Creating the Magazine Advert

For our second ancillary task we had to create and complete a magazine advert to promote our CD and album. 

For our magazine advert, we wanted to differ from the photos we had used on our CD cover, and have one with more body language involved, and using that to also portray emotion. We made sure to use the same make up and clothing that was used for the CD task. As you can see in the photo below (the one we have chosen to use) she is holding her hair back, and we decided to do this as she pushes her hair back in frustration a lot in our video.

Again we wanted to make sure that there was continuity and links throughout the two ancillary tasks so we decided to again put this photo into black and white as well, and we again did this in PhotoShop.

We also wanted to have a black background for this ancillary task, much like our other ancillary task. We used the 'paint' tool and the 'eraser' tool around the edges of the photograph to make the background black.

Some parts (such as the parts highlighted below) were hard to edit

We then put the photo into the programme 'InDesign' to see how much the outline of the photographs would stand out. As you can see it is not exactly professional looking and we will have to put the photo back into PhotoShop to edit it more.

To give it a more professional look we put a spacing around the image of Alice, and we did this by using the 'eraser' tool. This gave a smudge effect which highlighted the photo.

We then put it into InDesign, but this time realised that the top of the photo where the smudge effect was, looked too sharp, and did not look professional, this is shown below:

To overcome this problem, we decided to decrease the size of the magazine, which meant we could hide the sharpness at the top of the photograph. This did not cause any problems as everything we wanted to fit onto the page was still included.

Our final product is shown below, which we feel is successful as it keeps continuity with our other ancillary tasks and has a professional look to it.

Shown above is our predicted final product, which we thought was complete to hand in for moderation. However when giving it to our media teacher to look at for feedback, we found that his criticism was worrying as he said he did not like the poster at all, especially the white smudge effect around Alice which he thought was "terrible". Due to our negative feedback, we have decided to go back to the drawing board and edit our magazine advert further so that it looks better, even though we are pressed for time.

We decided to start by obviously editing the original photo to get rid of the smudge effect, which was the main part that our media teacher did not like. We did this on PhotoShop using the 'eraser' tool. This is shown in the photo below, where there are highlighted parts of Alice's arm. This process was extremely difficult as we had to be sure not to erase any of Alice's arm and only the smudge.

After removing the white edge we decided to put the photo back onto the page and see if it improved. We felt by editing this it did not as now, we feel, the advert is very plain with not much to look at. To overcome this problem, we decided to add more text to the page to increase interest and have more features to catch the audience's attention when looking at.

I have highlighted on the screen shot above the changes that have been made within the production of our magazine advert. We centered the image of Alice to make her the most prominent feature on the advert as the advert is promoting her song. We added ratings from popular music magazines and newspapers which allow a link to be made into real media products as we have seen this on real magazine adverts in our research. We also changed the colour of the 'Available now' text box to draw more attention to the fact that her songs are available for purchase, we changed it to red which links with the red 'A' on the album front cover. We also added a 'Debut' text box with a date of release for the whole album so that our target audience of teenagers and young people were aware of when the whole album will be out for sale. We have used the same font throughout our whole production of both ancillary tasks as this promotes strong continuity and allows our target audience to link all of our products together.

I have highlighted above the similar factors between the newest magazine advert with our other ancillary task. By using the same features on both products we are able to link all of our work together to convey a clear thinking process. We aimed for our products to link together well in order to promote a strong product, we have used a picture of the frontal album cover on the magazine advert so that our target audience are aware of the album that is being promoted. We have also used the same 'SONY MUSIC' text from the CD disk and back of album cover on the magazine advert to portray the music company which links to real media products. By making these changes to our magazine advert we have been able to create a more professional looking advert and it also looks less plain and simple by adding more information about the product we are promoting.

This is now our final magazine advert: