Photographs for Music Magazine: Camera Angles

After I had a rough idea of how I wanted my magazine to look and once I had devised a plan I needed photographs. However, before I could begin taking photographs, I first had to plan where I would take them (Location) and in what way (the camera angles). Below is that process of decision making through rough sketches;
                                                                                                                            
 

Camera shots include:

Mid shot: Of main band for the front cover
Long shot: Of main band for double page spread
Close-up: Of individual or two band members for double page spread
Low-angle shot: Of main band for contents page or double page spread
High-angle shot: Of main band for contents page or double page spread
Wide shot: Of main band for double page spread

High-angle shot: Of individual musician, accompanied by instrument for contents page, possibly black and white
Mid shot: Of individual artist for contents page
Aerial shot: Of main band for contents page (maybe)
Low angle shot: Of three people to look like managers for contents page
Long shot angular perspective: Of two piece band for contents page

Finding a Band 'Image'

Mise-en-scene research- costume

In order to make my magazine convincing I would need good quality photographs of people who looked like a band. This would require study of how an 'image' is acquired, in order to do this a compiled a collage of a variety of recording artists. The main link between the artists in that I listen to the music produced by all of them and want my magazine to be a genre that could accompany anyone of these artists.

























Chosen music focus: A loose form of all things alternative rock, indie and electro.Clothing can be anything from smart-casual, classy, 'nerdy', 'preppy' or eccentric.
Facial expressions vary but are usually serious or a face is being pulled.

Audience Research: Music Magazine

Analysis of the Contents Pages and Double Page Spreads of Several Music Magazines

For each music magazine I looked at the contents page and the double page spreads of the main features in relation to the front cover.

NME Magazine- Glasvegas



NME Magazine- White Lies



Q Magazine

Further Analysis of Music Magazine Front Covers

Here I used the front covers of an issue of Q, Record Collector and Mojo. I highlighted the interesting structural devices that varied from the ones used in NME magazine, which I am using as a basis for my own work.



General observations when analysing the front covers of music magazines:

Colour scheme- Always black and white are the predominant shades, red and grey are often interwoven, less commonly yellow and blue can be used.
Title- Is general short, catchy and in a formal, simple font. Titles can involve word play such as 'Q' and the use of phonetics to reference to 'Cue the music' in a single letter. Abbreviations can also be used, for example 'NME' stands for 'New Musical Express'.
Photography- The background image of a music magazine is usually a mid to long shot of a band. These bands often have distinctive looks and stare at the camera, band members are more often than not male and the most common number of band members is four. However, bands with three members, or just a front-man/woman from a particularly well known band can feature on the front cover alone. Moreover there is usually no background or a plain background to these photographs and sometimes the photograph can be in black and white.
General text- The image on the front cover is always linked to the contexts of the magazine by way of a main feature, always mentioned on the front cover in large writing on top of everything else. It is common from the name of the band/musician to be the title of the feature, this will be the largest text and can be accompanied by quotes from the artist and a short line of text revealing, very briefly, what the article will be about. 
Bar code- Can be either portrait or landscape and is most common in the bottom right-hand corner of the front cover. Accompanying this will be the price, date and issue number of the magazine.
Other images on front cover- These can be a variety of camera shots from high-angle/low-angle to mid/wide/aerial/close-up/extreme close-up shot.

Magazine Industry Research: NME

I have researched the background of NME magazine to better understand its agenda and target audience. NME (New Musical Express) is a multi-media platform that publishes a weekly magazine, has a radio station, its own TV channel and am interactive website. It actively champions new music, mixing the agenda of advertisement and entertainment. NME magazine was the first magazine to include a singles chart in its 14 November edition in 1952. The magazine specialises in Gonzo journalism- a style of journalism concerned with heavy author influence, allowing articles to have 'subjective flair' and include the journalist as part of the story. This allow their stories to be more interesting, naturally, exaggeration, profanity and figurative language are a common feature of NME magazine articles. This gives NME magazine a distinct target audience. Although there is no clear cut target audience listed on the NME website (or the publisher's website), from their style of addressing the reader, I can guess that the target audience is 16-25 year olds, whose main interest in reading the magazine is because of their keen interest in music. this can also be gathered from the types of advertisements in the magazine; predominantly music related. NME magazine costs £2.20 so would be aimed at socio-economical groups between B-C2 on the JICNARS scale. The JICNARS (Joint Industrial Committee for National Readerships Surveys) scale is a way of categorising readers based on their household income in order to determine what they would be interested in reading and therefore, how to price a magazine.

B – middle management
C1 – lower management and administrative workers
C2 – skilled manual workers

According to the promotional pack on the website of its distributer (IPC Media) NME is "a truly unique multi-platform media proposition". IPC media produce NME along with over "60 iconic media brands, with print alone reaching almost two thirds of UK women and 42% of UK men – almost 26 million UK adults – while our websites collectively reach over 20 million users every month."

I obtained this information from the NRS website (National Readership Survey)

Clearly NME has a wide circulation that reaches a lot of people, this suggests that it has versatile appeal.

Analysis of Music Magazine Front Cover: NME