Skills development essay

Describe and evaluate your skills development over the course of the Foundation Portfolio

For my Foundation Portfolio I produced a pop music magazine which targeted a market of mainly teenage girls (80% females: 20% males) who are in the social economic groups C2, D and E. I noticed there wasn’t an existing magazine in the pop genre for this group of people so I made it my task to create one using Adobe Photoshop CS5 to edit my front cover, contents page and double page spread together using my original images and text and I also used www.blogger.com to keep up to date with my progress on the project and write about my decisions and opinions of my media text.

At the start of this project I didn’t have any experience with any of the programmes I was going to be using. Photoshop was completely foreign to me so I had to teach myself everything I know now but I know that it was the best decision to use this software because it is better than PowerPoint and Paint as you can manipulate the photographs to a higher standard. I had also never used the blogging system before and on reflection I know I could’ve done this more effectively. Another program I used was Prezi which I found very difficult to use at first and I didn’t particularly enjoy using it throughout the whole process but it is a great way of planning and showing what ideas you have in an interesting production format.

Before I started the main task of creating a music magazine front cover, contents page and double page spread we had to create a college magazine front cover and draft contents page as a preliminary task. The first thing I did was set up a blog and posted what my brief was. The preliminary task was the most challenging part of the project for me as I had to learn everything from scratch. My planning for this part of the project wasn’t very thorough and I think this lead to my lack of planning during the main project but I will hopefully be able to learn from this while I’m producing my music video for my advanced portfolio. I started by searching the internet for images of existing college magazine front covers and I repeated this process when I started my music magazine. These were my very first posts on my blog. I was then taught how to do a LIIAR analysis which after practice I started to do very well as it is one of my strengths. My Photoshop skills were very poor during the preliminary task and if I hadn’t have done that task I wouldn’t have done very well in the main piece of coursework, affecting my overall grade.  The main issue I had with Photoshop was not knowing where any of the tools were that I needed to use including how to set up a blank page to start my project. We were taught some techniques in lessons but following this I just had to play around with the different tools until I found the one I wanted to use. Eventually I learnt where the basic tools were such as the cropping tool, spot healing brush tool and blur tool and I used these regularly. To use the spot healing tool I would zoom in so the imperfections on the skin were more visible. I would then select the spot healing tool which would bring up a skin coloured blurry circle as the mouse. I would then hover over the imperfection and click on it a number of times until it was blended into the skin. When I had covered them all up I zoomed out to see how it looked and if there were any problems with it I could then make any adjustments needed. When I began creating my music magazine I had to use some techniques that were more advanced so my work was to a higher standard and to do this I watched YouTube clips to teach myself where they were on Photoshop and how they could help me. I also had to make sure my magazine followed basic conventions such as a masthead, main headline, subtitles, skyline, barcode, price and issue number. I incorporated the main conventions of a contents page and double page spread into my media text too. 

While I was planning my music magazine I found that it was very important to keep referring to current music magazines such as Kerrang, NME, Vibe and Top of the Pops. Although not all of these magazines were in my “pop” genre there isn’t anything out there at the minute that would be an accurate magazine to find similarities from. Top of the Pops is aimed at younger teenagers and children to what my target audience were so I definitely found it useful using conventions from the alternative music magazines. There are a lot of similarities between my front cover and the Kerrang front cover that I used. During the planning process I also thought very carefully about my images. I needed to make sure there was space above my models head so I could include a skyline. I also had to think about the appearance of my model. The clothing was very important to get right because I needed them to look old enough for my target audience but not too grown up so I didn’t offend any of the younger readers. The colour scheme was inspired by that of the Vibe magazine and I would say this was unconventional but going back to the Top of the Pops magazine, this is unconventional too.

Creating numerous drafts of my work was great and I also tweaked things to see which product looked better by saving them to my file under many different names . My blog came in very useful when it came to evaluating my project because I was able to use it as a memory device so I knew the exact process I had gone through to get my finished media text. Looking back I think I could’ve done a better job with the blog but I can learn from this. My blog was also useful to compare my original ideas to what I had ended up with. Although these did change slightly I can see I did follow the template I had given myself to begin with. I also found it helpful to take a few days off from my own work and look at other people’s with them so by the time I went back to my media text I had fresh eyes and was then able to make changes that made my product a higher quality.

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