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

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

Above is a photograph of “The Source” magazine next to “Mercy” magazine which i created.

Masthead

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Model credit

Model credit

Model credit

Main Model credit

Main cover line

Barcode

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Blackberry barcode

Free gift

Dateline

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Editors note

Title of contents

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When creating my magazine I stuck to traditional hip hop magazine codes and conventions as much as I could, and looked at other music magazines to set an example for my own such as “Vibe” magazine. I made the style and layout of my music magazine similar to that of other magazines of the same genre. For instance, on the front cover of my magazine I used a large image of my main artist which took up a lot of the page which didn’t cover the title because I the artist I was focusing on was an up and coming artist and in other established magazines they had their artists in front of their masthead partially covering it because the artists were already famous and made the brand of the magazine more popular but because my artist is new and hardly anyone has heard of him I made sure to make him the main focus but also make sure that the audience knew it was a Mercy magazine, I borrowed this convention from various other magazines such as Vibe and NME, which I had noticed often did the same thing. I decided to copy their technique as I felt it created a big impact upon the target audience. The background colour for the pages of my magazine was black because I wanted that to be one of my main colours featured throughout the magazine along with yellow and white, as I observed in other popular music magazines such as Q and Kerrang that it was common for music magazines to have darker background colours for their pages and also have a

Article

Images of main artist

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brighter colour added to their colour scheme to make the magazine stand out. I also followed examples of other magazines in various additional aspects of my magazine such as the way my headings were formatted and the way my text, photographs, and captions were presented. However I challenged some conventions of real media products through the use of one of my photographs. The majority of my photographs I tried to make representative of the hip hop music genre but the one photo on my double page spread of “ANTZ” smiling. This is really untraditional to see in a hip hop magazine of a rapper because rappers are stereotyped to be angry, aggressive and serious 24/7. In the made-up interview the made-up artist “ANTZ” mentioned his love of music, how happy he is that he has starting to live his dream so the photograph of him looking happy and content with himself and his life seemed logical to use.