Media Evaluation Q7...

Q7 - Look back to the school magazine you created and dictate what I have learnt in the progression from that to your final product, the music magazine.

When I looked back to the preliminary task which was set in the early stages of 2012, creating a school magazine cover and contents page. I have found that I have developed my skills very well and in so many different ways to create a better magazine than the one I created last year. After asking a small amount of people and myself I found that overall people feel that my music magazine was more professional and more creative than my school magazine had been.

(Image to the left is the cover to the school magazine)

(Image to the right is the cover to the music magazine)

As you can see from the two images above there is a big difference to how my magazine covers ended up and how my music magazine is more professional than my school magazine. While for my school magazine I really only looked at magazines which the school had done themselves and which was going to be sent out to parents when I should have been looking at magazine created my students for students. Because of this error I feel that overall my magazine may have been mixed on who I was targeting rather than being totally certain on whom I was trying to target.

However in my music magazine I did endless about of research and searched for many other types of magazines with the same genre as mine so that I could understand what type of information was going to be in the magazine.

The other large difference between the makings of the magazine covers was that when I created my school magazine cover it was the first time I had ever used InDesign properly. This meant that I didn't really understand what extra tools there were and how I could make my magazine the best it could be on this new programme. However by the time I created my music magazine I was more aware of what I had to do and how I could make my magazine look more professional though the programme.

As you can see I have arranged my magazine cover better on my music magazine than my music magazine making the magazine more readable for the audience. For example on the school magazine I find it hard to read what some of the sell lines on the cover say as they are just placed on top of the image which takes up the whole page. This was because I picked my images with a better eye in my music magazine while before I liked the photo when I picked it and so used that image no matter what.

Sticking with the images, when I was creating my music magazine I learnt more about how the mise en scene of the images were important because of how they were going to affect the audience picking up the magazine and also how it represented the magazine as a whole as people make their choice if they want the magazine or not even before they have read what’s inside by just looking at the image on the cover.







(Image to the left is of the contents page for the school magazine)

(Image to the right is of the contents page for the music magazine)

When I was making my school magazine I felt that I didn't plan my photo-shoots to the best I could and felt that I ignored all of the help I was given by teachers and other students and decided to proceed to do what I wanted to do with my magazine. The articles which I placed in my school magazine I placed them in there when I was doing the contents page and didn't plan where everything was going to go. However in my music magazine I created a ‘flat plan’ before I even started to make the cover of my magazine, the reason for this was so that I could include relevant sell lines on the cover and know where everything was going to be placed on my contents page. I feel that by doing this is makes my magazine seem more professional as well because the sell lines on my cover would then be correct and I could add more information about features and other articles inside to attract the audience.

While the planning of the magazine and how it was going to look and be presented was much harder it helped by looking at other magazines of that genre, such as Country Weekly, and looked at the type of articles which were included in the magazine and what they advertised on the cover and also the type of images they placed in the contents page.

I personally feel that my contents page for my school magazine was not professional at all and make the whole magazine look like it would never be published. As you can see on the contents page the border lines are still placed on the page and this makes the page seem untidy and not finished as a whole. As you can also see there are only 17 pages worth of articles to read and then the magazine is over, however for the music magazine there are 57 pages labelled on the contents page. This makes the music magazine seem as if the audience would be getting their money’s worth rather than purchasing a magazine they would be finished reading in less than 5 minutes

(Image to the left is an image I used on the contents page for my school magazine)








(Image to the left is an image i edited for a poster to be placed on my front cover for my music magazine)

As you can see from the images above the way I take photos and edit them has developed largely since creating the school magazine to the makings of the music magazine. I feel that my editing the images I make them seem more professional and it attracts the audience’s eyes more than they would if they were just photos taken from the camera straight onto the magazine. The photos which I took for the school magazine were not planned and I found it hard to figure out what I wanted my models to do when I was taking the images as I hadn't planned what type of images I wanted. However I did plan what type of images I wanted for my music magazine, I also added a prop to make the magazine show off the type of music genre that it was presenting for the audience.

For my school magazine I only did one photo-shoot and didn't look at the images until the following day, this meant that I couldn't change the images and couldn't get the models together again to take another photo-shoot. However for my music magazine I took two photo-shoots at two separate locations, both with a white background, and looked at the images I was taking while I took them so that I could see if I needed to take more or that there were enough.

Overall I have enjoyed making my music magazine and feel that with the changes I have made throughout and the development of my skills in the creating, planning and taking photos for the magazine. I have made my magazine seem more professional and would attract a large audience to my magazine.