Evaluation Activity 7

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EVALUATION ACTIVITY 7
Looking back at your preliminary task (the school magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to full product?How have you approached the two tasks and how have you managed your time, equipment and other resources?

When first producing my school magazine I didn't have a plan or an idea of how I was going to have the front page or the contents laid out, I just saw it as a blank canvas for me to design and be creative with. As much as this was a good idea, there were many stages of the design were I didn't know what to do with it, it took me a long time to decide how I wanted it done and I kept changing my mind therefore having to change the design. I first thought to my self that planning it would take too long and therefore doing it this way would be a lot quicker but the more I got into it and realised I didn't know what I wanted to do with my layout the more I realised having a plan would be a lot easier and time consuming to work from. So for my music magazine layout, I planned into detail the front page and the contents page. Although I knew they were probably going to change a little bit I was glad I had something to work from.

Another thing I feel I have learnt is how to research before I start my work for example, on the school magazines I didn't do any research, apart from looking at previous students ideas, I just rushed straight in and started it, by doing this I learnt that some things were not appropriate to be in a school magazine and other things such as the school houses should have been in the school magazines, if I had researched this I would have known this before. Because of this I decided to do some research before I started my music magazine, I found specific things that were meant to go in my music magazine and things that were not, I also researched things such as what types of people should be mentioned in my magazine, the lay out of my magazine and the types of clothing and poses my model should do, this made designing the music magazine a lot easier.

When taking my pictures, I feel that they have improved from the school magazine to the music magazine a lot. Although I feel I have always been quite lucky that my image editing has never really needed to have a lot of work done to it, I still feel that things like my cloning and spot healing techniques have improved. I believe that the school magazine was like a trial run for me to find out what I was good at and things that I need to improve on for my music magazine.

Taking the pictures were a lot more harder then I had thought, in the school magazine I didn't think about the angle of the shot or the props that should have been in the shot. I only thought about the place the picture should be taken because it had to have something to do with school in it and the length of the shot because we had been told what shot it had to be. I didn't think about the props in my picture, seeing as one of my models still had her coat on when she was in library. Where as in the music magazine I thought a lot more about all these things such as props and angle shots, in my main picture on the front cover my model has got sunglasses on which I had researched and found that many pop/RNB singers wear sunglasses in there magazine shoots and I have taken it at a low angle so that it looks like her body is facing down on the reader showing a slight bit of attitude. I also learnt that taking one picture is impossible when wanting an ideal photo, many pictures get taken and very few get approved as an ideal picture.

When thinking about how I managed my time through out the course work of both the school magazine and the music magazine, I realised that with the school magazine I didn't really set my self any time boundaries or deadlines, this was why I was shocked when i found out that my contents page had to be in soon and I was still finishing off the front cover, although I got it all done on time, if I had set deadlines I would have completed it without the stressful rush. So for my music magazines I set my self strict deadlines, made sure I followed them and believe that this help me get my front cover, contents page and double page spread done in a more relaxed way.