Evaluation Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Through the process of this media course i feel i have progressed massively with creating a realistic media product.
When i had to make my first magazine which was the college magazine i didn't have much experience with using PhotoShop and how to make a professional looking magazine.
Now when looking back at my college magazine front cover and contents page i notice i had lacked continuity and a lot of conventions of a magazine. On the front cover the sell lines look plain and do not stand out at all to the audience i was trying to attract. I used minimal Photoshopping skills and the one plug i did include looks out of place and does not really fit in with the theme of the whole magazine. The masthead of 'Wyke 6th Form College' is not big enough across the top of the page and therefore would probably not attract the eye of the audience which will then not get many consumers for my magazine. I only included a barcode, there was not an issue number or date included. When i see my college magazine front cover now i realise it looks like more of a poster rather than a magazine. I used the exact same font for each sell line which makes my magazine look really boring which means it would not be very good competition for the other college magazines already in the industry. But there were also good points about my college magazine for example the shot of my model and the pose she was doing was appropriate for a college magazine. She looks intelligent and to the audience does look like a college student.
The contents page draft i did was completely wrong and when looking at my music magazine contents page i have increased my skills a huge amount. The image of my contents page was really distorted. The colour scheme did not match the colour scheme on the front cover and the competitions and fundraiser were the same size text as everything else and did not stand out at all. There were also a lot of empty spaces and the word 'Contents' should have been bigger than the title of the magazine.

It was really helpful to be given this preliminary task because it gave me a chance to realise how difficult it would be to create a final music magazine. It also gave me a chance to learn the basics of PhotoShop before creating my perfume advert so i would be able to improve my work.

By the time it got to creating a perfume advert i knew the basic skills of cutting out images using the lasso tool and how to photoshop other things such as the horns and the wings onto the model included on my advert. Also how to link the layers so they wouldn't move separately away from each other. But other than that i still was having difficulties on how to make it look professional. After learning the skills of how to change the colour of my models hair on my music magazine i noticed that when i had attempted changing the hair colour of the model on my perfume advert it did not look very good or professional. That is because i had used a different way of changing the hair colour. Instead of using 'soft light' and a fine brush. i used the lasso tool to go around all the the hair and then i just painted over it with the brown colour. Now i realise that was a mistake. But it gave me a chance to improve and helped me to figure out where i was going wrong.
I did notice improvements with my PhotoShop skills whilst making this advert. Especially when i created the perfume bottle. I got an image of a plain perfume bottle off of Google and manipulated the name of my perfume 'Tormented' onto the front of the bottle using the text option and the colours on PhotoShop. I then got an image of the wings and cut them out and then dragged them to go behind the bottle and then linked the layers.






















In conclusion i have learnt many things during this media course. I learnt how to include the typical conventions of a magazine so it will look professional and i learnt the particular conventions that were needed for the genre of the magazine. For example how my model looks and how she is addressed in the image taken of her. To get these photos correct i also learnt how to take the 'perfect' photo and the attitude she had to portray in the images. Each sell line, image or plug was positioned on my magazine in the correct places for a reason to follow the conventions of real media products which i did not know and the beginning of the course.
That is everything that i learnt during these past months to help me create a music magazine.