Q7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you think you have

learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Production & planning • I put a lot more work into the main task rather than the

preliminary. I saw the preliminary task as a ‘practise’ of creating a magazine front cover. I took a majority of photos for it as well so I got plenty of practise using the camera.

• The preliminary task finished a lot faster than my main task (my main task took a few weeks to produce).

• My preliminary task required hardly any planning and I still found it quite easy to produce as it was a simple task of creating a school magazine cover; as soon as I heard what the task was, I immediately knew who to use as the model (Harry)

Production & planning

• Seeing as it was the first time with using the camera, it was quite obvious as you can see by the low key lighting on the preliminary image

• With both the preliminary and main task done, it would be appropriate to say that if I re-did the preliminary, the shots would look a lot more professional with good lighting

• Over the time I have tried out different flashes which attach to the camera and with my final main image, I think that the lighting is perfect and fits in with the cover.

By looking at my preliminary task, and comparing it to my final production, I can see how much I have learnt throughout the process and the different/new skills that I have learnt using Photoshop.

Examples of some of the things that I have learnt is the different fonts that I have discovered – if you look at my final production, you can see that I have added drop shadows to all my text, whilst on the preliminary task there is not. Something else that I have learnt is to make a photo look professional – the lighting in the preliminary task is quite low, whereas in my final Production the main image of ‘Kate’ looks a lot more realistic. I also learnt how to manage my time wisely; I planned out each stage for my final production and managed to finish it in plenty of time. To conclude altogether, I know that I have learnt a massive

Amount of skills using Photoshop, and also the equipment that I used – for example with the camera I learnt how to use all the different functions, and tried out different flashes with it to see which one was the most suitable to give my images the best, most realistic look.

• In my feedback from question 5, Sally pointed out the fact that I had used bright colours and that it had a good tagline (‘add pop to your life’), she also said that it was informative about what will be included inside the magazine (it had boxes telling the reader about some of the stories). I wanted my magazine to stand out so I was pleased with this comment.

• My aim was to make my magazine look like a professional pop magazine - like we love pop and top of the pops, I think that I achieved this from some of the feedback that I have received like “your magazine looks like a real pop magazine”. I also used an informal tone whilst writing my DPS and I spoke to my audience in their form of address; I felt I did well in doing this so it appealed to my audience

• The only problem I had was with some of the images, I found that cutting out the background around the hair was difficult, but after long processes, I managed to get over this problem

My photos I have used have followed the conventions of popular pop magazines, such as top of the pops, like top of the pops, the main image is of a single artist, which makes her the dominant contrast of the magazine. Also, where I have positioned the artist with the eye-catching pink background, its allowed me to make the front cover look appealing to the audience – as with my preliminary task, the cover was very plain, with only one image and the rest was text. My background choice goes with the house style of my magazine too. Due to my magazine being pop, I haven’t used too many effects on my images as I want the magazine to keep looking realistic.

I learnt a few things from my prelimiary contents page, for example I learnt how to add a rectangle at the top of the page and place text into it. As you can see I have done this

on both tasks. I also conventionally added the page numbers to each article so the reader knows which page to go to if they are looking for a certain article. I’ve also learnt that I need to add more pictures on my contents page. I did not spend a lot of time on my prelimiary contents page whereas I did with my final production.

My final production does not look anything like my preliminary task. I think that this is because with my final production, I did a lot of research on existing pop magazines so I gathered ideas from there; I did not do any research for my prelimiary task as I saw this as a ‘practise’ for my final production.

Evaluate • The aspect that I learnt from the preliminary task is how to

use the camera – for the preliminary I took plenty of shots and learnt how to use the camera

• Another aspect that I learnt was how to use the magic eraser tool to get rid of the background on the photos

• For the prelimiary task and my final production, I used boxes on the front page on both of them

• With my preliminary, I did not use any drop shadows or any effects on my text, however I did in my final production