Slide 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

As a whole, the combination of all three of our media products (soap opera trailer, TV listings magazine and poster) are very similar and are to the same standard of real media products that are advertising popular soaps such as Eastenders and Coronation Street. I produced the TV Listings magazine front cover which is called ‘TV Now’. I chose this name for the product as it was suitable for the type of magazine, i.e. a TV listings magazine that is produced weekly, therefore containing relevant TV programme times as to what is being shown right now. I choose to follow real conventions used on current media products such as the date (positioned at the top of the page), the masthead (positioned at the top of the page), price puff, tagline and barcode. With these features I used them in a similar format as real media products do, for example the positioning of the masthead is at the top of the page. The reason for doing this is to allow the masthead to be visible when displayed in a shop on a point of sale display. All of the features on the TV listings magazine are related to the one soap opera ‘Westbourne Way’. This is un-conventional because most other TV listings magazines include details of numerous soap operas. ‘Westbourne Way’ is a new soap opera, therefore I wanted the main focus to be entirely on this soap, so readers can familiarise themselves with the new soap. When researching audiences of TV listings magazines I discovered that the majority of consumers who read this type of magazine were women aged 45+ (National Readership Survey), also when issuing the audience research questionnaires we asked the audience (18-24 years old) if there was a TV listings magazine aimed at their age group, would they buy it? The answer was no, so this indicated that I needed to produce a magazine aimed at the parents of the target audience. My TV listings magazine is aimed at both women aged 45+ and teenagers/young people. I have done this by creating a sub-section on the main page that is dedicated to a younger audience, so when their parents buy the magazine, they then too will have interest in it.A typical convention on a TV listings magazine is to feature two of the actors out of character, both with eye contact. I chose not to follow this convention and positioned my actors in character, with one character (the antagonist) facing and looking at the other character. I think this was successful as it creates the impression that everyone is looking at this character, and gives some indication that there is going to be a bad relationship between these two characters in the soap opera. For our poster, we decided that the page orientation was going to be horizontal. This is unconventional as posters usually appear vertically in places such as bus stops. By having the poster horizontal we were able to display the image much more professionally and create a dramatic scene. The masthead ‘Westbourne Way’ is positioned at the bottom of the poster, and initially we assumed this was un-conventional as it was at the bottom, yet actually it is very conventional as it shows that the soap opera is very recent. The model in the image has no eye contact with the audience (her eyes are shut), this is un-conventional as in real products all the models had eye contact with the audience. I think our poster is more eye catching as it will make the reader want to find out more about this situation, why is she on the floor? Why does she have her eyes shut? Therefore, by having her eyes shut I think this makes the poster more appealing and will encourage the audience to watch the soap.