Classical Mindmap

Along with my mood board, I have also created a mind map of things I associate with the classical genre to help me get a feel for what my final product should look like.

Cohens Moral Panic

The Moral Panic is a condition, episode, person or group of persons that emerge as a threat to societal values and interests. These people or episodes are build up as 'social devils' when the powerful groups that have influence over the media face troubled times, which often results in that group of people or event facing a lot of disapproval or hostility in public opinion. Social devil are often subject to stereotyping and are used as a scapegoat of sorts, to blame all the current problems of society on, even when they have little to nothing to do with the problem at hand (which they often don't). Dome examples of -social devils' built up by the media were football in England around 100 years ago, which was blamed as the cause of hooliganism. Bicycles were similarly blasted in the media in the 1890 as the cause of 'chaos and terror' in society. More recent examples include Video games, which have been blamed for a lot of societies problems since the 90's, and most recently the internet, which various arms of the media have claimed has skewered our values as a society.

My School Magazine

 This is my finished prelim task, a contents page and front cover for a school magazine. I created it using Adobe In-Design  and all the pictures (which I have taken myself as I will have to in my music magazine task) have ben edited using Adobe Photoshop. Now that I have some experience with In-Design, I can take the system into account when thinking about my music magazine

Mood Board

For my music magazines, I have decided to go with the classical genre. I realise that this is a niche market but it is a genre of music that I genuinely enjoy and feel is somewhat underappreciated in modern society despite the fact that their are many modern classical composers such as Ludvicio Einuodi , Hans Zimmer and André Rio who are still active in their writing of great music. To give myself ideas for a magazine of my chosen genre, I have created a classical mood board composed of things I associate with classical music.

In-Design

In preparation for my prelim task, on top of Photoshop, I also familiarised myself with Adobe In-Design . During my practice I mocked up a double page spread for a fictional article on the Arctic Monkeys. In-Design is the very system that a lot of professional magazine publishers use, so if I want my media productions to look as authentic as possible, its important that I get used to the system. As shown in my mocked up double page spread below, it allows for things such me to better control the gutters, fit pull quotes in-between two bodies of text, and other small details that add up to make an article look more convincingly authentic.

Deyes High Newsletter Analysis

In preparation for my prelim task I have analysed my schools newsletter. From my analysis, overall the layout of the front cover is poor, in that it fails at grabbing the readers attention.

Femenist theory

Feminism and feminist theory is important in media as the media is very influential in our view of women. Laura Mulvey ,a British feminist and film theorist, developed the 'Male Gaze' theory, the theory that Hollywood assumes that the audience is masculine and then based on that assumption, portrays women in the media in a way most appealing to that audience. There are two concepts that come into play when women are portrayed based on the Male Gaze, the first being objectification, in which women are portrayed merely as object of desire, or something controllable, and the second is narcissism in which we want to be like or identify with the character or icon in the media.
Miley Cyrus is a good example of a figure in media who has been effected by the male gaze as her image in the media has transformed to become more appealing to the male gaze.

Ideology

In media, and ideology is the concept behind a piece of media which is presented through semiotics. The Ideology behind a media product is important because it not only conveys what the product it is about but also conveys the target audience. Due to this ideology will be very important in both my music magazine and prelim task as by effectively showing my ideology in my products they will appeal to my target audience. As an example of an ideology, for my preliminary school magazine I think the ideology I would like to convey is that Deyes High is a modern school, with a range of modern and diverse facilities. To convey this ideology I will need to have lots of pictures showing the diversity of facilities, as well as incorporating a modern look in the design and layout of the magazines through connotations in things like the font and colours.

Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of signs and what they mean, a sign being something that represents something other than itself. It is very important to understand Semiotics when creating  magazine, as they indicate various things about a given sign I might use such as who it is most appropriate for and how it would make them feel. There are three different types of signs, symbols, indexes and icons. A symbol is a sign representing something that it has no contextual link to such as numbers or letters. An index is a sign that while not directly signifying the signified, it does contextually, such as a skull signifying danger. Finally an icon directly represents what it is signifying, such as an image of a bird which directly represents a bird.