Skills development essay

Skills Development Essay

In terms of digital technology throughout the music magazine process I used digital technology a lot to take the images for my magazine, the camera I used was a Nikon D4 this allowed me to take professional looking photos for my front cover, double page spread and contents page, also I used adobe photoshop to alter my photos so they were appropriate for my magazine I did this by changing the levels on my photos as well as the colour balance, this was also used to create my magazine it allowed me to create a layout for my magazine and explore different tools like finding different fonts to suit the genre, at the start of the course when I created my college magazine I only knew how to use the basics of photoshop like cropping an image but now I have developed my skills and have made my music magazine more realistic and professional by doing so. Furthermore, I also took a video of my audience feedback for my music magazine as a pose to writing it on my blog. To set out all of my research and planning I used websites such as Prezi and PowerPoint, on this I included YouTube videos, graphs and tables to show my planning, ideas and research for my music magazine.

My Creativity was developed from the college magazine to the music magazine because I had researched magazines and conventions a lot more and planned/ drafted different ideas to see which worked the best for my selected genre and what conventions R&B had, when looking at different magazines I got inspiration from them as well as looking at the genre R&B in detail, photoshop helped with the creativity of my music magazine the more I learnt how to use it the more techniques I found helping my magazine to stand out for example I was able to put borders around my photos on my contents page in order for them to look like stickers/posters which suits my selected genre, I also found different websites in which I could get different fonts from                                     (www.dafont.com) so my magazine had a professional mast head which suited the edgy, rebellious R&B theme, rather than what I chose for my college magazine which was just an ordinary font and didn’t stand out as much as it should have.

Research and planning is a big factor when making a magazine cover, for my college magazine I did minimal planning and research which lead to a poor front cover, I didn’t look into my target audience as much as I should have therefore my selected ‘headlines’ could have been improved whereas when it came to the music magazine I had researched and analysed the conventions of a music magazine so my magazine would look realistic, I also carried out research into my target audience and what they would like to see, so creativity when it came to writing my double page spread was important, I developed my skills in analysing so I understood the conventions and connotations more, I looked at interviews to see what type of questions were asked in an R&B magazine because each genre carries different conventions, the more planning I did the more I found out which colour schemes and costumes went with my selected genre appealing to the target audience, this means if my product was being sold, people who like R&B would immediately be drawn to my front cover because of the R&B connotations it holds.

In post- production when I was making my college magazine it included doing photo shoots for front covers which were located in the different areas around college whereas for my music magazine I did my photo shoot located on a brick wall I did this so I had the choice of keeping the brick wall background or I could crop out my model and take another photo suitable for the background, next there was photoshoping which included experimenting with the eraser tool to remove my model from the background, also changing the levels and colour balance as well as adding font and secondary images to my front cover. After production I also had to get audience feedback to see how they reacted to my magazine and listen to the way they felt it should be improved and what they liked, to do this I picked a member of the public to ask questions to, I then videoed this and added it to my blog, the questions included what they like to see in a music magazine and how they reacted to my finished piece and what they liked about it.

When using conventions from real media texts it helped me develop skills because I could analyse and point out key features in a magazine which make them to be successful, before the course I didn’t know about conventions but now I am able to point out conventions such as a skyline-at the top of the magazine that normally tells the reader what this issue/magazine will include, headline-the main story of this issue, barcodes-used to scan and buy the magazine, mast head-the name of the magazine, another convention is normally a quote from the artists interview used to draw in the reader. For inspiration I looked at ‘Vibe’ magazine and ‘R&B’ magazine a lot throughout the process as they are a popular R&B magazine, I looked at the conventions they had used and tried to interpret them into my magazine, I found that the conventions of an R&B magazine were colours like, black, red, gold and blue so I used this colour scheme in my magazine to attract my target audience, I also saw that the front covers show artists looking straight into the camera with no expression or looking slightly off camera which I interpreted into my magazine.