Evaluation Question 7Looking back at your preliminary task, what do

you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to your final production

Research and PlanningAfter I had created my preliminary task where I created a school magazine, I felt like I had improved with basic skills. When I was creating my final media product of the music magazine, my skills improved rapidly.

Print PrelimFor this task we were to create a magazine based around our school. This was to give us a basic idea before we created the real thing

Inspirational texts – What current magazines look like; colours, fonts, layout. Why they are like that

Created flat plans – basic idea of what we wanted our magazine to look like

Evaluation – comparing how our prelim product was similar to a real-life professional magazine

By researching what magazines looked like at the time of creating my prelim task, I developed my ideas about what works in the industry. If I found that most magazines used a certain colour I knew that it wouldn’t be a good idea to use a total opposite colour. With this research, it benefitted my final product as I knew what people looked for in a magazine. I obviously wanted my final product to look as professional as possible so by following this research I could do this.

When I created a flat plan for my prelim task, I got a basic idea of what my final prelim product would look like. This helped me to understand just how hard it is to decide on a new magazine. Although it was just a plan, it helped portray the ideas that I had, so I could see if anything needed to be changed. This benefitted my final product as it helped me to see what looks best where. Most magazines have a similar layout so by creating a flat plan of a similar style to professional magazines, it could help me to follow the same rule in my final product.

Final ProductFor our final product we were to create a music magazine of the genre we chose.

Prezi on Textual Research

Secondary audience research – audiences of professional magazines compared to my target audience

Primary audience research – people’s opinions on professional magazines

Institutional research – current magazine ownership

Developed our photography skills – imitated professional photos of music artists

Created flat plans

Organisation of potential costumes and props

Researched fonts and colours

A basic plan of our article

When I created a Prezi on textual research, I analysed two current music magazines. I analysed the layout, fonts, colours and images used on each magazine and why they are like this. This made me learn a great deal about professional magazines and how to make them effective for a target audience. Every part of the magazine has to look right in order to sell so by looking at this I learnt how to make my own final product effective. It helped develop a more detailed understanding of conventions of real media products

I also learnt a great deal about the program Prezi. I learnt how to create paths on the program so my prezi would go in a chronological order.

With the secondary research that I did on current magazines I learnt a great deal about the audience of current magazines. I have learnt what magazines attract which audience. This helped benefit my own product as I knew which audience which I wanted to target the magazine at so I had to follow a certain criteria in order to please that audience. I developed skills about what type of social groups like which magazines, where I could also categorize myself into one of these social groups.

From researching into people’s opinions on current professional magazines I learnt a great deal. Obviously people had different views on the magazines but I learnt that this was due to the music they listened to. The people that did like the Q and NME magazine appearances listened to the type of music that those magazines represented.

This brought many advantages to my product as I could get an idea of what people mainly looked for in a magazine. NME and Q are both ‘indie’ magazines, so to make my magazine suitable to it’s R&B genre, I had to change the fonts and colours used on those professional magazines.

By practicing our photography skills I learnt what would look good for my final product. In the prelim task I just took a photo without thinking about what it would represent. For my real product I had to think about the costume, pose and prop to enable I was portraying my chosen music genre.

Prelim images

Final product images

In conclusion I have learnt a great deal through the production of my prelim task to my final product.

Not only have I learnt about professional magazines out on sale at the minute, but also about how

difficult it is to create your own professional looking magazine that would be suitable for a target

audience.