Skills Development

For my foundation portfolio in AS Media I produced a music magazine front cover, contents page and double page spread. My music and target audience genre was Indie Rock, using bands such as ‘The Kooks’ and ‘The Strokes’ to attract the audience as these are well know bands within the genre. This therefore laid a foundation of which I could build on with aspects such as lighting, costume and colour scheme etc.

Before I started the AS media course I had no previous experience with the digital technology that we had used in the course such as Photoshop, the use of cameras and editing pictures etc. This meant that I had no platform from which to start from, as I had no skills in this area this meant that my ability was relatively poor, which indicated that I had to first, learn the basics of the different pieces of technology such as how to crop photos, use the different tools on Photoshop such as the blur tool etc. secondly, I had to learn basic photography skills in order to take effective pictures. The reason I had no evidence of these skills is because I had never attempted anything like this before either at school or out.

Once I had learned the basics of these pieces of digital technology I had to then apply these to my music magazine, as I started on my foundation portfolio my photography skills such as lighting and positioning was hard to achieve, but once I had the pictures and put them onto Photoshop for editing I used tools such as the blur tool around the edges of the pictures to remove the rough edges of the pictures which made them look really unbelievable, another feature I applied was a red background colour onto the front page of my magazine as this would be part of my colour scheme of red and black which are conventional colours to the Indie Rock genre. One of the major tools that I found most effective was the magic wand tool which allowed me to remove the background of the pictures that I had taken and apply them to my portfolio piece in different layers, this at first was hard for me as I did not fully understand how to organise and layout the layers of my work. All of these basic aspects were present once I had completed a draft of each piece as the layout of my products were very plain and blank for example, in my contents page I had block colours of red, black and white with nothing more than a headline, subheadings, non-chronological page numbers and a few pictures. Within my draft front page I had a blank red background with a small headline which was not very appealing to the audience and would not have caught the attention of many potential customers. My double page spread had a very short article which would not have been good for the magazine as the audience would have not had much value for money, it also had a banner that ran across the mid-section of the main artists image and the image of the artist was too large and was not very adaptable for much of the article to fit on clearly.

Once I had completed the drafts of each piece I then had to try and improve these pieces with new techniques and tools that I had learned about. This involved looking at what aspects of my current work was either too bland or not conventional to the magazine.  For my front cover I used the quick selection tool to cut my main image of its original background and placed it onto the new background which was originally red, but then I decided that just a plain red background made the magazine look ‘tacky’ so I decided to change the background to a white-to-red background. Once I had the image I used the blur tool to make the image have smoother edges so it looked more realistic and more natural within the magazine, I also used the transform scale tool to enlarge my picture to fit into a conventional place on my front cover as she is in the middle, under the masthead. I used the text tool to add all of the writing (except the masthead) onto my front cover, I then changed the main headline on my front cover as I wanted it to be bigger to catch the audience’s attention and so it didn’t cover up as much of the front image as it did on my first draft. For the splash I took a picture of a record and then cropped the picture onto my front page. I also moved the cover lines down a little as a believed this to be more conventional for a magazine cover.

For my contents page I decided to put a border on my original draft as I wanted the page to seem compact with a noticeable resemblance of the colour scheme I have used throughout my magazine, I then decided that my contents page does not need this and is not conventional to a magazine so I got rid of the border and put my features and news sections etc. down the right hand side which is conventional to a magazine and looks far better. The reason I decided to move and make my images smaller is so I could fit more writing on the page, I did this by using the transform scale tool which allowed me to manipulate the images to where I wanted them.

I made the main headline ‘contents’ and the date ‘12/11’ cross my using transform scale and by changing the opacity of the text so they can have a transparent appearance. I used another self-taken image of another record for my splash on this page, I then cropped the picture using the quick selection tool then used transform scale to change the size of the image to fit into the position I wanted it to. The reason I change the number order and position is because in my draft it is not conventional as the numbers are not in order and there were not enough pages which I felt was not good enough for the audience and did not want a poor audience review.

For my double page spread I fist used the wrong type of page layout, I needed to use international A3 paper, so I needed to change that first of all. I then had to adjust my image to the page layout which involved my having to use transform scale and moving the image around to find the correct positioning for my image without going over where the crease of the page is as this is not conventional to a magazine. I used the inner and outer glow tool on the smaller heading on the final piece at the top to give a eye-catching effect to it. I also moved the main headline across the bottom of the page as this is more conventional to a magazine and doesn’t intervene with the crease of the page. I also added drop caps and a pull quote onto my work as this is also more conventional to a music magazine and grabs the audience’s attention, I did all of the text in publisher as this was the simplest way to add drop caps and a pull quote and fit the text into the page.

Overall, I believe that my development in digital technology has vastly increased since the start of my foundation portfolio; one of the main keys to my development is learning from the errors I made and trying to improve on some areas that make the magazine look unconventional.