My Personal Pages

If you are looking at my blog I would love it if you looked at both my personal website, where I have all my photos:

http://benmaccers.wix.com/photographer

and my flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ben-maccers

both of these are very important for my photography work, and media work, so it would be great if you had a look

:)

Music Magazine Photography

After visiting the college's photographic studio with Tom over several weeks I have all of the photography for my front cover, contents page and double page spread, and with some photoshop magic and some indesign work they will be intergrated perfectly into my pieces of work for this project, the images below are all taken by myself with the help of noone else, they will be my final pieces, this is after much trial and error in the studio at college, and after a great deal of time editing, and picking images till they are perfect for use. Overall I am quite impressed with how all of the images came out and will go through the process of creating my magazine cover, contents page and double page spread in indesign and other applications.

For the front cover I chose this low key (one flash black background photography) image which I feel left enough space for the masthead, coverlines and other codes and conventions of a magazine front cover. I felt that the black and white contrast of the image meant I could put in colour to create a house style colour scheme for my magazine. I also think that the image, with the one flash gun and the dark background gives it the mysterious effect, so a matching coverline could mean I lead the audience into the magazine to see who Tom is (Tom Kane for my magazine). Overall I am quite pleased with how this came out as it has left me open for development and ideas on the front cover, I don't feel I am constrained by anything with this image, maybe the choice of colour but I prefer the black and white older feel of the image.

For the contents page I'm not going to use much in the way of images because I am of the view that the contents page is all about the writing and being an information page, so the image above will only be small, maybe 1/5th of the page with writing surrounding it, I was going from the angle sort of like NME magazine, because their contents pages are quite wordy, but I feel that this is a good thing, and aren't wordy enough that the reader can't get their information. Seeing as this will only be a small, but key feature of my magazine I feel that it will fit in nicely with the colour scheme I am planning and the general layout of the page

For the double page spread I chose this image, then extended it's width and made the background the same colour all over, so it would be easy to put text over the image and also so the image fitted the page. I chose this image over the others because I feel so far the images have been fairly serious, so I thought that it made sense to have something a bit more fun - Tom covering his face with his shirt, I got the inspiration for this idea from a Q magazine front cover of Paul McCartney that was in circulation a few years ago, the image (below) I thought gave McCartney the image that he wasn't being serious because he didn't need to be, he has achieved everything he could have possibly done with the Beatles, and I wanted that sort of angle for the double page spread of Tom. I like the image but I feel if I was to re-shoot I would either make the background black or white as the grey colour doesn't really compliment text very well, either black or white, but overall I am quite pleased with how all my images came out and will be looking forward to designing all of the various parts of my magazine.

Music Magazine Proposal

For my magazine I am planning to base it on an indie genre, this would mean the magazine, if it went to market, would compete with other magazines such as NME and Q magazine, these magazines in particular because they will feature similar artists and have a similar sort of style about them, through the research I have done previously to starting this task I have found out that NME is a more casual magazine, something that you pick up every week and read, whereas Q magazine is a more formal affair, being a less frequent magazine, something that is special and you read as a special occasion.

I feel that there are gaps in this market, but ignoring the process of what there has already been and what hasn't been I am planning on making mine more formal and more modern than NME, but less formal and less serious than Q magazine, I feel that my own style will mean I can create something that is visually appealing but gets the message across.

I have played around with a few names for the music magazine, one of them being 'Cardinal Music Magazine' which I may shorten to 'CRDNL', that is the strongest idea as far as a name goes, and the colour scheme will be similar to something I did with my college magazine (look to a previous post on my blogger page), so I'm going to use colours like orange, teal and other in-betweeny colours, rather than the traditional, and overused reds and blues, I also think using Cardinal Red the colour is fairly cliche, as the colour isn't the only meaning for the word cardinal, and using that colour scheme would rather limit the magazine as far as my creativity would go.

The most obvious problems I can see so far would be fonts, this will be something I will have to look and search for until I find the perfect one, one I would like to use that has been previously use is the 'Albion Didot' font used in the BMX magazine, the Albion, it is used during the feature articles and some of the article titles/headlines, I feel I can use something similar for my masthead of the front cover of my magazine.

Music Magazine Research Task Four: Representation Of My Target Audience

In this research task I will discuss the representation of both musicians and the target audience for my magazine. For my magazine, focusing mainly on an 'indie' fan base and mainly indie musicians, this is because at college and in my friendship groups there isn't really any defining 'type' of person other than the people that fit the indie genre, also because indie music is some of my favorite type of music, favorite musicians being Bombay Bicycle Club, and more underground bands such as Little Comets and General Fiasco.

In the music magazine industry and in the media in general these types of people that I will be aiming my magazine at are not really represented well. There are very few music magazines and few publications out there at the moment that target this audience, so I think it will be a fairly unique magazine that I will be creating, I want to make it so anyone who I'm aiming it at, being mainly 16-30 year olds can just pick up the magazine and understand what the content is trying to explain, as with many of these specialist magazines, and more genre specific magazines, for music an example would be Kerrang, the audience will have to know the genre previously very well before they can just pick the magazine up, read it and understand it.

I want to make the magazine look aesthetically pleasing, and an alternative look on an already fairly samey music magazine industry, one of my favourite magazines as far as the style goes is 'The Albion' a free BMX magazine that makes it's money from advertising so it can pay for the printing costs, a relatively good idea, especially as they can charge more as more people pick it up and read it, because at the end of the day it is free, but I find that the design of the magazine is more formal than other BMX magazines, more wordy rather than pictures, but the pictures are still very serious and formal, I like the alternative thinking that goes into things like the front cover, logo, how articles are layed out, the thought process that went into the font which they use in the main articles (Albion Didot), so this magazine could be a sort of inspiration.

I also like the way that NME magazine is set out, after being influenced by many different genres of music and many years of different influences it has reached a sort of indie layout, with the pop influence from the 60's,70's,80's and 90's. Before they took the indie route for their magazine they used to mainly pop, covering all of the big bands from the above era's, such as The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Nirvana etc.

I never regarded Rolling Stone as a real music magazine because it is very different to what I am planning to do for my magazine in the sense that I think Rolling Stone's covers and layout aren't very good, I'm planning on spending the time to make my magazine look legitimate, make it seem like an actual magazine, because after all that is the task.

Music Magazine Research Task Three: Genres Of Music

The genre of a magazine is very important to the way it is set out, so below are lists of popular genres and what genres music magazines are, I will also look at music I listen to, after looking at all of these I will make a decision as to what genre my magazine will fit into, it is very important that I don't pick something that has been overused, or that is present in today's media.

Popular music genres, with magazines that fit these genres next to them:

• Indie - NME
• Pop - Q, Mojo
• Rock - Kerrang
• Hip-Hop - Hip Hop Connection (American Magazine)
• Grime - Flavourmag (Urban London Music and Arts Magazine)
• Hip-Hop/R&B - Vibe Magazine
• Music in General - Rolling Stone Magazine (varies from month to month as to which artist they focus on, the magazine isn't devoted to 

all of these magazines have a layout and a design that mirrors what they are trying to represent, so for example NME has quite an indie feel to it, one that would match today's culture, with the clothing people wear, the people that feature in the magazine and other things such as the features they run and the way the codes and conventions are presented.

Music that I listen to:

• Indie - Bombay Bicycle Club, Little Comets, General Fiasco
• Grime - Skepta, JME, P Money
• Hip-Hop - Kanye West
• Rock - The Rolling Stones, The Beatles

 I think that I will make my magazine more of an indie theme, this is because I feel that there is a slight gap in the market, because although the content of NME is seen to be indie, the design wasn't originally to suit indie music, because when it was created it was more to do with popular music than anything else, and has recently changed. Whereas my magazine will be completely indie orientated, with a modern design that fits the genre, rather than optimized like NME's design has been.