Skills Development Essay

A2 Media Studies- Skills development essay

1a)

Over the course of producing my college magazine, to the making of my music magazine, my skills have rapidly developed. I can now see a lot of difference in my work to when I first started, in comparison to my more improved music magazine now.

Digital technology takes a huge part in magazines, especially camera work, as one of the magazine conventions is a ‘Main Image’ used on the front cover. The front cover of my college magazine was done too quickly at first, without much effort or thought put into it. I remembered the different camera shots when taking my images and used a medium close up for the main image. However, on the final front cover I realised that there was too much space around the model and decided it would of looked better if the model was taking up a wider area. For my music magazine I thought about what I didn’t do in my college magazine, so I came up with more camera angle ideas to get a variety of shots to choose from. I also re-did my front cover image twice after my first draft.

 In my first draft of the magazine the model looked to simple and to pretty, therefore in my next shoot I wanted to make her appear slightly tougher, some artists now have gone for the more rebellious look. The high angle camera shot on my second attempt didn’t work as well as I had hoped. Even though I tried to use it a number of times it still didn’t look up to a good enough standard.

Photoshop helped me to learn how to change some ones skin to give it a porcelain finish and I also used my own knowledge on Photoshop to make edits on my images. For example, I could change the lighting using levels, crop my image and cut my image neatly by using the magnetic lasso tool etc.

When taking the images for my contents page and double page spread I thought about the camera angle more and thought about what worked well and what didn’t. However I kept these images and didn’t making any additional change to them, as I felt more confident with them than I did about my front cover image.

The creativity side of my magazine came from seeing other peoples magazines and looking at existing magazines conventions. I looked at the way existing magazines used colour coordination throughout there magazine and the similarity in text type they had used, which made their magazines flow. This helped me realise what I needed to develop and apply to my own magazine, since none of my text went well together. Furthermore I learnt how to use things such as, ‘Go animate’ and ‘Prezi’ to present my work in a more creative way, instead of just using blocks of writing, like I did to talk about my college magazine. I also thought this was a better way of getting my ideas across.

 Creativity also comes into the layout of a magazine and the layout is very important to make the text and the images not look out of place. Therefore I looked at how existing magazines set out there text and images to get ideas for my magazine.

Research and planning helped me a lot when making my music magazine, as for my college magazine not that much planning/research was put into the making of it. However I did look at other college magazines to influence some of my ideas and did do brief list of conventions, plus created a box plan. To help myself do better in my music magazine, more research and planning was needed. I again looked at existing magazine conventions, but also looked at what genres come into chart music and found out the latest UK Top 40 songs in the chart (I included a music chart on my contents page to represent the different genres).  When creating my music magazine I had to come up with a specific target audience but in a more advanced way using demographics to. The target audience I had come up with was the 15-24 age groups, which I applied into the making of my reader profile.  My reader profile helped me have a specific audience and the images that I put on it linked to that audience. Since it was aimed at 70% female I had more images aimed towards them, although I only had a percentage of 30% male, therefore had fewer images for them.

For the post production process of my magazine, I thought that I was finished with final piece of my magazine although I still wasn’t happy with it. I changed the images; the text and the colour scheme of my front cover and changed the final piece to my 5^th draft instead. Although I did change the layout, image and colour scheme on the 5^th draft, it still needed improving. The next set of images I took I made sure filled up most of the page, which I initially wanted and used my skills on Photoshop to change the chair my model was sat on. I decided on a different colour scheme of black, red and grey to make my magazine more appealing to my audience, by using colours that aim towards both male and female (I used this colour scheme throughout the rest of my magazine to create continuity). The layout and text changed on my front cover to make it flow and not look untidy.

 For my college magazine I never used post production, which is why it wasn’t as good as it could have been. However for my music magazine I made sure I showed the editing changes I made to the images.

The conventions part of my magazine progressed as I went from just listing the conventions of the front cover, to adding a description to the conventions on my front cover, contents page and double page spread. I went through and analysed my conventions properly so I could then add that knowledge to my own magazine. The conventions helped my magazine become more realistic and match the real life magazines conventions.

I made a lot of changes and gained a lot more skills when creating my music magazine and I made sure when making my music magazine I did more research and included my planning on my blog.