Evaluation

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

When producing my school magazine I used the colour scheme code and convention throughout the front page and the contents page, to do this I used 3 main colours and repeated them throughout the page to not make it too busy with colours. I chose blue to be my main colour as I thought this suited both genders and was not directed at just one so it worked well. Another main code and convention I used the big bold main headings for the name of the magazine and the contents header, I took this inspiration from ‘Chill’ magazine. I thought this was good because it makes the page stand out well and you can immediately see the text which is the main feature on the page. When I did my magazine my titles took the top section of the page. When looking through the different contents pages of the magazines not many of them featured many images and if they did it was only up to 3 images, so I decided to only feature two on my contents page as I thought this was an average amount and this is also what ‘Chill’ did and I thought it looked good when only a few images were placed on the page. Another main feature of the contents page was the page numbers, each of the magazines I looked at had a line of what was included in the page, ‘Chill’ magazine used this well and I followed through with what they did. Even though none of the magazine front covers used the ‘rule of thirds’ I did this on mine as I knew it was an important code and convention, by doing this I placed my text on the far left with my image on the right and my title taking up the top third of the page. Finally I used a basic font on both pages; all magazines did this I think this was to make it look more simple and easy to read instead of looking too fancy and making it hard to read. This inspiration was taken from the ‘George Stephenson’ magazine, because I thought it looked appropriate and simple.

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

When taking a medium close up you had to focus the camera, to ensure that it didn’t end up blurry. After this was done you were ready to take the photo if you were in the right location. Depending on whether the place was dark and gloomy or not depended on whether you used the flash, since the place were I took my medium shot was dark I used the flash to ensure you could see the  image I was trying to capture. When I was constructing my magazine I used the text tool a lot to add text on to my front page and my contents page, from this I began to edit the style of the text by making it bold and navy. Since I had lots of layers it was good that I could move them around and could do last minute changes, which I did do by adding a background image that I took of Whitley high school. When doing my layers I could change the order of where things were positioned on my page. I used the lasso magnetic tool to cut out what I wanted from my main image that I used on my front cover, this let me cut out exactly what I wanted from the image and leave the rest. The move tool also allowed me to change the positioning of things on both of my pages; I played around a lot with this to see where I could place my images and my text to make it look better, especially in my contents page since there were a lot of pages to include. I used the clone stamp tool on my main medium shot on the front of my cover to get rid of blemishes and make the picture appear better.