Evaluation Essay

During the course of last year’s media studies I was able to develop and enhance my skills relating to the course and the tasks that needed to be completed. When I began the media course I had little experience using the image editing programme Photoshop which limited my knowledge of how to develop the images I captured. Also when I just began I struggled using my own imagination when putting together a project. Throughout the year though I started adapting to the work and realising what needed to be done, my Photoshop skills began to grow as I quickly learnt how to manipulate images and improving them in relation to the topic.

My first task of creating a magazine advert which advertised a perfume campaign showed how my amateur skills on programmes such as Photoshop and the basic understanding of an advertising campaign. Little research took place during the process of the preliminary task and I successfully completed the task. The overall outcome of the task, as well as the notes and comments I made in my blogger posts showing my changing and adapting ideas, showed strongly how I grew from knowing very little about programmes and imaginative ideas to becoming increasingly adapt to them. This project was mainly created so that students like I could familiarize with Photoshop.

After this task my official preliminary task began, this task was to create a college magazine front cover and a template of a contents page. This was new to me as the closest thing to this which I had created was the perfume campaign which was very different to this task. I had to use the new knowledge of Photoshop, which was still raw and developing at this point, and apply it to the task ahead. For this task I researched all kinds of magazine front covers but especially college magazines so that I could be inspired and I then analysed each feature on the front cover of these magazines so I knew what to include when I designed mine. After taking photographs of many students in different points of the college that I studied at I eventually came to the conclusion of taking what I knew, which was photography as I also studied it at GCSE and was studying it alongside media,  and my other courses. I decided to create a college magazine based around the topic of photography and for this I used a studio and then took photographs which were then edited in Photoshop later using tools such as ‘Black and white’ and ‘Saturation’ to create an alternative looking magazine front cover as not many featured a black and white front cover.

Researching and the progression for being naïve on a topic to understanding it was also a massive break through throughout last year’s course as I began the course and the project knowing very little on what I needed to accomplish in order to present a good piece of work. By searching the internet for useful material that I could analyse I was able to save examples of magazine front covers, contents pages and double page spreads   and then draw arrows and write about what is vital when creating a music magazine.

After the preliminary task I began to research and study for the main coursework project which was to produce a music magazine front cover, a contents page and a double page spread which would feature in a magazine of my own fictional design. This went underway almost immediately and I knew immediately I wanted to focus on the rock genre so I began to research other magazines that fell under this genre and also I focussed strongly on the features within these magazines and the subjects in order to get an accurate depiction of what may be included in this chosen style of magazine.  My Photoshop skills continually grew throughout this project as I learnt about layering images with different ones to create an overall new look for the image. Also, I learnt how to use tools such as the ‘eraser’ tool and the ‘spot healing brush’ tool which helped me eliminate imperfections within my images. The project was constantly monitored and recorded by me as I noted what I was doing with careful accuracy so I could later upload what I had done onto my blogger account, this allowed me to go back and evaluate my work later on in the project. When I completed my magazine front cover I began on the contents page and the double page spread which involved me researching more in depth on the magazines which was categorised in the same genre so I could read up on which features where included and also how interviews where presented and how they laid out their pages and the ratio between images and text. And my finished products where then uploaded onto blogger where I received feedback from my peers and teachers.

Final product

Finally when I was evaluating my work, after I had officially finished the front cover, contents page and double page spread, I had the ability to look back on every piece of work I had done on the project since getting the brief which I had previously uploaded onto my blogger account. Prior to studying the media course I had never used blogger as a professional or personal device so my knowledge on the internet device was limited at best but now it is very large scale.