QUESTION 7

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Preliminary Progression

Evidentially looking at my preliminary work before the production of my final magazine I have come a long way in my use of different software e.g. Photoshop which I had never used before the production of my college magazine and my final music magazine, the skills that I have learnt are of a much more intelligent level to which I was aware of when producing preliminary work but doing this task has allowed me to see myself what progress I have made with my own work throughout research and production itself.

Throughout the progression of my work into the music magazine I have used research into my audience and market through primary and secondary research, this includes using survey monkey to produce a questionnaire in order to see what my target market would be and how to satisfy them. I also carried out an interview with a potential audience member for my magazine and using these two skills to gain information was a quick and simple way of making decisions about my magazine. A secondary task that I did to gain information was also researching online to similar magazines to see what I could do to make mine better or to compare the look of them to mine to see if I am following the conventions of a popular media magazine.

Planning

When planning my magazine I produced a pitch of what my magazine was called, what it would include and colour scheme etc. I presented this to the class and got feedback from my potential audience on what they thought of my ideas and what to change about the magazine. From doing this it allowed me to change my colour scheme which I am glad about as my colour scheme featured on my original pitch contained red which one person said would make it too much like already mass produced popular magazine NME so I changed it to a colour scheme that nobody had really seen before or would recognise as another brand. Producing a style sheet, flat plans and layouts allowed me to know where I was going with the production process and be confident on what my magazine was going to look like so I wouldn’t have difficulty when figuring out the rest, it provided a plan for me to follow and improve along the way which was useful and I have stuck to my chosen layouts as far as I can tell. Planning photographs was quite vague for me as I felt that it would be useful to have a contact sheet and then select the most suitable choices to use for my magazine from there. It allowed me to see all the photos that I had taken together on one page so that I wouldn’t make a mistake in choosing the most suitable and best quality. The limitation of this I found was that when looking at the photos it was hard to tell some apart from each other as they were quite a similar camera angle and position of the band.

Language in Production

I have explored the ways that language is used on a cover of a magazine and the technical terms to use to address each feature, this has taught me a lot on how a magazine is made and published which was a huge leap from my preliminary task to my final music issue that I have produced. I feel that without learning these skills to pull your audience into your magazine and having thought about each feature of the magazine carefully in my preparation work that I would not have made the progress that I have. Being allowed more time on production with my production task gave me more of an opportunity to learn new things about how to use Dafont and Photoshop to make my magazine different and better quality than the first that I have produced. I feel now that I can be much more confident when using this software’s that I have used throughout the project and would be able to produce another piece of better quality if I took more time to look at different elements but am very happy with my progress from my preliminary task.

During the production period of my magazine gave me the opportunity to acquire new skills in technologies and techniques within software and hardware. These included my skills developed on Photoshop with how to add text and how to grab colours from other placed within the page shown in order to employ mise-en-scene into my magazine which would make it more individual and tie it all together. I learnt how to format the page in order to get a coloured background and to add overlay onto fonts to emphasise them clearly.

Contents Page Review

I was not fully happy with the outcome of my contents page that I produced as my preliminary task of my college magazine as I feel that it wasn’t thought out and I didn’t have knowledge at all as to what to include on the page, the huge leap that I have taken from then to the final product now is evident in the quality and even the use of a background colour and different fonts, the images that I have used are of a better quality and there are more than what was featured on the preliminary task, this is more appealing to the audience as they will want visual media as well as written to catch their eye and initially interest them in the issue.

Lessons Learnt: Evaluating

Activity Technologies Skills LessonsPhotographs Canon camera and location of

photographsComposition, camera angles, lighting

The first photos that I took I used a different setting on the camera than the ones that came out well, I used a manual setting but by realising the bad quality of lighting switched to automatic which allowed me to have the flash working and the shutter speed was quicker. The backgrounds of the pictures were quite busy and distracted from the main image, although I could not edit this out I made the lighting darker in the background of the pictures so that it would not be distracting. Some of the pictures that I was taking were not suitable for a main image as the camera angle was not face on to the band, I then went closer to the lead singer and took a picture from above which got the medium shot that I was looking for.

Editing photographs for magazine

Photoshop Colour grabbing, image adjustments, colouradjustments, fontextracting, blending editing

When I first started when producing preliminary tasks I used colours that were notincluded in the photo taken and colours appeared different from each other whereaswhen I started production on my music magazine I discovered the use of a colourgrabbing tool which helped me keep colours co-ordinating and also grab colours fromthe photo itself so that they all matched together nicely and made it a better qualitycover and other pages too. I also learnt to control myself when it comes to editing thepictures and thought more about the genre of the magazine and how the edit of thepictures would suit the genre of my music magazine which I did not think about whenproducing my college magazine in the preliminary task. I used a brown overlay on subimages to make them look more old and individual to fit with the rest of the coloursused.

Extracting fonts from elsewhere

Dafont.com Downloading font and applying it to magazine pages

I chose to use a font that was already featured on the software that I was using when I produced my preliminary task. When I discovered that I could take a font from the internet that would be individual I chose one that would be suitable for the magazine and constantly used it inside which meant downloading it onto the software that I was using, this allowed me to gain an advantage on other magazines by using a font that hadn’t been used before. I didn’t keep my font constant within my sub headings on my mock up contents page whereas keeping it constant with the front page and my contents page made the page look more official and easier to read so the eyes did not have to adjust to different font sizes and fonts on the contents page which could prove difficult.