Reviewing my prelimary task and evaluating how I have developed my skills and knowledge throughout the project to achieve my final successful product.
When viewing my prelimary task I feel like my skills to compile a magazine have improved a lot. Firstly I think the music magazine looks a lot more professional and follows the conventions more for a magazine then the college one does. The masthead was not conventional for a magazine as it had a blue background square and border, normally they do not have this. Similarly the feature stories have a background behind the text, I did this because the background was too patterned therefore the text was not clear, but by adding a background this made the magazine not look professional and I think it also made the cover look more cluttered. I took this into consideration when taking my pictures for the front cover, which is why I chose a plain white background, this then made it easy to change colour on Photoshop as her dark clothing stood out from the background. In my first draft I did change the colour of the background but after receiving feedback I kept it white but made the colour stronger as the white background I used from the lighting had a yellow tinge. The placement of the barcode was also not conventional in my college magazine therefore when doing my music magazine I made the barcode smaller and put it at a vertical angle. This made it more realistic to real magazines and was a way I have improved. The placement of the stories on the prelimary task also covered the models up and distracted from the picture, therefore when framing my front cover image I made sure it was a medium-close up which in editing I could then write stories around without interfering too much with the model. I also found that the use of the main story in my college magazine was not clear enough with the main story not clearly been shown to relate to the image. Therefore when doing my music magazine I made sure ‘Delfina’ was in a large font which shows that this is the main story and we can clearly see that the model is called ‘Delfina’. I have also experimented with more styles of writing in my music magazine by using italic style, bold and changing the colours of different parts in a story this allowed a more professional look and showed more variety in my skills. I think overall my skills are shown to have significantly improved between my prelimarly task and the main task, this can be shown in the more realistic look the music magazine has and I am really happy with the outcome of this whereas I found I could quite heavily now criticize my college magazine.
Throughout the process of starting the project I found my knowledge and skills have significantly expanded in the following areas:
Research:
- Learning to compose a LIIAR analysis was part of my planning to effectively look at the way other magazines have successfully reflected their genre and appealed to the audience
- Creating moodboards to collect together an ideology of how my magazine is going to represent my genre through the use of hair, makeup, clothing, possible positions and props.
- Creating a reader profile which allowed me to decide on my target audience and researching current reader profiles for similar products. Also researching demographics which added to creating my target audience.
- Researching behind the scene shoots of artists who are part of my genre to gather a feel for how production teams conduct photoshoots to achieve successful images.
- I also looked into the charts and highlighted how many of the songs featured in them are part of my genre to represent the popularity of my genre.
Terminology:
- Learning and understanding new terminology was an important part to fully understand the magazine industry and what features in the creating of a magazine
- Ideology
- Masthead
- Skyline
- Plug
- Reader profile
- Demographics
Composition:
- Developing an idea of what was an effective layout for my magazine was vital to creating a professional looking magazine, I did this by creating hand-drawn drafts and then creating digital drafts of these. From physically drawn to digital the drafts changed as once on the computer I found I changed my mind about certain original ideas. Which when creating my final product I found a lot of the layout placement was based on the image and fitting text appropriately around the main image. Which links to image placement and the sizings of images as this was important especially when producing the contents page. The images used on the contents page are smaller than the main image used on the front cover, this is because it includes more images and more information on therefore the placement and size of the images on the contents page took more thought as some images I wanted to stand out more than others.
- The colours used in my magazine did change as I re-drafted my magazine but I felt I learnt throughout doing this what colours worked best and stood out yet still kept the genre of my magazine.
- Deciding on text font to work with my genre was something I had to tackle, my main aim was to make sure it was clear and read-able therefore I did opt for simpler fonts but believe this was the correct choice as I am happy with the final choices on text font.
- I had to also decide on what conventions I was going to keep for my magazine and which ones I would leave out. Conventions like the masthead and main images are compulsory for magazines but others like footers, taglines and plugs are not essential and therefore I did decide to leave some of these conventions out which I justified my choices for this in my evaluation.
Photography:
- To take the images I used a DSLR camera. Luckily I have my own which I was quite new to using but had grasped the basics when it came to the photoshoot of my magazine. I did not just have to rely on the camera to produce a successful set of images but also had to set up lighting in the studio. I used three-point lighting which consists of the Key Light (Primary light source), Fill Light (Second light source) and Back Light (Separation light) these work together to create the right conditions for taking an image in artificial light. The key light acts as the main source of light to directly shine onto the model, the fill light acts as a secondary light source to add to this and the back light creates a separation between the model and the background so there is some depth of field to the image.
- I also learnt about shot types which were useful to develop my knowledge of cinematography and also I could recognise the commonly used shots in music magazines so therefore I was prepared with what shots I would need to take in order to create a professional looking magazine.
- Shot types also fits in with learning the framing of images as how I framed my image effected what kind of shot I had. I used a medium long-shot for my main image which allows the model to be viewed from the waist upwards so the audience can see her emotion but also get a sense of the fashion she is wearing which reflects the genre.
PhotoShop:
- This software was a key part to editing and composing my image therefore I significantly developed my skills in this area.
- I learnt different tools such as:
- Lasso tool
- Magnetic lasso tool
- Adding text and re-colour, re-sizing and moving it
- Creating different layers
- Locking layers to prevent any further editing to this layer
- Levels to balance out the image
- Brush tool
- Highlighter tool
- Eraser
- Brightness/contrast levels
- These were all really useful for making my image as although complicated and sometimes frustrating to get to grips with through learning the different tools and ways of editing the image they allowed me to edit the image in ways I did not previously have any idea how to do.
