Evaluation: Question 7
Evaluation: Question 7By Erin Hunter
Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have
learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
At the beginning of the course I had very few media skills, my
only real experience with the media was television and social
networking sites on my mobile phone and on laptops. Within the
first media lesson, I had gained skills and knowledge as my teacher
taught me about fonts-serif and sans serif- terminology such as
mastheads, pugs, cover lines and about the structure of magazines-
e.g. hotspots and columns. Then as I moved onto the research and
planning stages of creating a magazine front cover and double page
spread I began to asses much more observantly looking at school
magazines and trying to pick them apart applying some of the
knowledge that I had learnt in class as well as the independent
research that I had done. In order for me to create any products I
had to take some photographs and this required my use of a camera.
I used a camera to capture some staged and some natural images of
students around me thinking about the lighting, mise en scene the
angles that I was taking the pictures at. This really helped me to
develop my thoughts and I began to piece together what I wanted my
magazine to look like, who would feature on my magazine and what
representation I was going to portray through the use of colour
imagery and house style of the magazine. I then moved on to
creating my three preliminary products and used adobe Photoshop for
the majority of this. When i had finally created my products I was
impressed with the progression I had made from not even being able
to use software such as Photoshop to being competent enough at it
that I was able to produce something that replicated real products
that I had based my preliminary work on. However now reflecting on
my work at the end of the course and looking at my preliminary
products, I can see that my skills were very limited and restricted
my abilities to create a realistic product. Now, at the end of the
course I would say that my skills have improved massively. The
photographs that I took at the beginning of the course are now much
better as I was able to apply my wider knowledge of how cameras
worked and which backdrops looked best when taking pictures. I was
able to position the camera at high and low angles and take a wider
range of long shots and close ups to create empathy and emotion
contrasted with emotionless pictures creating the impression of
solitude and mystery. I am also now much more experienced when it
comes to editing and photographs and creating products. At the
beginning of the course I tended to inly use the spot healing tool,
the magic wand tool and the plaster tool, whilst of course adding
text boxes and text. By the end of this course I am now able to go
further with those skills adding drop shadows, adding layers
playing around with the contrast and saturation on the images as
well as thinking in depth about the use of colour and font and
being able to understand the different effects that might have on
the genre of my products thinking about certain representations and
connotations and about how it may affect the way that my product is
presented. The overall presentation of my products is also better,
not only do my products look professional and fitting to the music
genre, I am also now able to present them using software such as
slide share, indesign, bubble.us and Emaze. My new skills have
helped me to find many different types of software enabling me to
expand my skills and learn more and more about the media industry.
I have found that meaning and representation is very important when
creating any media product as the primary attraction is graphology
therefore for example the use f colour really needs to be thought
about as it will be the first thing that the audience sees and thus
create a lasting impression.
Click the speaker icon to listen to my audio description
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