Preliminary Task - Evaluation

Preliminary Task – Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Before beginning work on my product I analysed several existing school magazines in detail in order to ensure that mine adhered to these while still maintaining individuality. For example, I noted the fact that the colour schemes on both cover and contents pages generally matched those of the school logo or uniform, and for this reason I chose a pale blue, white and red theme for the heading and text on my magazine. In terms of the cover, something that stood out was the repeated image of students from school taking part in activities that suggest achievement, so for my cover I chose to depict a medium shot of a student sitting an exam. Contents pages, generally speaking, focussed more on text and less on images; therefore my contents page was heavily text-dominated with just one image. The language used here, I noticed, was usually very informal in an attempt to appeal to the students and be easy reading, prompting me to use a similar tone in my article overviews.

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

One of the distinguishing features of my front cover was the masthead, which was an alteration of the school logo – for this I put my Photoshop skills to good use, using tools such as the clone stamp to edit out the original text on the logo and replace it with my title of By The Bay. The magnetic lasso tool was also crucial, in cutting around the school logo to place in the bottom right of my contents page, as well as the ‘Styles and Effects’ tool which I used on my images and text to give them a slightly 3D appearance and appear more attractive and unique.

     The other aspect of technology I have learnt about is photography – using the digital cameras and all of their associated equipment (such as tripods and lights) correctly was integral to the professionalism of my final images, as well as the health and safety aspect of using the equipment. In taking my shots, I experimented with the zoom and focus setting on the digital camera, and in creating my front cover image it was important to have light falling on the face of the model so I made use of the flash.