Monday 20th October - Evaluation

For my preliminary task there are some things which I feel I could have improved on my school magazine front cover and contents page. I also feel that this preliminary task will help when it comes to producing my music magazine, because I now know to complete work on the deadlines which are set. For my preliminary task I did not complete my school magazine front cover and contents page for the deadline which was set, and I know now to complete my main task on time. However, I completed my planning on time and also took my pictures for my front cover and contents page on time as well.
When creating my front cover, I didn’t follow the codes and conventions as well as I could of, and I think that this will help when it comes to producing my music magazine as I will know to follow the codes and conventions. Also, after taking pictures for my front cover and contents page, I have a better idea of the different types of angles I can use.
One of the strengths of my front cover, I believe was the main picture as it was a medium close-up which was asked for in the brief, and it was also different to other peoples photographs. Another strength was that I followed some of the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover e.g. relating a cover line to the main picture and making it stand out the most so that it is obvious it relates. A weakness which I found was thinking of cover lines for my front cover, as this took the longest to do. Also, thinking of 10 regular content and 10 feature articles for my contents page took a long time, so therefore this was also a weakness. Another weakness which I found was finding pictures to put on my contents page, as I didn’t take as many pictures which I needed.
New media technologies which I had been taught to use helped in creating my contents page, as we had to use Quark Xpress which I had never used before. I found Quark Xpress easy and simple to use once we had a demonstration on it and I had a clear idea on how to use it. The other media technology we used was Photoshop, but I had already used this when creating my magazine front cover for GCSE media.

Friday 17th October

I finished off creating my magazine front cover, and started to create my contents page using Quark Xpress. The deadline for our preliminary task was today, but mine wasn’t finished so I had to finish it on another day.

Wednesday 15th October

We started to create our school magazine front covers using photoshop. We were told to follow the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover to help us know what to put on the cover.

Tuesday 14th October

In today’s lesson, we were taught how to use a software called Quark Xpress and had a demonstration on how to use some of the tools which we will be frequently using when we create our contents page.

Monday 13th October

In this lesson, we took pictures for our school magazine front cover and contents page. We had to take a photograph for our main cover image, and I found this a quite hard as I couldn’t’t think of a suitable picture. I spent all of lesson doing this as I took numerous photographs with different poses. By the end of the lesson, I had took a photograph which I was going to use for the main image on my front cover.

Friday 10th October

We carried on with the preliminary task, and I finished my rough draft of the front cover. After we had done that, we then had to come up with a list of regular content which will appear in my school magazine and also a list of 10 feature articles. The regular content and the feature articles will appear in the contents page.

Thursday 9th October

We started the preliminary exercise of our coursework, and we started it by planning the title of our school magazine. I brainstormed the word ‘school’ to try and come up with a suitable title for my magazine. I did this by writing everything that came to my head when I thought of school, so I had words such as lunch, timetable, homework etc. I decided to choose the word Whiteboard as my magazine title as I felt that it related to school well. I then made a list of the content which would be on my front cover, and after I had done that I started draw a rough draft. By doing this preliminary exercise, it is getting us prepared for our main task in the coursework of designing the front cover and contents page of a music magazine.

Thursday 8th October

In today’s lesson, each groups different photographs were shown to the rest of the class. We were shown other peoples different pictures as it gave us more of an idea of the type of angles which we can use for the picture on the front cover of our magazine. It also shown us if we were taking the photographs at the correct angle, by comparing them to the other groups. After this, we started our task one on the task sheet, which was to create a school magazine. First of all we were to come up with a name for our school magazine, so I brainstormed the word school to see which name I could use which signified everything about school. This preliminary exercise will help us to when we come to the main task of creating a music magazine, as we will be familiar with the type of things we have to do.

Tuesday 7th October

In today’s lesson, my group had to re-take the photograph which has connotations of friendship and the photograph which has connotations of stress. We did this as we thought that we could take a picture which was more spontaneous than the original photograph we took. For the photograph which has connotations of friendship, we re-took a photograph of a piece of paper with the words ‘best friends’ on and also a little drawing of two stick people. However, for the photograph which has connotations of stress, we couldn’t come up with a more unique idea than our original photograph, as nothing seemed to look right, so we kept our original. It is useful for us to re-take photographs as we get more experience of the type of angles we can use for the picture on our magazine front cover.

Monday 6th October

In today’s lesson we were told to take pictures in our group using the task sheet we were given. We had to take a low angle medium close up, a high angle long shot, an extreme close up of time, a big close up of something using a mobile phone, a close up of someone in ‘nature’, a two shot in medium long shot, an over the shoulder shot of someone writing, a very long shot conveying isolation, a medium close up of a teacher and a long shot of someone who is drunk. We also had to take a photograph which has connotations of friendship and a photograph was has connotations of stress. We did this as it would help us learn how to position the angles whilst taking pictures, and this will be useful for when we take pictures for our magazine.
We spent most of the lesson doing this, and then we uploaded them onto the computer so they were ready to be shown in the next lesson.

Friday 3rd October

After writing down the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover in last lesson, we now had to write the codes and conventions of the contents page of a magazine. Some of the codes and conventions we came up with where that most of them had the same structure with page numbers and also keywords, most content pages are double page spreads, articles are divided into categories and often have layouts, they have the website printed at the bottom of the page, and we also found many more codes and conventions. Learning about these will help us when it comes to the main task, as we will have to make a contents page for our music magazine. We now know what our contents pages are expected to look like as we can use the codes and conventions to help us.

We started our coursework by writing down the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover. Some of the codes and conventions we found were that there is always a main image which dominates most of the cover, the title usually starts from the left hand side of the page, the price and issue date is always publish on the cover, the title is a unique font, there is a simple colour, they always have a barcode, the title is usually only ever one or two words, and there were also many more. Writing the codes and conventions for a magazine front cover will help us with our coursework because it is telling us what we need to put on our front cover and what the design will be like, so therefore our magazine cover for the preliminary exercise and the main task wont be untypical or not fit the codes and conventions. We discussed the codes and conventions so that we could write down any ones which we didn’t already have, so we knew exactly what is to be expected of our front cover.