Critical Self Reflection

This blog will talk about the Critical Self Reflection I wrote in regards to the magazine I made.

1. How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?

My media product (magazine) employs cliched genre conventions from the beauty and fashion sectors by featuring female models and is representative of its target demographic, which is primarily female. The magazine rejected some of the conventions of western magazines such as Vogue Britain or Harper's Bazaar, instead subverting towards those of its Asian counterparts under the Vogue umbrella, such as Vogue Korea and Vogue China for references.
We also wish to convey the beauty of Asian women through this magazine, notably how small eyes may be gorgeous and appealing. This is also why the model was chosen to be Chinese.

We didn't employ difficult positions for the poses; instead, we chose stances that anyone, even a non-professional model, could easily replicate. We also concentrated on making our two models glance at the camera (mode of address) more frequently in order to develop an indirect communication relationship and make a strong impact through these gazes. In terms of camera angles, we typically employ low perspectives to give the sense that women can have strength and lead. This is linked to the patriarchal era that currently exists in the Asian continent. This is further reinforced by the race of our two models, both of whom are Asian ladies. We want them to portray the beauty of Asian women while also bringing out their forceful side through their clothing and poses.

2. How does your product engage with audiences and how it would be distributed as a real media text?

The magazine engages with its audience through having mentioned a website in numerous of the pages so audience could get more content of the magazine through it’s website, we also employed a QR code where audiences can see the behind the scenes from various photoshoots from which the pictures from the articles/ads were taken from. This can be distributed as real media text through for example; where we plan on selling the magazine such as supermarkets where audiences can grab the magazine from the checkouts or bookstores alike which would include the majority of our distribution. We are well aware that pricing is an important aspect in garnering The target demographic for this magazine would be teens, young adults and adults ranging from 15-30 of female gender, cross media convergence has been on the rise due to technological convergence in this contemporary age and hence adding a QR code makes it accessible for audiences to get more content. The advancement of communication technology leads to the rapid growth of multi-platform media use among media consumers today, the content is being repurposed and spread across multiple social media channels simultaneously. Modern-day advertising methods would mean that we could spread our magazine word-wide through use of internet with the website we included, our audience in addition to getting more content can easily access our brand as it is digitized, as audiences consumer more content, the magazine benefits as well.

Given the technological conversion that has occurred with the transition of conventional media to new media, we give these two services to our audience. This is also encouraged by the increasingly widespread phenomenon of globalization, and with these things, everything related to technology and media is made easier for human life. This is, of course, far more efficient for the audience and far less expensive than purchasing physical magazines.

3. How did your production skill develop throughout this project?

My production skills throughout this project has majorly developed as prior to the project I had not been able to edit photos or taken any photos using a camera. This project has taught me to adopt skills such as learning how to properly handle a camera and features of a camera that may make my project better such as learning about depth of field which is the distance between the nearest and furthest elements in a scene that appear to be "acceptably sharp" in an image, this aided in helping me and my teammate distinguish which we want to focus on whether it’d be the product or the model

Editing itself taught me how to do so many things that now seem very simple to me, despite the fact that they used to be really difficult for me. The simplest method is to make the lettering beneath the photo; I even studied multiple YouTube video lessons and it still failed. But as I tried to investigate all of the existing features, I quickly discovered a way out. Aside from that, I learnt how to alter lighting in editing, which is a function that makes it easier to clip an image from the background and relocate it to another.

4. How did you integrate technologies - software, hardware and online - in this project?

During the Research and Planning stage, in addition to my drawn drafts that I have made for all the contents within the magazine I have used the design website Canva to create a rough draft in pertinence to the contents page, cover page as well as the article spread. This made it easier for me to be able to have a rough overview on how the magazine would look when I have finished designing it with. The canva website as well as "Dafont" have helped in choosing the typography suited for our magazine. This proved beneficial as it helped me stay consistent with the genre conventions and target audience with how the typography would be representative of how it will attract from those categories. During the planning stage, I had used my Iphone to take photos of different poses I would later employ to our magazine, this was beneficial in creating the digital draft done through canva. I have incorporated technology by utilizing various pieces of hardwares and softwares continuously, including during the photo op in the production stage, this included the use of fans, light fixtures/ light boxes, . The fan managed to help create a look of "a moving image," attempting to make it all more elevated and shows evidence of its genre conventions of lavish since numerous of the references we focused into, such as vogue, harper's bazaar, w and etc. frequently employed the look to generate an edgy yet contemporary feel, through the implementation of the style to contextualize the daring message of women in action. We also used the set's existing lighting fixtures and even an additional light box to produce the image we wanted, which had a brighter intensity to mimic the studio atmosphere. We sought to replicate that with the intensity of light we adopted and while remaining true to our target demographic as the majority of the images generated in the beauty space were suggestive of the flashing studio lights with high resolutions. This has a connotation for our genre's audience of fashion and beauty. The camera, which I utilized was a Fujifilm XD 2 with a 35mm lens, is another piece of hardware that was employed. While the quality of the images was still satisfactory, using a physical camera contributed to achieving greater resolution and freed up additional time for editing, since using a phone could've result in far more time required to edit the pictures to depict the aesthetic of the high-end and luxury in relevance to the target audience while the camera already created a good baseline and less editing was therefore needed. Utilizing this camera significantly changed how well the photos managed to turn out.