Magizine cover

In the last few weeks my class has been running workshops on Photoshop and other programs which will be useful in the production of our coursework. This is an example of many of the techniques learnt, put into practice. As you can see I chose cosmopolitan as the magazine which I wanted to emulate. My thinking behind this was that it had a simple layout which will be easy enough to re-create. However we had to work within set pictures and only a few of which were suitable for cosmopolitan, all of which already had backgrounds to them. This meant that by picking a magazine with a constant background colour (commonly white or pale blue) I had made it much harder then necessary.

After cutting her out from her background I had to crop the image above her waist. This helped to desexualise the image which is more suitable to cosmopolitan readers. However this made the image to small for the background colour, this meant I had to enlarge the image of the girl and therefore slightly blur her (this is most obvious around the eyes) fortunately I believe this isn’t noticeable enough for me to have to replace the image.

As for the colour layout of the page I chose black and pink for two reasons. First of all they are contrasting colours and therefore seem to stand out more when you alternate them like I have. Secondly this is a colour pattern which is commonly used in cosmopolitan. However there are a couple of exceptions to this pattern. First of all there is the “I got burned by the details” sub-heading. I chose to do this heading in red so that it stands out more then the other headings as it goes against the pattern, however looking back it I’m not sure if it was the best idea. The end of the word burned and the by seem to blend in with her skin tones. If I had the chance I would go back and apply a white outer glow to it like I did with the writing opposite it. ‘Jessica on what she really wants’ has a black outer glow on it in the hope to stop it blending in with her shirt. Although it seemed to work at the time I didn’t look at it proper size and I now believe I should have made it bolder.

There are a few aspects of this work which wasn’t covered in the workshops however I believe they work well in this context. For example using a slide to simply make a box then applying text to the top of that is an example of how the layers worked with my piece. Then applying a drop shadow to that box (as well as the heading of the magazine) gave the appearance of it coming of the page, this in turn makes it more eye-catching. The use of specific numbers in surveys ‘17 ways to know he’s cheating’ is commonly use in magazines this gives the impression that this is all the possible ways as it isn’t a round number. Changing font to one which looks more like handwriting makes it seem like that article was specifically written by that person and therefore makes it more personal to the audience.

I am aiming at a specific audience for this product. This magazine commonly aims at females between the ages of sixteen and about thirty. I believe that my product also relates to this group the most obvious representation of this group is the age of the women on the cover. Although it could be argued that the model should have been British but I believe this works well anyway. This magazine supports Anne Cronin 's media theory of 'compulsory individuality'. People can relate to this magazine cover because of the varieties within it therefore they can choice between representations to pick the one which best represents them.

Book References

The following is information on books which I have read to further my media productions. Along with information on how they have aided me.

Title: Research for media productions, 2nd edition
Author: Kathy Chater
Published: 2002
Passage: Pg110 - Pg113

Last year my group and I had many problems with the initial research behind our piece. I believe this in turn led to poor planning and ultimately had a negative effect on the end product. This is why this book caught my eye. However it turned out that this book didn't give me much additional information about researching. However when I read though the nook this passage did catch my eye. No one in my group last year was very confident in writing of the script had to be more of a group job and tore people away from other jobs which needed doing. However this particular passage is all about script writing and would help anyone write a decent script whilst letting everyone else can carry out there tasks.


Title: Guerrilla TV
Author: Ian Lewis
Published: 2000
Passage: Pg 96 - pg 106

As I earlier pointed out I was looking for some help with the researching of our product in order to avoid some of the problems which accrued last year. In this book and this passage in particular I found a lot of useful advise on the research and general pre-production of this years product. Including things such as search strategies and how to get the most accurate results from online searches.


Title: The television genre book
Author: Glen Creeber
Published: 2001
Passage: Pg 89 - pg 91

When I first saw this book I had hoped it will give me a better understanding on how to achieve the intended results from my production. However reading though it I discovered that there wasn't a single mention of thriller movies which is the genre which my production is based around. However I did notice this passage which is entitled "Music on television" I thought that this passage might help me to understand better the effects certain pieces of music have on a media piece. Although we did include music in our production last year we possibly didn't select the best possible musical extracts to use and I hope not to repeat that this year.

Dreamweaver

My group have recently had a workshop with the software Dreamweaver. I have used this software before however it was several years ago, so this was more of a refresher session for me. Also then I worked directly onto the program by using a making a set format for the website and then typing onto that. Rather than editing photos into the right format, this is what I would be doing in the production of my website. So these skills will be essential in the production of my coursework. In the past when I used Dreamweaver I have had troubles with the hyperlinks. However it is only now I realise why it didn't work back then. This will hopefully stop me from re-doing my mistakes from the past.

I have never before used both Photoshop and Dreamweaver together. The main reason for this is at the time I wasn’t very confident with Photoshop and provided using Dreamweaver directly instead of editing things on it. However now I do have more knowledge of how to link only certain aspects of a picture rather than linking the enter picture. This allows me to create links from one page of my website to others.

How has my creativity developed further though the use of digtal technolgy?

My creativity with the use of digital technology has increased more since my last post. In particular the use of this program. I have never used blogger before and have now discovered how useful it is in keeping notes on my production. This site also allows me to post links and other sources of information related to my production. This allows me to keep my work organised and in an easily accessible format. This also allows myth work to be moderated easily and to gather some feedback as it is in a public forum.

I have also started to refresh my memory on how to use 'Photoshop'. I plan on using this website for the production of my website and my magazine cover, although I have used this program before it was over two years ago and only on an introduction course. Now however I have a much better understanding of the features within 'Photoshop' and how to use them successfully to create a realistic and acceptable image.

Finally I have had the opportunity to use the collages library’s system. I was able to use this programme in order to find several media texts which will be posted in a later blog. This allowed me to further my understanding behind the course and to get some ideas in order to help the pre-production of the course. In particular the research.

How has my creativity developed though the use of digtal technolgy?

I feel that my practical creativity has developed greatly though the use of digital technology. This is because I was in charge of the editing of the footage into a believable diagieses. This gave me the opportunity to develop techniques which I already had and learn new ones which will help me with future productions. For example the use of cross cutting clips which had dialect which helped give the scene a much greater conversational feel. This was influenced by my own and my group’s intake of similar media forms such as television drama. There are also examples of overlapping photos with fades to give them the appearances of fading into each other. This idea acutely came in the research of that particular programme during pre-production I tested some of our initial ideas to see if they were possible. During this process we were limited on a few ideas which were important to the plot of the production but instead of abandoning this idea entirely I changed it slightly to suit the software at hand. Although the final result was perhaps better than our original idea I would still say that this shows us the limitations of this particular software which hopefully will not impact our production this year.

The experience also gave me more understanding on the use of digital technology such as the setting up the equipment such as the camera. Before this production I had only ever filmed productions free hand and they were therefore rather shaky. However during this piece I had the opportunity to use the cameras tripod and this led to much more planning. As the camera was stationary we had to think much more carefully about the placement of it as afterwards its movements would be limited. This meant that we had to have detailed drawings of the set with ideas of characters movements and the camera angles which we had wanted to achieve. We already had a vague idea of what sort of shots we wanted from the previous storyboarding however the experience of looking at the optional setting for the production allowed us to develop this ideas further.

Web 2.0 was instrumental in the production of our piece. As we had a very limited time frame of which we had to work in much of the production had to be e-mailed to other accounts in order for us to work in our own time. Without the improvements made to e-mail we would never have been able to send the work to our other accounts and therefore would have gone behind on our plans. Web 2.0 also allowed for the creation of ‘Youtube’ which is the site we used to upload our final production. This allowed us to review our work in a publicly open forum and made it easy for us to post our reviews of it in the form of comments. ‘Youtube’ was also very important for the initial research. Even after we had decided upon what we wanted to do we had to use a lot of research to decide on who the audience would be and how the genre of the movie would be divined. Although ‘Youtube’ was more important in deciding the actual content of the film rather than divining it and its audience. However other sites such as ‘Facebook’ did allow us to find out more information about the audience.