Raymond Taiwo: March 2012

Friday, 30 March 2012

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

The preliminary task of this project involved making a college magazine and the main task which was to complete various tasks and create a music magazine which was meant to have a: front cover,contents page and double-page spread, and eversince then I have seen the strong change and improvement In the way that my magazine is presented. At first I wasn’t experienced in using photoshop and was clueless when it came to editing my college magazine at first I was focusing on making my college magazine look good unfortunately I failed in doing so and also unintentionally forgot to apply general convenetions to my college mag and this can be seen in my magazine.

In the process of creating my college magazine I begun to test various tools in order for me to learn all the functions of these tools eventually I started to also watch videos on youtube on how to do certain things with my magazine and how to improve the image and quality of my music magazine. And I also gained information on what people would expect to see in a music magazine by carrying out an unstructured interview on a blackberry device, and I used the answers given to me by those who answered the questions by taking in their advice.

In general, my media magazine has that professional look, as my accurate outline of how my magazine would look was planned in advance, this enabled me to construct my own personal music magazine, with a number of examples from conventional music magazine, to help give me a vivid idea of what I was going to do with my music mag. I was capable of using my information from previous blogger research tasks, to help me create my music magazine, which tremendously helped me, in the beginning of the plan for my mag.

I also planned getting my hands on camera from college as soon as possible and I did this in order for me to avoid any problems, another thing that I planned on doing was choosing a place to take my images I had to also remember that I needed a model so I told a couple of my mates to avoid any problems and fortunately one agreed to do so which eventually made the process of taking my music mag photos easy. A huge amount of pictures were taking just to be on the safe side I planned which pictures were going to be used in the magazine.

Other than that from the process of creating a music magazine to the process of making a music magazine I discovered how to perfect the image of my magazine, and also learnt how to grab the attention of my target by following conventions of popular music magazines. I also established the social group that my magazine focused on based on the genre of my magazine. Unlike my college magazine which I really didn’t focus on the social group that my college magazine would focus on or on any aspect of my magazine.

At first I struggled at using various items like cameras and editing software, since I could not get the precise images that I wanted to have on my magazine. Other than that I developed the abiltity to perfect and fix up my magazine which was nothing like how my college magazine was presented in the preliminary task.

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

. I learnt and acquired new skills through the process of creating my media product and using various items to put my product together. At the beginning of the project for my media product I first thought of where I would take the pictures(location), and the various places I would take my pictures. I used a Canon EOS 400D Digital to take my pictures at first I found it a little bit difficult to use the camera, but thanks to using the camera for a previous task I found it a little bit easier to use the camera. I decided to take various pictures in different places to give me a idea of where I would take pictures of my model. One thing that I learnt during this project is that photography is not an easy task as it involves taking good and clear images of models/items, I found that difficult since not all the pictures that I took weren’t like the images that I would usually see in music magazines. Another thing that I learnt was that in order to solve this problem I decided to study another music magazine to see what factors made the magazine front cover and I eventually came up with a conclusion. That the model,setting and location were all important factors in order to get a good front cover. So I decided to put this act in motion by taking various pics of my model in various places at the Southbank Skate park I was also aware that my pictures had to have good lighting. In order for me to avoid all of these problems I decided to take a huge amount of pictures at Southbank, and at the end of this i decided to look at the various that I took by using the cameras functions to check if the pictures were bright or clear enough by zooming into the images etc. Fortunately I had a lot of good images to use even though there were some images that I couldn’t use due to lighting or wrong camera shots. Since I used the Canon EOS 400D to take all of my pictures I found it easier and easier along the way to use the full functions of the camera this involved using the camera to focus on a specific item. One problem that I had when I was trying to take pictures with this camera was trying to get rid of any unneccessary space in the pictures that I had taken since it wasn’t needed in the picture, in order to solve this problem I had to zoom in on my model just to get rid of the unwanted space by turning the lenses on the camera which made it easier for me to get a better picture of my model.

Another technology that I learnt a lot from was through the use Blogger (Blogging). Blogger is a free weblog publishing tool from Google, for sharing text, photos and video. I found this website very useful as I could use the website to share my work with fellow bloggers and people who may be interested in media product, I also learnt that using blogger made it easier for me to track my progress so I could simply log into blogger to see the work that I hadn’t complete and complete it later on.

Another technology that I also used was Photoshop CS3 this editing software was used to edit my magazine and I did this by usisng various items and tools on photoshop to help me make my magazine look more presentable and to make it seem as if it was a professional magazine. I did this by using different items on the toolbar which had different functions, in this case I chose the magic wand/quick selection to select my models head and moved it using the cursor and I decided to place infront of the FAME masthead to make magazine look professional. Another area in which I used the photoshop toolbar was when I wanted to add different effects for the text on my magazine coverline but In order for my to do this I had to look for different types of fonts to use on my magazine I decided to use different fonts all the way through the process of making this magazine to stay away from boring my target audience with the plain and simple look. I downloaded different fonts from the website called www.dafont.com which was very useful seeing as it had a wide range of different fonts, which one could also test out with the words you wanted to use to see if it would look good on your magazine. I believe that I have learnt many things by putting together the magazines whole image, by using Photoshop. I have learnt all the essential and vital details about the function of this editing software which assisted me in a lot in perfecting and reaching my goals for the appearence of each and every part of the task: front cover, contents and double page spread. This project had a very creative feature incorporated in which I was slightly concerned about, as I feel like Photoshop would be too difficult for me to use, nevertheless by testing various features and by watching video’s on YouTube to gain knowledge of it, I felt pleased after and confident in using photoshop.