Analysing Media Representation in Last Year's Coursework

For my AS Media course, I created a front cover, contents page and double page spread for a music magazine of my choice.  All of the ideas that I came up with were completely my own, with the way in which I was appealing to my audience being very unique due to my genre being 'female festival goers', which is a very niche area when it comes to marketing and distributing my media product.  Despite mainly using my own ideas and design, I used various stereotypical techniques in creating my magazine in order to conform to normality.  This is important because it makes it more likely for the audience to be drawn towards to product.  These types of technique included the placement of titles along with the style and colour of the fonts depending on the audience that I was targeting.  Everything that I used best appealed to my audience because of the way that everything looked. 

The pinks and the whites were the main colours that I decided to use because I thought that they worked best with the overall theme that I was going for.  Along with the fonts, I thought that they best represented the genre of the magazine along with the audience that I was aiming my product at.  I tried my best to make it look like a professional piece of media and I think that it looks legitimate and definitely represents the genre along with the audience. 







In terms of who my magazine was initially going to be aimed at, I automatically knew that I wanted to create something that would relate well to something that I like.  Therefore the target audience had to be female so that I would know how to include certain things that females like, such as colours, language and texts that look most appealing.  I also thought that it would be a good idea to appeal to a certain area of the media market that hasn't already been explored which is why I chose to go with the festival idea.  As I'd never seen a festival based magazine on the shelves before I thought that it would be interesting to see if I could attempt to open up the idea and make it a reality.  

When it came to actually creating the front cover I thought of all of the different representations we are used to seeing in the media.  To me, the most common representation is that of women.  Laura Mulvey's, Male Gaze theory, highlights how females are put in desirable positions in order to appeal to men.  Even so this can work for women looking at other women too.  For example, someone could look at a celebrity on the front of a magazine and think that they have an amazing figure and would start to begin to look up to them.  With this in mind, I wanted to use a photo on the front cover that would appeal and relate to the audience of 16-21 year old festival goers and I think that the image I chose works very well with what I was trying to achieve.


















The contents page and double page spread also relate to the different types of media representation because they both have very specific features that would appeal to my target audience.  The representation of the main person in the magazine, is clearly one that would appeal to a lot of people, due to the fact that she is happy and that there is a lot going on surrounding her life.  It is important to represent the person on the main pages, as someone who is admirable and who could relate well to the people I am aiming my product at.

In regards to media representation, I think that all of my pages that I created represent the genre and the audience very well and all have various techniques and ideologies that add to the conventions of a music magazine.