Evaluation Essay

Evaluation Essay

  
    In my AS media coursework I created a front cover, a contents page and a double page spread for a new music magazine I had created. I had to take my own original images for the magazine and create my own text for it. I had several photo shoots to ensure I had enough images for each section. My chosen genre of music for the magazine was Pop music. I choose pop music because I knew this had a large audience sample I could target. For practice before I made my music magazine I had to create a front cover and contents page for a college magazine. To create this I had to start using programmes such as publisher and Photoshop. I was new to the Photoshop programme and found it very confusing at the beginning. The front page had to be a medium close up image of my student in a college environment, which I then added text to the surrounding image to create the cover. I didn’t have many skills or knowledge in these programmes as I hadn’t had to use them before I started this course. My knowledge was very little in Photoshop and this is the programme I struggled to use most because of this. I was able to use publisher as I have often had to use this programme in school before for things such as leaflets and brochures and therefore was aware of its tools and abilities.

  
 I gained many skills from all areas of ICT from programmes such as Publisher and Photoshop, as well as using new websites such as Blogger, Go Animate and Prezzi. I was able to learn how to edit photos to a high definition standard in Photoshop, I learnt how to air brush skin on my images which is used in all popular music and fashion magazines to enhance the look and glow of the model. I have learnt very useful editing techniques such as the ‘spot healing tool’ and ‘levels’ tool which help improve the image and its quality significantly in an easy way. There are also many tools and adjustment layers. I also learnt how to highlight, lighten, darken and enhance the image overall. I developed my skills further in Photoshop by learning how to edit out several parts in an image, add several images together, change the background and add a new image to a different background. I learnt how to add different fonts and bolder them, change the colours, lighten them, add outlines, add shadows, inner shadows, outlines and transparency to make them all look realistic to a font you would find in my genre of music. Doing this developed my skills in Photoshop and helped me become better at editing images and creating titles.

   
I researched into several existing music magazines of my genre (pop) to see what the conventions of a pop magazine was and learn insight to how they look, what you expect to see in them, how it is laid out and the images that are used in the magazines. I looked at magazines such as Sugar, Seventeen and Billboard all popular pop music magazines sold in the UK. I used LIAR to analyse each of the magazines front cover, contents page and double page spread. I noticed that most pop front covers had a medium close up image of the celebrity who would dominate the magazine, noticing this I decided to use one of my medium close up images I had taken to create one of my front covers, I also demonstrated with full length images of my model on front covers but decided that overall the medium close up images looked better. All mastheads where large bold and belonged at the top of the magazine cover, I decided to use a pink ‘pop’ colour for my title and keep the house theme pink, white and black for a pop yet professional look. I had my model dress in young, fashionable clothes that where up to date yet ones you would expect to see in a pop magazine. I ensured I took lots of images so that I was stuck if I changed my mind on the image I had chosen for something and that I had enough to decide on for the double page spread. I also made sure that all my image related to one another and that my front page image looked connected to my double page spread image, as I noticed this is a convention from all music magazines.

 Overall I think my skills have improved dramatically over the course if you compare my college magazine drafts to my music magazine covers you can see instantly how much my skills have developed as I have more knowledge of how to edit everything on the page and more insight to what the conventions of a music magazine are.