Friday 21 March 2014

Evaluation Task 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?

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?
My school magazine and music magazine are extremely different, my preliminary task barley covered any of the regular mainstream conventions whereas my coursework clearly shows various conventions.
After learning about the layouts of cover magazines F,Z and E plans I could arrange my magazine cover in a way that looked realistic and in ways followed this convention, I had my features in more of a C shape because of the image I decided to use I didn't want to cover her face with words. 
I now realise that the mast head on my prelim does not work at all, the fonts that I have used for the features are to bold for features, and my bar code set up looks awful. This barley follows any of the regular mainstream conventions. 

The photo shoot I did with Alice for my Preliminary task I barely took any photos so I didn't have much choice in what photos to use in my magazine whereas my first photo shoot for my course work I took over 100 photos and the second one I took around 30 so overall I had a very large variety of images to choose from. 

Due to not planning when I had the studio for my preliminary task the clothes Alice was wearing clashed with my theme colour which is why the image is in black and white, from doing this I have discovered editing photos so they are black and white don't look right unless it fits the genre of music or the target audience which in my case it does not. Another problem with my bad planning is Alice's hair wasn't down so wispy parts of hair restricted my from editing the photo as I would of liked to.

All the knowledge I gained about technologies helped me a great deal with the progression of my product, from my preliminary task to my final product it is clearly visual that I have learnt more about all the software I was using during the construction. Without the knowledge I now have with Photoshop I could never of made the magazine I have now created. 

I feel like I have learnt a lot about what attracts people to the magazine, the golden spiral is a vital technique I have learnt. This is why I wanted my logo in the top left corner because its where the eye instantly goes to and then works outwards in a spiraling shape. I think for a magazine to work there needs to be more features than what I included on my prelim which is why my coursework had so many features all down the left side of the cover.
In my actual coursework I made a big statement about the model used on the cover whereas in my preliminary task I didn't so there wasn't anything to pull the audience in. I now know how to change the brightness of photos so I could make the background appear whiter than it is.




My Contents page in my preliminary task didn't include anywhere near as much content and features as it should have, the logo is to big for the contents page, the features are to bold and the images are randomly place on the page.

After looking in other magazine for inspiration i have learnt about the layouts of the contents page and that the logo should be small in the top right corner and in the bottom right corner it should be a page number. I decided to use a 3 column layout for my coursework as its popular in other magazines so I knew it'd work well.
My preliminary contents page looked very plain which is why in my coursework I included more colour and images of other artists to make it more interesting, I also had 5 sections full of content so there is plenty of interesting things to hook my audience.  
I now know how to use the different layers on photo shop which allowed me to move everything around and change my layout whereas before I was making the mistake of putting things on the same layers and then having the problem where I couldn't move one thing without everything else moving too.

I didn't make a double page spread for my preliminary task but I still learnt a lot about the layout of the spread from researching double page spreads in other magazines. 

Overall I think that I have learnt a lot since my preliminary task, my progression using Photoshop has is the main reason my two magazines are at very different stages. 










1 comment:

  1. A decent answer Emily. You should also mention the things you've learnt regarding the actual technologies e.g. the camera and Photoshop - give some specific examples of some of the tools you learnt how to use etc

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