Evaluation Question 7: Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the final product?

My preliminary task production:

School magazine front cover

My house music magazine production. 

My preliminary task

My preliminary task was to create a front cover for a school magazine. I created this front cover using fireworks and because this was the first time I had ever used fireworks I only knew how to use it on a very basic level so my production work was very limited in how professional it looked. I look at it now in comparison to my house music magazine production and realise how much my skills have developed. However I did do certain aspects correctly such as the main image, it is of a high quality and presents the right image of secondary school students being very chilled out as it is aimed at these type of people, however now I have learnt in my production work that this is not the only way to reach your audience and I have put a lot more thought into how to reach my audience. Such things as makeup, hairstyles, clothes, facial expressions, lightings are all part of creating a successful magazine that reaches a wide scale of people. I have only created a front cover here also so therefore I have learnt now how to create a contents page and a double page spread for a magazine. The front cover I have created for the school magazine is not professional and probably wouldnt attract anyone at all because it does not contain the correct conventions of a magazine.  I realised from looking back at my preliminary task where I needed to improve and where I needed to learn more skills in order to make my house music magazine appear more appealing. Especially by making the text on the front cover look more proffesional, as the text I used on this school magazine does not look like a magazine. 

My house music magazine production. 

When making my house music magazine production I had become more aware of a range of different technologies/softwares and I had becomes much more familiar with fireworks. Basic things like creating shapes and learning how to stop things from moving are very small aspects, however they make a huge difference to the quality of your final product. I have learnt how to correctly choose different font and how to create a font colour theme that flows through all my production work. I have learnt how to delete all white areas from images and text to a very high quality, I have also learnt how to sharpen text and images to make it of a higher quality too. In my preliminary task I chose any fonts, images colours and did not consider this deeply how they would appeal to my audience. I have also been very creative with my mastheads and choosing a main image, I pre-planned a photoshoot that allowed me to plan outfits, makeup etc that would appeal to my audience. I also chose from different mastheads I designed which would be the best to use by carefully analysing why each one would target my audience correctly. The masthead I chose to design was something I spent a lot of my time on creating a masthead that not only represeted my chosen genre but represented a high quality and looked professional.  I have been able to go back and improve different aspects of my work by gathering feedback. I was also able to gather an undertsanding of the certain things my target market would be attracted to by carrying out a questionairre also. This is something I was not given time to do when doingmy preliminary task.