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


By deconstructing media, for example analyzing a music magazine, you would look for conventions. Conventions are very important in media productions because it notice's what structure has been used before. A convention can also be described as a common denotation. Music magazines with different genre have specific conventions, take 'Kerrang' for example. Kerrang's conventions have very ruggered text and the models always have an objective gaze. Some magazine have more conventions than other due to genre and structure. A conventional Magazine would it's title on the top of the front cover and unconventional magazine would have the title in the middle frame or at the bottom. A conventional magazine would always have a model on the front cover, a unconventional magazine wouldn't have a modal at all.
Genre describes what audience is being targeted while producing a magazine. Genre is similar to a stereotype- they both want to express their lifestyle. My magazine has a Indie/Rock genre. Having an indie genre is very unconventional for a magazine because it is hard to try and express it's content. Therefore I chose the band 'The Smiths' to express this because 'The Smiths' really connote a indie genre. Placing the headline 'The Smiths' middle frame in capitals, hopefully viewers will recognize this second (Title being first) and discover what genre this magazine is.
The magazine that influenced me first was the structure of the Karrang's structure and how it uses conventional graphics. The Kerrang magazines choose black boxes with a border and place text or images in them, mainly to stand out but personally it looks more professional. This because I added boxes to my front cover, but also my contents page.

This image is of a Kerrang magazine, as you can see the magazine provides boxes at the bottom introducing images or text. Being in boxes, this represents a new area on the page- away from all the other graphics. Which also connotes a sense of power- being on its own level. I also like a slim rectangle box at the bottom, this represents that not only there's everything center/top frame, there's always a little extra at the bottom which ideologically means this magazine front cover hardly end. Large head lines connote awareness which is good for target audiences. It does it's job in sucking viewers in and making them attached to the magazine.


This double page spread influences me, just because of its ideology. The ideology of this double page spread is freedom. A lot of conventional double page spreads have big spaces- due to what their expressing. Usually art and culture have big spaces if they were on a double page spread. Although stereotypical girl magazines for example Hello and OK magazines have double page spreads which are full, conventional to a newspaper.

Connotation analysis

Front Cover
http://www.flickr.com/photos/54368073@N04/5353702723/
Contents Page
http://www.flickr.com/photos/54368073@N04/5354364742/
Double Page Spread
http://www.flickr.com/photos/54368073@N04/5362790985/