Evaluation Activity 2 Draft

Evaluation Activity 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

I knew from the beginning that one of the most vital aspects to get right on my magazine would be the front cover and the artist on it. This is the first thing the reader sees and so needs to immediately give off the right first impression for the magazine as a whole. If the picture is not very eye-catching then people will not pick it up to read however, you can’t throw the reader off and have some really crazy image on the front that grabs their attention but actually has doing to do with the rest of your magazine. I wanted a picture that gave the reader the impression that this magazine is definitely not a mainstream, pop magazine. That would be the last thing i want to achieve. My magazine is for those who have a slightly more divergent music taste and so with my front cover image i wanted to give off that impression.

Looking at my target audience research it was quite clear to me the sort of style my front cover artist was going to adopt in order for it to attract my target audience. The artist i have created was highly inspired by a lot of the bands and artists i looked at for my research previously. I could have gone for any gender on my front cover as my target audience was about a 50/50 split; it wasn’t aimed at any specific gender. In the end i decided to go for a male as i had ideas for creating a whole 80s style look and i felt that was easier to achieve with a male. So at this point i knew i wanted a male and i already knew he was going to be an upcoming, alternative/indie rock artist from all of my research; it was just finding the right person to achieve this look. After doing some research on www.uktribes.com i found that my magazine would most likely appeal to those who fall under the ‘leading edge’, ‘hipster’ and ‘young alt’ categories. Doing this research really helped me finalise my ideas for my front cover artist and the whole style i wanted them to have.

So having done the research i knew my front cover artist was going to be a 16-25 year old male. He needed to have a quite 80s inspired style to keep with my theme and he’s an upcoming alternative/indie rock artist. With this information i tried to think of real artists like this that i could take inspiration from. The person i thought of was an artist called Declan Mckenna. Mckenna is exactly the sort of artist i had in mind for the front of my magazine and so i kept him in mind when styling and taking photos.

For my model, i chose to use my friend Finlay Quinlan to play the part of my artist ‘Mickey Who’ as he has the most similar look to Declan Mckenna that i could find. Luckily enough, Finlay also has quite a similar style to him too as he often wears clothes such as big patterned shirts, rolled up trousers and doc martens; all inspired by the 80s. This meant that i could ask him to bring his own clothes to the two different shoots we did. I styled Finlay in one of his most patterned, vintage shirts to really catch the eye of the reader. We did however keep to a very grey/black & white colour scheme as i knew i wanted to use colourful borders around the photo and didn't want them to clash with what he would be wearing. Overall i think the look is exactly what i wanted to achieve and i’m happy with it.