Dear examiner/moderator,
I hope you enjoy reading though my blog and looking at all the work I have worked hard to create over this course. I have labelled all of my posts to ensure it is easy to navigate around my blog and I have created a playlist of all of my favourite songs from the genre selected for viewers to enjoy. I have developed my skills throughout the work seen in my blog and have completed each section of research and planning, creating my magazine and evaluation with great interest and effort.
Thank you,
Charlotte Hull.
Wednesday, 15 April 2015
7. Looking back at your preliminary task (the school magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
Before I started this process I had little knowledge on how to create a
professional looking magazine and had never used a lot of the technology
involved either. I had never used Photoshop to put together an A4 display and
so I had to learn how to use all of the different functions within that as well
as learning what I should and should not include in order to make my music
magazine as good as possible. When I started to make my preliminary magazine I
used Interview magazine as a style model which meant I had some idea of what a
good magazine looks like however it did not follow the common conventions seen
within a lot of music magazines. For instance, the shot I decided to go for,
from copying the layout of this magazine, was a mid-long shot which meant I had
a lot of empty space on my magazine cover which meant it looked bare and
unfinished. Also, it meant I used a coloured background which is another
uncommon convention and therefore made my magazine more unusual and
unprofessional. Although I was able to use the same camera as I used on my
final magazine to get good quality images I was unsure on how it worked and how
to properly use the lighting for the image so I used the setup provided to
take my images in without any changes and as a result they were not
as good as they could have been. Furthermore, I cut around the image which
meant using a tool I was not very familiar with which led to the
image not looking very clean cut or fitting well with the rest of the
magazine. If I had used an image with the white background included this may
have worked better and produced a more professional magazine.
I was unable to do research into the target audience for this magazine and
common conventions or the genre and so I had little idea to what I wanted
the cover model to do or to wear. As a result of this she wore her
own clothes which meant the styling, although good, was not in keeping with the genre
or target audience for this magazine (for a school). I was able to use
props to add mise en scene and develop the idea of the school magazine but they
weren't very prominent and so the effect was subtle. The choice of colours for
my magazine were simple but they did not work well with the choice of
background colour as they were not contrasting enough so, the second line of my
masthead does not stand out. I was pleased with how I added the cover lines
however, looking back now I would have either made them closer to the
bottom within that box as they do not appear to fit to the edge or, I would
have made the text black and had them on top of the actual background so it did
not look as random with the black rectangle. The bar code on the cover was not
correctly shaped and I have now learnt to recognise what
looks right and what doesn't through my research of actual music
magazines and from the creation of my magazine. The contents page layout,
although a good idea to position around the image as Mojo magazine does, does
not fit well as text overlaps and so should have been corrected. Also, I have
learnt that the title 'contents' should either have been something different,
the title of the magazine for example, or made smaller and fitted with reference
to the rest of the page.
From creating my
final magazine I have learnt that most magazines have very small text,
something that I did not consider on my preliminary magazine or early drafts of
my final magazine. When corrected, this allowed me to add a lot more
information, to my contents page in particular, and so would have been helpful
to me in my preliminary as it may have fitted around the image better. I have
also learnt how to display the banner (information about the magazine such as
price, issue number etc.) so it is discrete yet available to the reader. This
information needs to be small and to fit in with the rest of the magazine, like
I have done in my final magazine. I have also learnt to consider the colours
used in the magazine not only on the cover page but throughout the magazine
making them link to the cover. For instance, in my final magazine I took a
colour from the artist's shirt on one of my biggest images and used this throughout
to identify the same magazine. I also kept the background colour to the
background of the image as learnt from my preliminary. Moreover, I learnt how
to use the styling to identify the target audience and to show the genre of my
magazine through using the same kind of clothes identified as that genre
(tassels and shorts as seen in my magazine). Overall, I believe I have learnt
through the research I have conducted what a good magazine looks like
and what conventions to include or avoid when creating my own
magazine. I have learnt that a good image can make a magazine page either
really good or really bad and so the work needs to go into the magazine from
this early stage.
Tuesday, 14 April 2015
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