Evaluation

In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

I analysed 3 magazines to learn about the codes and conventions of school magazines. The magazines I looked at were CHiLL, Fusion and The Bishopbriggs Academy magazine. From these magazines I chose a range of codes and conventions to use in the production of my magazine. The first I chose was to choose a colour scheme, the 3 colours I chose to use were red, blue and white. These colours are used in the logo for Whitley Bay High School so I thought they would fit well into this magazine. I also carried on with the colour scheme and used it on the contents page, which the other magazines did, but I thought the colours CHiLL used didn’t look very good as they weren’t well used, there was too much of the red and black.

Also after looking at these magazines, none of them had a large image on the front cover, I thought that most magazines should have a large image as it is a code and convention in other magazines. So I used a large image on the front cover, which would be relevant to a article inside the magazine. The magazines had smaller images, for example in CHiLL they had numerous small images showing what was inside the magazine, but I went against this and didn’t add them, I left the front cover with 1 image, and named the articles to leave the reader with an imagination of what the article would be like. This also led into my contents page, by not adding any images. The Bishopbriggs Academy magazine left the contents page with no images and just the articles, although I like magazines with images on the contents as it gives the reader an insight to what the article is about, I thought I would try something different and thought my contents page looked quite effective without any images.

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

I learnt how to use 2 pieces of technology which I used to produce my school magazine, and I will use to produce my final music magazine. I learnt how to use Photoshop where I will construct the magazine, and how to use digital SLR cameras which I will use to take the pictures for my magazine.

I learnt how to use the different functions on the camera to take different sorts of pictures, like using the shutter speed, which if you have a light you can draw a shape and the shape will show on the image. I also learnt how to manually alter the lens on the camera in order to take a clear picture and zoom in and out of the model, which helped when I took my picture. The lighting in my image is artificial as I used the flash on the camera. However I altered the image on Photoshop by changing the hue and saturation. We learnt how to use Photoshop so we could construct the magazine in this programme. I also linked layers together once I was happy with them, so I didn’t have loads of layers building up.

When I produce my final music magazine, I will take more images and use them, and to improve I will use more of the effects in Photoshop to make my magazine look more professional.  I will also analyse more magazines so I can see if there are any more codes and conventions I could possibly follow.