Photography

To have a good magazine it must have a good quality image on the cover, the photograph on the cover is the first thing people see in a magazine.

This step is critical.

How to make your picture look professional for magazines:

Music magazine photoshoot tips from jvmac

Uses and Gratifications

I will refer my magazine to the use of gratification, so people would automatically like the magazine because of the specific satisfying needs we all have.

Use of gratification from jvmac

http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/short/usegrat.html

Photographer

I decided to follow a photographer's style or ideas, to be able to look like a professional photo-shoot.
To decide which photographer's work to follow, I selected four photographers who work for big magazine names and are currently popular. I then asked my target audience to choose one of them on my questionnaire.
The chosen Photographer was:

Mario Testino has most votes.

Mario Testino's work is mainly for fashion magazines but he also features singers in his work. His work is very powerful, he portrays women as powerful beings with sensuality (usually the models are with bare legs, little coverage and clothing that hugs the figure) to represent femininity. All his pictures include pink which is a stereotypical female colour, which contrasts with the stereotypical male features such as short hair, boxing clothes (men sport) blue background (boy colour). Makeup is used to refine features for a sharper look (bold eyes and cheek bones) His general use of colour is bold and contrasting (black and white, blue and pink and blue and yellow). All his models give eye contact, using fierce direct address aimed at the potential consumer.

Why is eye contact important?
This is called direct address, this is used to interact with the consumer, people are more likely to engage with the magazine as they would sense the feeling of belonging. This is seen on Maslow's Theory:

Belonging is in the third level of the pyramid of needs.

Socialising is a way to feel like we belong, from the thought of being accepted in different groups.

People socialise for enjoyment, and it helps us to feel included in our society. As we all see models enjoying themselves this is showed by smiling, confidence or freedom (independence).

Socialising can sometimes be hampered by boredom, insignificance and insecurity.



Pose and position

My target audience questionnaire results revealed they prefer a long shot photo for the front cover.
Giving me a bigger variety of poses to choose from.

After researching poses I was surprised on how different poses have specific names, each of these are based on a central mid shot:

“The Prayers hands”  The “introspective” shot.

                                                                                                               "Gun hands"










“Jesus pose”


I have then selected 5 long shot poses that would be suitable for my characters and my genres.

1 -A simple and casual looking pose. Lots of variations are possible. As the model can experiment with hand positioning and try different head turns.

2- Another very simple and elegant pose. The model is turned slightly to the front, one hand in the front pockets and the other leaning on the waist with the head turned to the side keeping eye contact.

3-A sensual pose. By holding the hands above the head body curves are emphasized. And eye contact is kept.

            4-This pose would make the singer look like she is a fun, confident and different as this pose is not as common for singer to do. The singer to be able  succeed this pose would have to balance her body into one foot, play around with the arms and body angle. This pose gives an idea of energy and youth.

 5- This is pose is performed with one arm
behind the head and the on the hip with feet together.

Now I have tried a few of the poses:

After experimenting these poses I realised the ideal pose would have to review a confident, fun, dangerous and young, similar to pose number 4. To contrast with the reasons she had a break which are serious, mature and ordinary.
My target consumers also established from my questionnaire analyses that to make the cover shot stand out it would have to make a shot in movement.

Here are some poses I will look at to inspire for my photo shoot.

To inspire my shots I have watched a few videos of Coco Rocha she is a model who is famous for her jumping poses she leaps with energy and enthusiasm:

To achieve this my camera would have to be adjusted to a different setting so it can capture the movement as if it frozen in the air, for it I will need a DSLR camera which stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex. To gain a pixel sharp image the main thing I will need is a high shutter speed. However when using very high shutter speeds less light will allow the camera to capture and compose a nicely balanced image from. Therefore I will need to adjust the amount of aperture too allow more light through the lens while taking high speed photos.

• shutter speed 1/250
• aperture F5.6
  
  
  
  

Masthead

Magazine name

My Magazine name must incorporate both genres pop and rock. It should also be suitable for young adults as much as adults. To ensure that this is true I should avoid any:

age reference such as  Seventeen, Woman, Teen Vogue or Men's Fashion.

I should also avoid separating genders with my magazine name such as:

             female



             male

Most music magazines take care not to only attract a specific gender or age group such as:

Clash: showed many music stars female and male, unisex colour (yellow).
Vibe: stereotype male colour (blue),showed a female singer for balance 
Billboard: male colours blue and dark colours with golden which is unisex. Representing a female she is wearing a delicate dress. However her hair style denotes masculinity as it is male length  hair. The hair is normally an empowering tool for women which was lost. However her facial expression is very empowering.
Mojo: Includes male music stars with girly colours as the background (pink and purple).
Q: A powerful female singer, the queen of pop with her boxing cape which is stereotypically a sport for males. This is showed by unisex colours black and grey which contrast well with her pale skin and her feminine features.
NME: Female singer on a dull unisex background which gives more attention to her iconic ginger coloured hair which is common for men and women.

All those magazine names are vaguely related to music as it can be used for any music genre. Most are short and all catchy.

Suggestions

When asking my target audience for opinions they suggested:
-Burst
-Beat
-Shock!
-Popnow
-Happenings
-Urban Chaos
-Underground
-Hardpop
-JVM
-Prock
-Treble
-Crochet
-Poprock
-Kick
-Tune
-Motif
-Rpop
-Riff
-Bassline
-Rhythm


From the suggested names I selected five that I most favoured considering all aspects mentioned:
-Beat
-Kick
-Tune
-Riff
-Bassline

For more research I researched some Drum Terminology
I found:

- Crash= or "crash cymbal". A cymbal used for accentuation. A drummer will use this cymbal to emphasize a certain beat or accent beat one of the new measure. They generally come in sizes 15" to 18"

- Ride = (ride cymbal) - the primary cymbal that you "ride" much of the time while playing a standard beat. It is usually larger than the rest at around 18" to 22".

- Beater = A drumstick (usually with a mallet-type head) that beats a drum. Also, the rod and ball mechanism on a bass drum foot pedal is called a beater. It "beats" the bass drum.

-Bass drum beater - see "beater"


Resuming my final decision for my music magazine name, I chose between Beat, Bassline and  Kick.

Bassline is my chosen magazine name, as it was able to tick all required features: acceptable for both genders, the magazine style (my point of view) and for my target audience.

Beat was not chosen  because it could affect the older adults by sounding too catchy, Beat is also a well-known brand of music products speakers, headphones, etc. This could affect my brand where people would believe it is copyright.

Kick was not my final magazine name because Kick is not automatically music related, first costumers would think of the action of kicking instead of kick drumming.

Colour scheme

 From analysing answers from question number 1: What colours do you expect to see in a pop rock magazine cover?
my target audience preference of colours for my magazine is:

This table shows most voted colours from each age category and gender :

Female 15-25:      1st black       2nd white         3rd dark blue
Female 25-35:      1st purple     2nd pink           3rd yellow
Male 15-25:         1st red           2nd black         3rd white
Male 25-35:         1st blue         2nd white         3rd black

From this research I was able to determine that my target audience's most preferred colours are black and white as they appear mostly on the table above. I agree with this as black is an iconic rock colour and white would contrast well.
Black represents rock and white corresponds well to black. This means the third colour would have to represent pop.

To find which is the colour is most common in pop music magazine I decided to simply type on Google "pop music magazine" and hope to see a common colour through all pictures.

 

To clarify which are the most used colours in pop music magazines I used a colour hunt website to see a palette of the image above.

This clarifies it could be pink or purple:

In my opinion the colour hunt pallete identifies mostly with pink than purple.

Black, white and pink is the colour scheme defined by my target audience opinion and pop genre magazine most used colours.
However in my opinion the pink could  object
a great deal of male customers. This concern is supported with the fact that in the graph shows that none of the male aged 25-35 suggested pink. Leading me to change my colour scheme.

I made the decision to change pink with red would contrast well with black and white and I believe it can still represent pop very well; King of pop (Michael Jackson) was very  iconic for his black and white suit which was usually represented with red:


And also the album of Taylor Swift which is could 'RED'

~                       

      Taylor Swift is known for wearing her signature red lipstick.
                                                            And many other pop singers use red lipstick such as Rihanna  and Ariana Grande who also were iconic for their red hair.

I can still change the colours tone, but from knowing the colour scheme of my magazine will help me decide the background colour, font colour, model clothes colour and many other decisions to be done.