Rowan's A2 Media: Evaluation Question 1

Evaluation Question 1:
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

For the other part of my ancillary tasks I had to create a magazine cover for my film again part of the marketing campaign. Before I started creating the magazine cover I did some research into existing film magazines to see what kind of magazine my film would appear on and what the conventions were, so that I could include them, helping my magazine cover look more authentic.

When looking at the conventions of magazine front covers, I look at a variety of different magazines including a mainstream magazine and a more independent magazine.

I looked at the two very different magazines to see if the same conventions are used regardless of the target audience but also to see what the different conventions between the two are and which type of magazine would be more appropriate for my film. They both share the general conventions including a masthead which more often than not appears at the top of the magazine, cover lines that reference what will appear in the magazine. The difference is the way the display these conventions for example on the mainstream magazine the masthead is in big block capital letters, whereas on the independent magazine the letters are lower case with a less bold font.

In conclusion it is clear that if I want to make my magazine cover seem authentic I will need to include these conventions. Once I decided it would be more appropriate for me to do an independent magazine I analysed a number of sight and sing magazine front covers.

Sight and Sound Analysis

Sight and Sound Analysis 1

Sight and Sound Analysis 2

Sight and Sound Analysis 3

Sight and Sound Analysis 4

Sight and Sound Analysis 5

I later realised I wanted to do a more specific genre magazine focusing on Noir films, so I looked at various genre specific magazines to get a rough idea of how they represented their genre within the general conventions of magazines. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a noir specific magazine so the information I got from genre specific magazines was minimal but game me an outline of what to include in my magazine cover.

Genre Specific Magazines

Using real magazine conventions:

Masthead