Class Notes

Using conventions for real world texts: How did you use conventional of real world texts to make both your music video and your music magazine?

 

When making media products, it is always mindful to remember what the actual products look like and who they sell to. And what the conventions of each genre is. When making my music magazine, I made a preliminary example of a magazine by creating a Haydon School magazine – with content surrounding the school. Seeing as there are no school magazines, the formula to making one was more complicated. I decided to use primary colours on my front page to attract attention to the masthead. This use of bold and bright colours suggests that it was more friendly to a kid – based audience. When making my front page, I decided to use Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop is a program where you can edit photos. This program is not the program used when making music magazines. When making magazines, the popular and more suitable choice of program is Adobe InDesign. I think this showed progression from my preliminary task to my final product. There are clear differences from my final product and my preliminary task. For example, I learned that the masthead of a magazine is clear to drawing in your audience. Due to it being the biggest text on a page. For my text on my preliminary task, I used Arial on my preliminary task. It is quite a bland text that is not intended on drawing your audience. This is one criticism I took into account. When deciding on my font, I decided to use the Edition font. This is the font that Beyonce used on her third album – I am Sasha Fierce. I thought using this would be effective because Beyonce is an R&B icon, and using her iconography would be effective in terms of attracting mass audiences of the ABC1 16-30 demographic. This is the people who often immerse themselves in her music and other artist’s music in the same genre – such as Usher, Chris Brown, and Estelle. I also thought that using this iconography would help establish the perceived image of my music magazine. It was very clear, that I wanted to make a ‘high brow’ R&B magazine which didn’t talk down to their audiences. Whereas, R&B magazines like Vibe play on the perceived images and stereotypes of their audiences, allowing nothing refreshing in that genre to introduced.

 

When making a music video, I felt it was harder to break away from the conventions of the alternative genre. The song I decided to do was What The Water Gave Me by Florence & The Machine.