Sign Off

Hello Moderator,

Below you will find all of my Research and Planning posts, Evaluation Questions 1-7 and my finished Music Magazine. I have designed my blog so it is easy to navigate and easy to read, so I hope you enjoy scrolling through my blog!

Many Thanks, 

Stephanie.

Completed Music Magazine

Here is the finished product!

Extra Audience Feedback: Complete

I sent out images of my completed Front Cover, Contents Page and Double Page Spread to a few of my friends, and got some last feedback from them.

Facebook-Megan

Whatsapp-Ellie

Front cover

 Contents Page

Double Page Spread

Evaluation Question 7

Here are my two videos to show how my preliminary task compares to my finished music magazine. In the first video I have compared my front covers, and in the second video I compared my contents pages.
In case the audio isn't clear I will post an overview of what I have said below the video.

When I created my college magazine I had never used photoshop before so I knew how to use the basics of the software which is why the front cover looks very minimal compared to my music magazine. 

Obviously the genre of the two magazines is very different so the look of the magazine is bound to be different, you'd expect a college magazine to be more widely appealing and a punk/alternative magazine to have a more edgy feel.

As you can see the simple layout hasn't really changed but I have used it more effectively with my music magazine. There is a lot of black blank space on my college magazine whereas my music magazine is packed full of information and images. 

My photography has also improved dramatically between the two covers. A lot of shadows fall on Adams face in my college magazine making the image not as clear whereas I found a spot to take photographs in clear daylight for my music magazine overall making the image clearer, and my editing skills were put to the test here, as I smoothed out parts of josh's skin using the spot healing tool, but not too much so he looked fake, and I also adjusted the brightness and contrast of the image to work accordingly. The other photos along the bottom of my cover show that I did take a lot of photos to find the right shots, I have 3 extra models and one has a nature themed background, and the two are made to look like they have stood in front of a coloured backdrop, however I just cut out the original backgrounds and created a drop shadow. The other photo is one of my own photos from a gig that I went to this varies the use of technology since I used my phone for this photo and makes my cover look different and more appealing.

I kept one font for my college magazine making the cover look really boring and plain, but I changed this for my music magazine, I downloaded my own font and used that as a unique font for my masthead and I also downloaded another separate font to the rest for my bring me the horizon cover line, the font is quite similar to their band logo. For the rest of the magazine I used a sharp, bold font that is easy to read so I used the Impact font.

The layout is completely different, I had an idea for my college magazine that with my limited skill and knowledge at the time I was unable to carry out successfully. However after doing research into my genre of music magazine the layout became more clean cut and a lot simpler than what I had planned for my college magazine. Both contents pages have a white background but again excessive amounts of space was an issue in my college magazine. My music contents page however has filled the space without looking too crowded. And the amount of writing is split with images making the whole page easier to read and looks like it has a clear section by section guide line. 

Imagery was also a massive difference. My college magazine has one image off the Internet to relate to a mine craft related cover line, but that is it none of my own photos. My music magazine on the other hand uses all of my own photos, again varying the use of technology I used my phone for 4 out of the 5 pictures, and again two of these photos were from gigs corresponding with cover lines I had chosen. 

My colour scheme ties in well with the front cover making the two pages look related and definitely belong to the same magazine, whereas my college magazine since it was unfinished could have belonged anywhere. 

Again I used the same font throughout my college contents page showing no creativity or experimentation, but on my music magazine I continued the font scheme through from the front cover to the contents page again tying in nicely as a magazine on a whole. 

My contents page uses a lot of different features since I have added red rectangles to section off the page, and added black rectangles to section off different features in the magazine. My photographed features also have their own red triangles to promote that feature more with the page number inside as an easy guide. 

Overall i know that my music magazine was much more of a success than my college magazine. My photoshop skills have developed massively over the course of the first year allowing me to experiment more meaning my music magazine could have it's own uniqueness and not having to adjust to my own limitations.

Evaluation Question 6

Throughout the production of my musiz magazine I have used and developed my skills in numerous different technologies.

The first bit of technology I used was the Canon 1000D DSLR camera to take the photographs of my various models. This peice of technology was completley new to me, so I had to learn how to use all the different settings available on this model of camera, this took quite a bit of getting used to but all in all the photos I took were a complete success. To begin with I took a few photos with my phone but these photos were badly lit, and quite blurred compared to the photos taken with this camera, so the camera was a nessecity for my model photos.

A very handy piece of technology that I used throughout the production of my magazine which I took full avdantage of was my phone (Samsung galaxy s5). I used my phone to message my friends to organise times of when to take photos, and to gain feedback. I used facebook and whatsapp to gain my social networking feedback, I took screenshots on my phone of these comments and continued to post them to my blog.

To record the software I have been using I have used Ishowu when demonstrating Adobe Photoshop, and for recording software that I used at home I used TinyTake by MangoApps to record voicethreads and videos. Both these pieces of software were completely new to me, I didn't know that software like this was so easy to use, it also provides another way to record evidence during the production stages.  

The video below shows a little tutorial of how I have used Adobe Photoshop as another piece of technology. I filmed the video using Ishowu and the voiceover using TinyTake. 

In case the audio quality isn't fantastic here is an overview:

I decided to create a simple masthead and manipulate one of my photographs of my model Josh.

For the masthead I created a text layer and chose the font and then changed colour by using the colour picker tool. I then added a black box behind my mastehad, by drawing a rectangle using the shape tool and then using the paint bucket to change colour.

When manipulating my picture of Josh I showed how to adjust the brightness/contrast, the hue/saturation and the levels of the photo to add various filters and to enhance the photo. I then showed how to smooth out a skin tone by using the spot healing tool across Joshs jawline.

Other peices of technology I have used are Flickr, Prezi, Slideshare and Blogger.

Flickr was a new platform for me to produce question three of the evaluation regarding distribution. Flickr can be used as an alternative to regular powerpoint presentations to show and present my work in a more creative way.

Prezi is something I have been familiar with for a long time now, and I prefer Prezi to Powerpoint because it is more interactive and is really easy to present your ideas.
Below I have added a short video of how to use the basics of Prezi and how Prezi can improve an average presentation.

I had never come across Slideshare before, but I have learnt that Slideshare is a way to post your own powerpoints for public viewing, which could give a lot of extra feedback.

And finally Blogger, I had never used Blogger before AS Media the closest I have ever had to a blog is a Tumblr blog, but Blogger is completely different. I really like using Blogger and how simple it is to use to post your progress online for everyone to see, again it has a comment feature which encourages feedback. I have learnt how to embed links into blogger which was a nessecary part of a few of my other evaluation questions.

Evaluation Question 5

Evaluation
Question 5: How did you attract/address your audience?

Below is a link to my annotated presentation using a Prezi format.