier and have forgotten that they too have life which they need to change for their betterment. They are no more active and positive which probably has made their life go slow. That is why I chose ‘Shape Issue’ to be in the puff of my magazine as it is a common issue in the social groups these days.

Q2. How does your product engage with audience and how would it be distributed as a real media text?In a media product, the audience engagement is very important in order for the distribution of that product. Similarly, The pose of the model in my magazine shows thepositive attitude she has, her activeness and the way she is smiling connoting that she already has a happy life that is why she is representing it that way engaging the audience by her eye contact. I chose this genre as my targeted audience really needs awareness of health and I wanted to represent that how women can also show the strong side of their self and prove that they can change their life by challenging their health. My product has been produced in a way to target the range of working women, newly married girls, and aged women so they read my product. The female model on my magazine cover page was an inspiration to the target audience as she was holding an apple which connotes health so they could be motivated more in picking up the magazine and reading what it was about. Moreover, my target audience had to be Pakistan because women here need to be aware of the healthy lifestyle issues which women face and the health magazine is a solution to them so they eat, drink and stay healthy. The article given inside is a challenge to them to change their selves. Distribution is defined as the route from which manufacturers distribute their products to their consumers. My magazine would be published and advertised by DENNIS PUBLISHING CO. LTD. As a real media text distribution, firstly I will check consumer behavior and outcome of my product by selling them in medical stores, clinics etc. Secondly, I want it to be a supplementary magazine in surgery centers so people know that surgery is not the only way and they might get awareness.

Q3. How did your production skills develop throughout the project?

Throughout the year, I made a lot of mistakes in my project but developed may skills. From the preliminary task I made, I learnt many things then such as the camera angles, first taking a look at the features of the camera so I could know how to properly use it however still made little mistakes. By the time, I also developed with the practical skills such as shooting with the right camera angles, the right setting of lighting so the shoot could be successful. Also, development of the editing skills were improved by then and I learnt the use of tools as well. Taking evidences while shooting and working was the most important thing so the examiner knew that I did the work myself. Pixels and resolutions were standard for the magazine. Moreover, I also developed the creative skills such as creating vision and putting the vision into practice, learning the ability to describe and distinguish between different genres, researching and planning about them.

Q4. How did you integrate technologies-software, hardware and online in the project? Since I used IPhone 5s and Nikon Coolpix camera for my preliminary task, the

results weren’t that good, so this time I decided to use DSLR because of high definition(HD) and fine details.SOFTWARE: Basically, I followed the previous steps that I used in my preliminary task from the opening sequence i.e. for editing and making of my magazine I used Adobe Photoshop CS3. HARDWARE: I used a DSLR Nikon D3200, and used an 55mm lens-which was able to give a variable focal length that focused on expressions which was one of the key elements of my shoot. ONLINE: In order to make the magazine I needed and used a versatile number of

resources available online via the internet.  I used Wikipedia, Google to do research on my selected genre magazines

covers, content page, double spread, sizes, pixels and resolutions, media distributors and different names of health magazines.

For my blog I used Weebly as it was user-friendly, slide share to make presentations that would reflect on the coursework with creative visual.