Evaluation 3

 How did your production skills develop throughout this project?

My media studies blog was my first actual blog, I didn’t know much about Photoshop, Illustrator and their uses, however they developed over time starting from the preliminary tasks. I learnt the importance of camera, shots and angles.

For my print media task in AS, the development of the magazine was done by extensive research and planning on my genre. This is because I had to gain knowledge of particular codes and conventions used in the production of my magazine in order for it to be successful. A comprehensive research helped to plan my production phase, it assisted me to identify the background and the significance of Flower magazines it also enhanced my creativity.

At the start of AS, I developed a school magazine, cover and contents page, although this was only a short preliminary task, I developed Photoshop and camera skills sufficiently to be able to produce the front cover of a magazine , contents and double page spread for the Final AS magazine.

In the post production stage my Photoshop skills such as image cropping, resizing, margin adjusting was the first step in the development of the magazine which was later on done without any hesistation because these basics were already implied to my preliminary magazine.

For the text on the front cover I used various text manipulation techiniques such as the drop shadow and blending the image opacity and for the text used in the double page spread I applied new techniques such as adjusting columns by using the margins on top of the page.

The photoshop skills I have developed as I have used a variety of fonts on the front cover and I have also used a number of different font sizes. These skills have effectively helped me to produce the product that I wanted to create as the main cover line is clearly displayed in larger text than the remaining cover lines, and is therefore more noticeable.

Photoshop enabled me to produce the planned cover and spread of my Flower magazine, technically speaking there were no major limitations to the program however I there were limitations to my skill development, but I used as many tools as possible to apply to my magazine. Although at the start of AS I developed a school magazine which was preliminary task I didn’t need to carry out research as it only included secondary research methods, such as desk research which was done with the existing school magazines. For the final magazine I did an extensive research which set objectives or rules which I applied to my magazine in order for it to be more affective in reaching the audience.

The ideas which came up for the planning phase was obtained from research which I carried out on my genre; I looked at various Flower magazines, they helped me create my product by using the real conventions and applying them to my product as well as the most important stage was between the research and planning, where I had everything in mind and I had to plan accordingly to the research, mood board was developed to set a mise en scene and overall theme of the magazine.

In conclusion production skills were developed at the start of AS with the development of the school magazine but more production skills and tools were discovered in the post production stage of the Flower magazine and the existing skills were more enhanced with constant practice.