Technology is used by people all over the world. It increased the cinematography process's quality and also helped to modernise the media industry. Only this complex technology allows for printing, animation, diagrams, audio, video graphics, massive data storage, newspaper and magazine production. Google and other search engines are amazingly helpful to obtain information about the world around you and also find out things you want to research, for example magazines. You need to put a lot of effort into making a magazine, by having technology it eases the work process. This is because if you don’t know some information about a topic you can easily research it and get the knowledge you were looking for. The easiest way to research a magazine is through the internet, you have different search engines through which you can find a lot of useful information which can help you with your project. The most important app I used to inspire me was pinterest. I gathered a lot of images and things that I thought would be useful for developing my imagination. In addition, I also looked at some crime movies to give me more ideas about what crime articles I should write about. This helped me a lot as it opened my mind to new crime stories and made me get ideas easier. Also searching on Google the magazines I researched about, reading some of their articles and looking at their illustrations made me know a lot more things about how to get my desired audience interested. My magazine is aimed at an older demographic which is why I made it be bought from book shops rather than online. This also makes my product have a niche market which is what I was going for as I want people to search for it rather than just look up the entire magazine. Furthermore, as my magazine is still produced online the Blumer and Katz theories of Diversion and Surveillance are frequently used. The diversion part of my magazine gives people a moment to relax and escape their worries by reading the interesting articles and Surveillance makes them gain a more in depth understanding of the world around them.
Software
To produce my magazine I used a lot of software, some of it was new to me and some I knew exactly how to use. For all my photos I used Canva to edit them and make them more professional. I edited the lighting on them and also added text, anchorage text, the issue number and also a barcode which made my project look more like a magazine. Even Though I didn’t use Canva before, after some help from my teacher and peers that already knew how the application worked I got the hang of it fast and I feel like I did a great job. To edit my pictures, I also used some photoshop apps like FaceTune to make my models' faces smoother so they look better in my magazine, this also created a more professional look for my final product. I also used it as it is easy to use, didn’t take a lot of time and I had some practice on it as well from the past years. Another app that was easy to use and helped me obtain the product I wanted was my laptop photo app. With it I edited the photos to make them look more vintage as that is the main aspect of my magazine. After I liked the edited images I put them in canva and edited them even more as Canva has some different filters I used.
Hardware
The main hardware I used was a Canon Eos R6. It was a normal camera with which I took all the pictures. It was really easy to use as I had one at home as well so I had a lot of practice with it. I also used my Iphone 11 Pro Max to take some behind the scene pictures and also for my front cover I took some pictures of my model’s makeup with it as well. Furthermore I also used my laptop to gather the photos and I did a lot of research on vintage crime magazines and analysed them. It was very easy for me to do it on my laptop as it is portable, easy to carry and I can take it anywhere with me. This helped me a lot because I knew what I was aiming for while creating my product and what would make it look more professional and put together. Additionally, by using warm lighting and two orange screen setups it made my work a lot easier as I didn’t have a lot of editing to do. This is because the image was exactly how I wanted it to look. They had a lot of warm tones and the lighting wasn’t too bright which gave the illusion of a vintage magazine.
Blog
My Weebly Blog is separated into different sections and divided into different pages. I did this to make it very organised and easy to look through. By making a folder named “ Production” I keeped all the important work in its own place which made it easy to access and look at. On my blog I made different pages for the preparation and production phrases : research, notes that I took in class, pre production process in which I analysed different magazines from my genre , final products, and my four CCRs. This helped me keep my magazine easy to flick through and kept my resources in separate pages depending on what I am searching for. On my blog I also have my “ Terminology” page. It is very useful to me as I can also revise for upcoming exams with it.
For my research tools I used a lot of Google searching. This was my main research tool as I needed a lot of information on my specific topic and how to make my target audience interested. This was harder as I had a high age difference between my youthful audience and older audience. I still wanted to make all my audience be interested in my magazine, share the text’s code and accept the preferred reading. ( Stuard Hall’s Reception Theory). Youtube was another research tool I used. I watched videos of people discussing what they like about crime magazines and how it makes them feel. This greatly aided me in determining exactly what I needed to do to improve my product and make it more desirable. Lastly, I created a questionnaire for my classmates, asking them what genre I should explore and what the title of my magazine should be, by giving them three options. I also asked some of my friends for suggestions on how to improve my magazine. For example, I showed them every one of the images I thought were appropriate for the content pages, article, and front cover, and they gave me their feedback, which was really helpful in determining what people in my younger target demographic liked and disliked.