Skills Development Essay

Over the two years I have gained experience and developed my knowledge widely with the use of cameras. I started my first year with hardly any knowledge of cinematography and first produced a perfume advert after having minimal training with cameras and the computers, we were not given long to produce the advert and I made sure the background of my image was acceptable to be used within the advert as I was unsure of how to cut the background out and make it look professional. I then went on to produce a college magazine as we had a little more training in the editing suite on the tools to use. My images for my college magazine were taken on an OLYMPUS digital camera, this helped me to produce good quality images to edit and to adapt to my magazine. I used the internet to help me research into existing magazines and gain ideas such as layout, context and images. I took images of a student at the college holding folders and reading their work. For my front cover I used a medium long shot which breaks conventions of a typical magazine as the usual image used is a medium close up. This is also when I first created my blog on the internet, this would store all of my research, planning and the products I created to help me evaluate my end result and create my As portfolio. For the main task I decided that my music magazine was going to be in the genre of pop/chart music as I had seen a gap in the market for a more mature and sophisticated magazine, therefore I went on to create a front page, contents page and double page spread using a featured artist that related to the genre. I went on to decide a price and who the main publisher for my magazine would be, researching the main publishers for magazines within the same genre.  

The creativity of my music magazine came purely from a lot of research on the internet and even in shops themselves. I searched the internet of styles through google images and also went into supermarkets to see what the latest music/fashion magazines were on the shelves. I looked at things such as colour schemes, cinematography/images, text and usual conventions of a music magazine. I created my magazine through the eyes of my target audience which was the category of 16-24 year olds. I created questionnaires to gain demographics into music magazines and then take the ideology from them to create the first drafts of my music magazine. Before starting Media Studies I had no experience or skills with how to use Photoshop and this made it hard for me to gain a full potential of editing within my preliminary task where as when it came to my magazine, I was able to play around with photoshop and experiment more with my images and text that I was wanting to create for the magazine. I feel this is shown through comparing my preliminary task to my final product as the cinematography and mise en scene where more carefully thought about after seeing the poor lighting and stances I made my model use in my preliminary task.

I put a lot of time and effort into my research and planning and kept all of this on my blog this enabled me to get the full potential when creating my music magazine. I started my research by looking into the music industry and finding out the background of the ‘big three’ this was, Universal, Sony and Warner. I went on to look into three different existing music magazines and used LIIAR to analyse these and get myself to grips with what conventions are used within every single magazine and how these attract the audience and the ideas and concepts behind them. My research and planning helped me to develop skills in all key areas of producing my magazine from looking at house styles to producing well edited images that followed conventions of my typical pop/chart show genre. I went on to look at demographics and started to understand that there was a lot more of a thought process put into a magazine than it looks, taking into consideration the social class of todays society and having a strong demographic knowledge will help you to boost sales of your magazine. I looked into Maslows Hierarchy of Needs, this helped me to understand the needs of my target audience and what would appeal to them. This research also helped me to take into account the fact I would need to budget the price of my magazine due to aiming at the age bracket of 16-24 therefore many being students and unemployed. I then went on to start creating my front cover, contents page and double page spread by creating draft after draft and getting feedback from peers and teachers to be able to reach a point where I felt nomore changes needed to be made. I had peer feedback which helped me to gain a perspective from the view of my target audience but as well from teachers who would help me to follow conventions and be continuous with my work.

I got to know the main conventions such as using a medium close up of the model to place in the centre of the front cover this intrigued the audience into the magazine due to a successful and worldwide known artist being the ‘centre of attention’ and over powering the sell lines, as this is what many music magazines do. I also used typical conventions such as placing the barcode at the bottom left handside of the magazine with the date of publish and price, having my magazines name placed at the top in large straight forward font to catch the eye of my target audience and being a dominant feature when placed next to other magazines. I followed conventions such as Q magazine and Billboard with placing my sell lines on both left and right of the page and having them evenly spaced. Another convention I took from a real media text is placing the magazine’s website in the top left hand corner under the masthead. I placed a pull quote on my front page which was another convention I learnt as this relates to what the artist has had to say in an interview within the magazine, this makes the front cover look more interesting and does its job of pulling in the reader and wanting to read the article. Other conventions I pulled from real media texts are using the masthead from the front cover in my contents page and double page spread this further advertises the magazine. I added sections to my contents page which were a ‘featuring’ section and a ‘regulars’ section this showed the reader that every month there was new articles yet the regular Album reviews and such. Subheadings are also conventional so I included these to help the reader understand the magazine and what article they was looking at or wanting to read. Within my double page spread I followed and used conventions by taking inspiration from Q magazine. I used a bold heading to advertise the artists name and this made it clear to understand this is also showed my progression of continuity by being able to use the same font throughout the magazine. Whereas in my preliminary task I was unable to follow most of these conventions and stick to the typical continuity throughout.

Once creating my final products I began to analyse my own front cover, contents page and double page spread against real media texts comparing and contrasting the conventions I used and the conventions I broke and how this fitted with the genre of my product. I did this with magazines such as Q magazine, Billboard and Top of the Pops. I went on to answer which media institution may distribute my products as during my research and planning I looked into how Q, Billboard, Top of the Pops etc are distributed this helped me to gain the knowledge of the main distributors of my genre of magazine. Post production helped me to gain feedback from the 16-24 age range category before the magazine would be published this helped me to gain the understanding of what conventions worked well and what didn’t.

Evaluating my own work made me realise that I gained a lot of skills within the production process from gaining an understanding of an audience as well as using photoshop to make such products that I did and opening a gap in the market for the magazine genre pop/chart. To conclude, I feel that I have developed numerous skills from the preliminary task to the main brief task, this was through the use of learning new skills in technology and theory as I had no experience prior to these tasks therefore helping me to create a final product that was successful with fellow peers.