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

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

 

For my preliminary task I created a magazine around the topic of college. Since the preliminary task I have learnt many different skills that will contribute to the final product of my music magazine. These include the Photoshop skills, publisher skills and Picasa skills also. These are the practical skills I have achieved since the preliminary task, however also I have learnt different things about the music industry and how different colours and layouts can attract different audiences. One of the main factors that have improved my skills is my photography; I think this has affected the whole look of the magazine and changed the standard and quality of my work.

Throughout my preliminary and the drafts of my cover especially the photography let the rest of my work down, however I think the improvement of this has created a better more professional result. I learnt about having different ideology for the college magazine by having props such as books and exercise material within the college campus. However I had to change and adapt this to a fit the music magazine I created. I have tried to create a more professional shoot which I took within a studio with spot lights that look similar to stage lights, with a curtain behind the model. I think this is better fitting to the music magazines, and I used what I had learnt from the college magazine and adapted it to fit the brief that I had been given.

Also from my preliminary task I had not thought of the different demographic differences and pricing of the magazine depending on audience. Also the distribution ideas and unique selling points, this I gradually added to my final magazine by researching. Another thing I never thought would be important for a magazine at the start in my preliminary was the colour scheme and how that could change the dynamics of the product completely, from different genre to different target audiences just with adapting and changing colours. I have considered this more within the final task more than I did for the preliminary; I think this is one of the factors in the reasoning of why the music magazine was of higher quality to the college magazine.

I think my editing skills in changing and adapting photographs has improved, I think the contrasts between the imagery from the preliminary to the final magazine are very different. With all the factors that have improved and changed I think something that has been kept the same within the front cover is the layout. I think it’s similar when you look at the two together, however the new final layout is more structured and I designed and based this on different magazines structures more effectively. However I think my two content pages are incredibly different. The college content page has none of the conventional aspects or very few that are seen on the new music magazine. Also some of the content is very different due to the different genres; therefore I have learnt how to adapt the same concepts and ideas to different ideas within media.

All my computer skills and program skills have been improved by doing these tasks, and have changed a lot since the first preliminary task. Publisher and Photoshop were both programs I knew very little about however experimenting within the programs to create different effects has improved on my work and general knowledge of different work on the computer. I think overall all my skills have improved in some way in all areas, I think these skills are useful to adapt and put to other things within other aspects of media such as the music industry exam assessments. I also think the exam side has helped me understand the distribution industry and how products are marketed with their competitors.