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

This shows that I didn’t experiment as much as I should of when I did the preliminary task, I avoided a lot of functions that Photoshop enables like the ones previously mentioned, however, in my second and final production I managed to incorporate these giving my magazine an overall professional look. The preliminary task made me feel a lot more confident when using Photoshop and it has enabled a greater understanding of the software which will be beneficial for future use but I feel as though I should of experimented more which could of made my media product even better.

The models I used were wearing different clothes throughout my final product if they featured more than once which I think gives my magazine a more professional feel as magazines do not have their models wearing the same clothes the whole way through They are also linked to the genre of magazine, for example I would not have Phoebe in school uniform on the front of my indie magazine because the connotations are completely different. The preliminary task helped me figure this out as I looked into the conventions of a school magazine; these are completely different to the conventions of an indie music magazine. This actually helped when looking and understanding conventions that do or do not link in showing that they may or may not complement each other.

At the start of the preliminary task I had minimal knowledge on Photoshop and no knowledge on InDesign which was apparent in the first draft of my actual product which lead me to designing my dps on Photoshop also, this is where the preliminary task came in very beneficial. It made me remember what I had done before, like using the magic wand tool meaning that I could easily delete backgrounds. After more extensive research after the preliminary I realized the importance of setting up the lights and producing better quality photos and using the correct background, these will lead to much more professional looking images in the future. However I did change some image editing such as changing the opacity and saturation etc. I do think my photography could be much better than it was in the final product but especially in the preliminary.

Through target audience I have found out that surprisingly the age audience overlaps. The target audience for the school magazine would be 11-18 and my magazine’s target audience is 15-23. This is down to the maturity of these teenagers which continues into their early twenties. This shows that my target audience is correct.

The school magazine would use house colours that represent the school colours, this would not conventionally be black colours which an indie magazine does. Because of the school magazine only targeting their audience at students and may be teachers and parents which means that the use of web 2.0 is unnecessary but is beneficial in the indie genre.

My front cover did not have the same quality as my music magazine which shows that I have improved my skills through placement and images etc, I think this is mainly down to the use of drop shadows and inner shadows and so on. When comparing my preliminary to existing magazines I saw that I used blue and yellow equally, whereas others have a dominant colour and another that is less obvious. This dominance of colour is a lot more effective meaning that my preliminary has failed as an effective magazine.

On the whole I feel as if my photography and photography skills have developed a lot which may come in extremely handy in the future. My organizational skills have also increased a lot, I have had a lot of problems with this in the past and I feel that these have improved a bit.