Contact sheets

The image I chose to be on my front cover is the fourth one as the model is looking directly at the camera and appears confident to the audience. Thus, the readers will want to be just like this boy and so buy the magazine in order to identify with him. Also, his pose adds a certain sense of nonchalance and blasé attitude as he does not seem like he views being on the front cover of a magazine as that much of a big deal. For the contents page I decided to do something unique and have am image of my model sitting cross legged on the ground. This gave him the edge of seeming down to Earth and more identifiable with the audience as he was not striking a complicated pose. He was simply sitting down and facing the camera. As I had the camera on a setting where it would take a succession of photos straight after the other some of the images were very similar which is why the last two photos are the same. I chose to use the last photo. I decided to use the last two images on my double page spread. The shot of my model standing up would be the main image on the right page whereas the shot of him sitting down and looking away from the camera would be a smaller image used on the left page. I felt that the main image was of a good, clear quality and sat well amid my article. The other image was chosen because it is not a 'perfect' shot of my model which gives him a rougher edge and hopefully conveys to the reader that he is not perfect, yet people still want to be just like him.

Audience Profile

Using results I gathered from my survey I had to decide upon my demographic. I decided to aim Awake at young, white males aged between 16-23. They would enjoy rock music and generally be in a defiant phase of their life in which being different is something they aspire to be. This demographic will hopefully be generally more into the music than the fame and aesthetics of artists thus meaning that content will mean more to then than the 'look' of my magazine.

Qualitative Audience Research Focus Group

Although the quantitative audience survey was helpful in understanding my demographic I still had to get a better idea of what my audience were specifically looking for in a magazine. I showed a group of 10 people who represented my demographic some templates I had created and asked them to give their opinions on them, stating what they liked and did not like and reasons why. The majority of my focus group said that they like the templates that I had done in blue and red. Further questioning revealed that they thought it would be better suited if I combined these colours and used a colour scheme of red, blue and white. It was decided that the masthead should be black and the feature stories a mixture of blues and reds all of the same hue to ensure the magazine still looked appealing. They liked the idea of the cover story spanning across the main image as they thought this was different and striking. Also, they thought that I could inclue more feature stories as otherwise it seemed that there may be blank spaces which would make my magazine seem empty and not as though it is bursting with content. My focus group found the positioning of content on my magazine unappealing and instead said they would prefer the title: contents to tun down the right side of the page and then the text and image positioned in the rest of the available space. I felt this was a valid point and so decided to follow their advice and make another template depciting this. The double page spread was the most agreed on page. The focus group largely liked what I had done and the position of text was appealing to them. However, they also came up with some different ideas for where to situate the images. The idea of the main image on the left page towards the right was accepted yet they did not like the idea of the smaller images as they found them distracting and pointless. It was so decided that to give my magazine a rougher edge I would copy and paste sections on black tape from Google and arrange them around the image to make it appear as though it has hastily been stuck down. Also, I was to use another image on the left page; one of the model conveying a different emotionto what was shown on the right page. They also stated that the position of my quote should be more in the centre of the columns of text as this is what they had seen in other magazines.