Evaluation Question 7

What do you feel you have learnt in the progression from creating your preliminary task to your music magazine? 

On the left hand side the images are my preliminary task images, the right my actual magazine. I discuss these images further down in this post.  

Through the progression of my work from the preliminary task, the college magazine, to the final task of creating my music magazine I believe I have learnt a lot to where I currently am. My knowledge on magazines as a whole has greatly improved, I am aware of the key conventions from the basis of a Masthead to the reason behind ‘drop shadows’ on coverlines and the institutions behind them. From before this task I was useless regarding Adobe Photoshop and thoroughly relied on Paint/Microsoft Publisher yet as the weeks went on I grew more and more confident with other software’s – especially Adobe Photoshop which has been proven throughout my blog, via posts, weekly updates and the final production of my professional looking music magazine.

As we can clearly see, looking at both pieces of work, the preliminary and the final product, it is obviously apparent the software I have used, and my knowledge of Photoshop has significantly impacted on the final outcome of my magazine. For my preliminary task I used Microsoft Publisher, which resulted in restricted editing options and leaving you with the only obvious, thus being: change of font size; style of font and other basic editing. This had a huge impact on the quality of my preliminary task by only producing a poor quality, messy college magazine. This lack of edit-ability was purely reflected on my preliminary task and shown through the lack of profession of the actual front cover and contents page.  However, by using Photoshop on my final magazine we can see the significant effect it has on the quality of the magazine, this being purely because of the wider range of tools I can use within the software. By being able to use a ‘drop shadow’ and ‘magic wand tool’ on Photoshop I was able to cut around my images perfectly and able to emphasise coverlines on my front cover in order to stand out to the audience and give the text a three-dimensional view ‘standing-out’ more to the readers. With the help of all these extra features Photoshop enabled me to create a high-professional music magazine perfect for my target audience. The magic wand tool was a vital feature for me to use whilst producing my magazine, especially with how many images needed separated from their background, which has helped me to produce as high of a quality magazine that I have.

Additionally, regarding the use of my final images on my music magazine the quality of them is significantly better than my preliminary tasks ones. I believe this is because I used a photography studio and was able to adjust lighting to how I needed it, have my model pose how I please and there were no interruptions unlike during the production of my preliminary task. By being able to use Photoshop’s photo editing skills and editing the hue and saturation and colour scheme my images successfully link with one another, this is especially presented on my contents page.  Changing these few things within my images, i.e. using a higher quality camera, a professional setting and software with greater features it made my magazine look a far higher standard than my first preliminary task.  

Once again when comparing the two pieces together, I believe it shows my greater understanding of the needed conventions on a magazine and the semantic field of lexis which needs to be used. For example with my preliminary task the lexical field included ‘college’ terms where as my music magazine is simply all music related. By using both of these I have transferred some skills from my preliminary task onto my music magazine.

As well as this similarity I kept many basis conventions the same and used flat plans as a guide for the production of my magazines. Although I kept thoroughly to my preliminary task flat plan, I did not for my music magazine. This was for the best though. With my original flat plan for my music magazine I did not like the idea so decided to totally start again, which I was proud I made the choice of doing. Especially since I changed my contents page two weeks before the deadline, I believe by following my flat plan originally my final product looked extremely unprofessional and messy so this obviously had to change. As you can see through my magazine progression posts, my idea instantly changes and for the better.

Overall, during the creation of my media product I had to take into consideration many factors: the time I had to produce my work; teamwork issues; technology issues (especially the lack of resources and reliability of working computers) and my target audience. I have learnt a lot whilst undergoing this project, from the start of the year; time was a major issue and deadlines approached fast. Being able to keep on top of my work was a struggle, especially when feedback was needed, yet if I was to do this project again I would create my own personal targets and aim to beat those deadlines. By receiving feedback by not only my tutor but colleagues I believed this helped my production a great amount, especially by receiving criticism of my blog/magazine as I was able to change these ‘errors’ in order to submit and hopefully achieve a better grade.