Skill Development

Essay

 

For my Foundation Portfolio in the first year, it required having to complete a preliminary task followed by the main task. The preliminary task required having to create a college magazine front cover and contents page. Throughout this task, I had to include the conventions for any current existing magazines. For example headlines, mastheads, splash. The target audience of the magazine is aimed towards 16-19 year olds mainly being students, meaning all information inside had to be relevant for them. This also meant keeping the cost minimal to ensure that it was affordable for students as it is typically known that students don’t have a lot of money. The purpose of doing this task was to find out what our good skills were and what skills we needed to improve in order to start the main task for the foundation portfolio. Without doing this preliminary task, I think it would have been really difficult going straight on to the main task. It really helped to improve the skills that I struggled with.

For the actual main task, I had to create a music magazine front cover, contents page and double page spread. All images and text had to be original and had to include 4 images minimum. This meant having to decide on a particular genre to base my magazine upon which would need to appeal to a specific audience. This meant it was essential to include all the codes and conventions for all existing music magazines. I decided on creating a pop music magazine for my genre and took a look at the conventions from VIBE and NME music magazines. These magazines would have a target audience of people ranging from ages 16-25; this is due to the mast amount of people within this age range really liking or listening to the genre of music.

For the foundation portfolio, it was necessary for me to use Adobe Photoshop CS5 in order to manipulate the photos that I had taken and give them a more professional look about them. When starting AS media studies, I had been given a brief introduction to this software and had used it for the starter task at the beginning of the year. However when starting the foundation portfolio, it was still quite new to me and I had a lot more skills to learn about it before really knowing what to do and how to use it. Throughout the year, I have now learnt a lot more skills to do with the software. I am now aware how to edit my photographs to a higher standard and know a lot more tools to use to create different effects on the photograph and learnt how to get rid of spots and blemishes which came in really useful. I used a lot of photos and tested them out on Photoshop before I started creating the tasks.

It was quite scary to be given these tasks and now knowing anything about Photoshop in order to complete them. However, being given the preliminary task really helped. Getting the experience of making a college magazine, it was fun getting to experiment with different images and making them work within the magazine. It helps to boost my skills and enabled me to be a lot more confident when producing my music magazine as I then felt that I had a lot more experience and better understand with the software.

When editing photographs, the first major thing to do to manipulate the photo was learning to use the quick selection tool. This was quite tricky to master until I got the hang of it, I found that it would cut parts of the photo out that I wanted to keep in. After learning how to use this correctly, I then got taught to use the blur tool to smooth the edges around the photo so that it wasn’t obviously seen as being photo shopped and the outside edges of people in the photograph wouldn’t be rough looking.

After experimenting with all of these tools in the preliminary task, I felt really confident that my finished overall college magazine was at a good standard for what I know at the time. However, after re using these tools and using more knowledge and skills with my music magazine, in comparison I feel the end result of my music magazine turned out far better than the college magazine. The images are far better on my music magazine than on my college magazine because I discovered the tools I used for my music magazine toward the end of the year which meant I was unaware of them during the time of creating my college magazine.

Overall, since beginning media I have gained so much more confidence using Photoshop software and being able to manipulate photos for creating magazines. I have also gained a lot more awareness to the importance of researching conventions as it really helps to understand things that are similar to what I am doing as it relates so much and I can use other ideas and corporate them into my own.  Now that I know a lot more about Photoshop, it is the main reason for having a higher standard quality in my music magazine compared to my college magazine. Also, being more aware of the conventions, it gave me a lot more knowledge about laying out the magazine and how the magazines are put together. This helped me when structuring my own music magazine. During the preliminary task, I made a structure of the contents page so I would know exactly how to lay it out when I had all photographs and text ready, this was great preparation for continuing onto the music magazine. Going through these processes throughout the year I think has helped me produce a good quality music magazine; it was set at a considerably cheap price and it also appeals to my target audience.