Section A: Theoretical Evaluation of Production
1 (a)
Last year when I started my course with AS Media Studies, the technologies was new and at a glance, seemed quite hard to use but with the help of the Wyke Media staff I managed to achieve my goals in order to boost my skills which were required to become more familiarised with the technology.
Prior to starting work on my advanced portfolio, the class needed to set up a blogging website on blogger.com which was all self explanatory as I was already familiar to internet social websites. The initial point of creating this was to place all our work on which we did throughout the AS year as it was an easy, cheap and structured way of viewing work which we had done. Furthermore this meant our teachers could view our work in order to surveillance our work and making sure we was keeping on task. Using this for our foundation portfolio meant that we could get used to posting work on it and it also meant we could decide what work we wanted to be placed on the blog to be marked.
As our worked was produced using Adobe Photoshop, the programme was alien to me at first as this equipment was extremely technical and unfamiliar. Ray (teacher) was able to set up a lesson in order to illustrate to the students how to use the programme. My efforts on the foundation portfolio at first were pretty mediocre and was not up to standard as I was getting used to Photoshop, tweaking my portfolio every now and then helped me as it became clear what tools to use in order to improve it and make it stand out. I discovered how to use such websites such as ‘da font’ and apply some of the stylistic fonts on the website onto my college magazine. The front cover consisted of a smooth light green colour connoting the fresh look and healthiness of the magazine. I gathered this from my previous research which made me decide that this was an ideal look for the magazine as it eye catching and appealing. In order to target the audience I used a fellow colleague (Lindsey Simpson) on the front cover of the magazine to highlight that this magazine was produced by students for students. From studying closely a variety of college magazines, I had realised that the masthead had been placed near to the left hand side of the magazine as this is where the audience first look and make an impression on the magazine, therefore I applied this to my masthead also.
Furthermore after completing my foundation portfolio, my skills I learned from this could now be used for my advanced portfolio. This consisted of the same programs in order to produce a music magazine such as Photoshop and blogger. The use of camera angles and variety of camera angles I used on my college magazine could also be applied using a digital camera. Firstly this was a picture of me, a low angle show to highlight the dominance and power of the artist shown on the front cover of the music magazine. For the contents page of the magazine I had learned to keep the magazine conventional and use the similar three colour house styles of the magazine to keep its authenticity. Moreover this also meant similar fonts so the magazine does not look confusion and keeping its simplicity. I decided to use quite bold colours such as black, red and white to imply rebellion and a rock n’ roll lifestyle which philosophy of the magazine is about. I carefully layered the contents listing at the left hand side of the page which I had learned from doing my college magazine.
After completing my magazine I did a PowerPoint presentation of the magazine which also included an essay on the methods I used on how to make the magazine. This also included why I placed the features where I did making well thought out decisions in order to improve it. Furthermore coming from a different perspective I also gave criticism on the magazine illustrating different views of the magazine.
