My foundation portfolio started off with a preliminary task
of making a magazine representing the college and aimed at the students in that
college. This task was done so that we were able to build on our skills using
Adobe Photoshop and photography before we did our main piece of AS coursework.
This way we had experience with it and also could do better when it came to our
main task. After we had done this task we moved onto our main AS piece of
coursework were we had to make a front cover, contents page and a double page
spread of a music magazine. The music magazine needed to look professional and
good enough to be published so therefore I had to research other magazines and
look at the conventions of them which included having a good consistent house
style, focus on only one specific genre of music and also making sure my house
style and genre of music matched, I then had to apply these to my product to
make sure it looked as professional as the real magazines. I had to decide on
some demographics for my target audience and I came up with these; I was going
to aim the magazine at people aged 15-24 as they are the age that I believe are
most involved and interested with music, the SEG would therefore have to be
class E – C2. I aimed towards achievers with my psychographics as at this age
they may still be looking towards their career path and not know what to do so
therefore I want to inspire them to achieve in the music world.
Whilst doing both of my magazines I had to learn a lot of
terminology such as ‘Masthead’, ‘Splash’, ‘Teasing Contents’ and many more,
this was so that when it came to writing about my product it would look a lot
more professional as I would be referring to it with its actual name. I also
had to show that I could show my planning and designs in different ways when
doing this I used programmes such as ‘Prezi’. ‘Prezi’ is used for making
slideshows and is easy to use and a brilliant piece of software, it allows you
to make your slideshow very easily and it also lets you choose the path which
your presentation will take, it also allows you to start from a blank canvas
and do everything yourself or it has templates for you to use. I also used ‘Go
Animate’. ‘Go Animate’ is different to ‘Prezi’ as it allows you to show your
research or planning in a conversation between animated people so that it gets
it across in a conversation format rather than just text on a screen, therefore
it gives you a different way to get your information across.
I had to use Adobe Photoshop for both my college magazine and
my music magazine. I had very little knowledge on how to work Photoshop when I
first started my college magazine; I knew what you could do on Photoshop
however I had no knowledge on how to actually make it happen. One of the things
that Photoshop can do which I knew about was its ability to manipulate images,
therefore when I produced my front cover I had to take a picture of my model
myself therefore I had to get rid of any imperfections as the front cover model
of any magazine always looks ‘perfect’, this meant I had to manipulate my own
image by using Photoshop to make my front cover model ‘perfect’. I did this by
using the ‘spot removal tool’ to get rid of a few blemishes on the face of my model;
I also used different layers of the image to make the model look like he had
perfect skin, I did this by using the ‘blur’ tool and also changing the
brightness on different layers which made the skin look more porcelain and gave
it a really good look. Another tool I used was the ‘clone stamp’ tool, this allowed
me to fill in any gaps that had been created such as if there was a gap in the
hair of the model I could use this tool and clone some hair from somewhere else
on the head and then clone it where it was missing so therefore it would look
like the hair of the model is perfect and there are no gaps in it, this tool
can also be used to get rid of spots too, however it is best to use the ‘spot
removal’ tool for that.
Altogether in my foundation Portfolio my skills have improved
massively, I started my AS year with no previous experience and improved my
skills a lot. I learnt how to use Photoshop to manipulate images so that they
look professional and make the model get that ‘perfect’ look and at the start
of the year I had never used this software before. I also learnt about the
terminology which as a brand new media student at AS had no knowledge about and
I believe that I managed to get the grasp of it all very quickly and could
analyse a magazine for conventions and label them with the correct terminology.
I also improved my skills on both Prezi and Go Animate as again I had no
experience on either of these products and I managed to produce presentations
on both of them which pleased the teacher. I also believe that my skills in
taking a picture increased as well as I now know what angles to take the
pictures at to connotate different things and therefore know what angle to pick
when doing different products. Overall I believe that as I started the year
with no experience in media my skills have improved greatly as I have shown
what skills I have improved on or learnt throughout the year and I now think
that I am now able to use these skills in many different ways to produce and
analyse different media texts.
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