Evaluation question 7:

Lucy Clarke

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression

from it to the full product?

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full

product?Looking back from my preliminary task, I seem to have developed a skill in Photoshop as my original images seem to have been edited more professionally. I have also seen a big change in how I appeal and set a target audience. My research skills seem to be a lot better as I have looked into a lot of different aspects to make a high standard media product. Before I could think about producing a media product of my own, I researched into a lot of areas in magazines and made sure I understood each criteria. This improved my understanding of what went into a front cover, double page spread and a contents page. I did this by deconstructing some of these of some popular music magazines in relation to the genre of music that I am basing mine around. I worked hard at finding my target audience and how I would make my media product appealing to my target audience. I did this by making questionnaires and researching in to radio stations that play the genre of music in which I based my magazine around.

Distribution of magazinesI researched into distribution for film and magazine to develop my understanding. I had no idea what distribution meant at the start of this year. This lead me to research a lot about it and I found that in media terms, it means the companies that organise a release of a media product like a magazine and arrange to send an amount of copies to a specific place/shop. Learning about distribution helped me in the way of developing my media understanding and benefited me in relation to my coursework as I had to think which distribution company would be best for my music magazine. In the end, I chose Capitol Christian as that was one of the biggest and commonly used distribution company for music magazines. Also, I chose this company as it distributed a magazine that I took a lot of knowledge and understanding from as it was similar to the genre and type of magazine I wanted to produce, meaning I took a lot of inspiration from this magazine. This is why I chose this distribution company to distribute my completed magazine media product. Learning about distribution put me in good stance in the media topic as it is also something I am revising about for my exams. However, it is slightly different to magazines as I have to look at fil distribution, which is on a much bigger scale to magazines. But learning from this has developed my own knowledge into a basic understanding of the term distribution. And I am glad I have learnt about this.

Target Audience I have had a basic understanding of how to target my audience as I did this last year in media and in other subjects, but this year, I believe I have taken this one step further. I have done a lot of research into target audience for my magazine, as I find the more information I have, the easier it is for me to target my audience right and appropriately. My target audience was 11-19. meaning that this age group are based around being teens and living whilst they are you and keeping up with trends. This is a very modern age group so I had to keep my magazine up to trend and had to base it around current artist and what is happening now within the music industry. I learnt that there are many ways in which I could appeal my media product to my target audience. This could be through, colour scheme, featured celebrities, fonts, plugs and buzzwords which may appeal to them, style (costume, hair and make up) and the use of social networking site as technology has had a huge impact over the last few years with my target audience. The best ay I have learnt how to appeal to a certain target audience, is to put yourself into their shoes and consider their preferences and likes throughout. This was easy for me as I fell into my target audience age gap category. I also asked my friends who are within the target audience for feed back for my media product as that lead to me to really appealing to my target audience and having a clearer understanding of their preferences.

Layout and Structure of a Magazine

I have learnt how to structure a front cover, contents page and double page spread. This is from experience from my preliminary task which then I developed by researching further into magazines. I deconstructed front covers, contents pages and double page spreads which each showed a perfect example of a layout and structure. This helped me develop my structure and layout especially to my front cover in terms of where to put my text. In return, this gave my front cover a professional finish. My layout of my magazine is good as it doesn’t looked cramped and fits yet makes it look busy and fill all blank spaces. I based my layout on other magazine in relation to my genre and the best one I saw that also relates to my target audience was billboard magazine. I took a lot of inspiration and knowledge from this as it fits entirely into the product in which I was aiming for and trying to achieve.

Photoshop SkillI have developed my skills with Photoshop as I have learnt new things in which I did not know how to do last year. The biggest thing I learnt was how to create a drop shadow. This impacted my media product as the picture blended in more to the background with the use of a drop shadow. This gave it a sense of realism as the background didn’t look unnatural. This added depth into my original images which made them stand out. I have used different tools and techniques in Photoshop to make my product more effective and detailed to make it appeal to my target audience. I have also developed the fonts on my front cover which I have found could potentially be more appealing to my target audience. This may boost my grade and could finesse the piece of work showing my better understanding of Photoshop as I have developed my media skills. I have also realised in Photoshop I can blend things by reducing the opacity of the eraser to a low opacity and use it in any areas that stick out and blend it to get rid of the problem. This is difficult to explain typed up but overall, my Photoshop skill have become more developed and I am more confident using this piece of software.