Critical Analysis

At the beginning of my first year I had no skills in Photoshop or a vast knowledge with computers and I found it very difficult to adapt to new technologies (such as Photoshop, blogger, YouTube, Wikipedia etc..) and new terminologies (such as connote, denote, mise-en-scene etc..) . Also I found it hard to keep up as I was very disorganised and as my organisation has improved I have found that I have picked up a lot of new skills, that have slowly been discovered and improved with a lot of effort and hard work over the past year. I have found that I am now a lot more confident with using these new technologies, and that my work looks a lot more professional than when I had first started, and I will carry on succeeding with more knowledge of this subject.
Our preliminary tasks were to make a perfume advert and the front cover, contents page and draft of a double page spread of a college magazine. Whilst working on my college magazine I had never used Photoshop, an SLR camera or Blogger. I started to use an SLR camera and I had to adapt to the new settings of the camera, when I was able to use the basic settings of the camera, and keep the models in focus, I learnt that it took better and clearer images. I found Photoshop very difficult to adapt to but now my skills have improved drastically and I am now able to add different layers, resize images, blur the edges of photos, add different textures and fonts on top of images, these new found skills helped me with my final product of a new music magazine.
The difference between my college magazine front cover and contents page, and my final product of a music magazine front cover, contents page, and double spread, was that in the college magazine I had only used basic fonts, whereas in my music magazine, I had used fonts from “dafont.com”, and photoshoped them in, using the crop, layer and blur tools. In the college magazine I had tried to stick to the original conventions of a basic college magazine, by using a masthead, a barcode, a medium close up shot of a student, subtitles, a date and a price, placed in the bottom corner of the page. My main objective, was to try to keep to Wyke's colour scheme, using purples and greens, which I did stick to throughout the front cover and contents page, because I hadn’t acquired the skills of using “dafont.com” or being able to use Photoshop that well, I used a plain font, but tried to make it stand out with bright colours and a black border around the font. I chose to use a black border so that the colour of the font would stand out and wouldn’t get lost within the background. I didn’t stick to the continuity of this, and didn’t apply this effect to the sub-headings in the bottom left-hand corner, therefore you can hardly see what they say, whereas in my music magazine I have a dark background and I have tried to use either red or white writing throughout to stick to the continuity and make my magazine look more professional. In both magazines I have tried to use interesting sub-headings, to grab the audience’s attention, but I think that I didn’t achieve this objective with the first magazine, as much as I did with the music magazine. With both magazines, I tried to find an appropriate image to agree with the conventions of each magazine, but I found that I achieved this more with my preliminary task of my college magazine, as the main image was of the brand new building "Oak" at the front of the college, which is also the main entrance into the college with a midshot of two students smiling, a smile connotes happiness and therefore makes the audience feel that this college is very inviting and friendly. The reason I chose to take the picture here, was because it has the logo of the college on the side of the building.  The image of the two students I took, was not originally in front of the building, it was in the green room, and I have flipped and photoshoped it onto the main image, with a lot of practise, this gave me confidence to try more things on Photoshop. You can tell that this is a college magazine, because of the main image and the masthead, whereas on my music magazine if it wasn’t for the subheadings and images of festivals, you would not be able to tell that it was a music magazine, because I have not related any of my images towards music.
Over all I think that my past experience in my preliminary task helped me feel more confident with making my music magazine, I just feel that I needed a lot more research on music magazines, i.e. - using LIIAR analysis on other music magazines, and reading through more magazines, to get used to the conventions of a typical music magazine, using Google and Wikipedia more to research these conventions, and also use YouTube to watch professional artists music videos, to see their style of clothing and how they deliver themselves across, therefore helping myself in delivering better images.