Rough sketches for preliminary task

These are the rough sketches of my school magazine front cover and contents page. I used my plans for my school magazine to decide what my school magazine would roughly look like. For example on my front cover there would be the title of my magazine at the top of the page in a larger font than the rest of the writing on the page. All magazines have a main image and a main coverline to give the reader and insight as to what the article will be about. On my contents page the stories that are displayed in the magazine are split into 3 columns, this is done because most magazine contents pages are separated this way.

Evaluation.

My front cover develops the codes and conventions by having things that a normal magazine would have. This includes a title that is a larger font than any other form of writing on the page. It has a main image to tell you what the main story is in the magazine and it has smaller images with captions to give you an idea of what stories are in the magazine before you buy it. My school magazine front cover also has a price on it. This develops the codes and conventions of a real media product. My magazine front cover however does challenge the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover because it does not have a barcode on it. I thought I would not include a barcode on this piece of work because it is only for school use and not being sold in mass production. There is also the schools website and the issue number of the magazine on the front cover of my school magazine. My school magazine front cover and contents page conform to the codes and conventions of a magazine.

My contents page was made in Quark. It has 'contents' written at the top and in a larger font than everything else. It also has a picture of the front cover with numbers by each smaller image to show what page each story is on. Underneath this my contents page continues to develop the codes and conventions by having 3 columns each containing page numbers and a paragraph going into a little bit of detail about the story the buyer of the magazine can read. The contents page repeats information that the front cover has on it such as the school website and the issue number. My contents page has two letters in the right hand corner under the title. One letter is from the editor of the magazine while the other is a letter from the headteacher of the school. These letters would proceed to be in the school magazine every week to conform to the codes and conventions of a contents page.

I manipulated my final image in photoshop and then put a background to it and cropped in smaller images to make my front cover. My contents page was made in Quark. Tools used in this were the text box, picture box and the linking tool to move my text over to the next column to fit everything in. The tools I used in Quark were mostly basic as I didn't need anything else to create the contents page of my magazine.

The strengths of the products are that they conform to the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover and a contents page. Each product has certain things such as a masthead that is a larger font than all of the other writing. The weaknesses of my products are that because it was a preliminary task for the start of this course I have not been able to make it as best I can to reflect what I could do.

The strengths of using new media technologies are that I managed to create a product even when using a program such as Quark for the very first time. I had already used photoshop before but Quark was completely new. However the weaknesses are that some of the tools took me longer to use than others as I had not used Quark before such as scaling the image into a picture box.

My final front cover

This is my front cover of my school magazine.

Final front cover image

This is my final front cover image, I have manipulated this image on photoshop to make it look like this.

Production of school magazine contents page

Production of school magazine contents page screenshots from BeckyWalsh

This powerpoint shows the process of making my contents page on Quark. It shows the tools I used and I have written how I used the tools to create the finished product. I had never used Quark before so this presentation shows the tools I was able to use while creating my preliminary task magazine contents page.

Production of front cover screenshots

Production of front cover screenshots from BeckyWalsh

This powerpoint shows screenshots of the process I did to create my front cover of my school magazine. It shows all of the different tools I used on photoshop to produce this front cover. The production of my preliminary task shows that I was not extremely familiar with the tools on photoshop as although I had used it I had not used it often.

Original photos for school magazine

During this lesson we went around school and took pictures of things we could include on our school magazine. The picture we had to take for the main image of our school magazine had to be a medium close up. The other images could be chosen to represent other smaller stories on our magazine front cover. These are the original images I took for my school magazine front cover. Going around school there were many things such as posters that I could use on my magazine to feature as stories.

Brainstorm of front cover and contents page for my school magazine

In this lesson, we made a plan of our front cover and contents page for our school magazines. We looked through our list of codes and conventions that we had previously written and we decided what we were going to include on our school magazines. My school magazine plans note the things that other magazines have that show how they conform to the codes and conventions.

Screenshots of my use of photoshop

My screenshots of the use of photoshop from BeckyWalsh

During this lesson we manipulated our main image in photoshop for our school magazine. I did a print screen of every tool I used in photoshop and put the screenshots on a PowerPoint. I uploaded this PowerPoint to www.slideshare.net and then embedded it here.

This is my final front cover image that I manipulated on photoshop. This is the image I am going to put on the front cover of my school magazine.

Shot types and camera movement





In this lesson we were given a list of camera angles and were given this sheet to match the camera angles to the pictures on the sheet. Underneath the camera angles we learnt about camera movement. The camera angles are the way an object is being shot. The camera movement is the way the camera is physically moved towards/away from/around an object.

Codes and conventions of a magazine contents page

In this lesson we identified the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover. We then analysed a contents page of our choice. We looked at many different magazine contents pages and wrote down what they had in common to determine the codes and conventions of magazine contents pages. I made this presentation on Prezi to show what I have noted down as the codes and conventions of a magazine contents page.

Codes and conventions of a magazine front cover

Codes and conventions of the front page from BeckyWalsh

In this lesson we identified the codes and conventions of a magazine front cover. I made a PowerPoint and uploaded it to www.slideshare.net of these codes and conventions. We looked at a number of different front covers and we discussed what they all had in common. We went onto the computers and I made this powerpoint presentation of all of the codes and conventions of a front cover of a magazine.

Preliminary task original photos

These are my original photos that I took for my schools magazine front cover.

Brief

Print
Preliminary exercise: using DTP and an image manipulation program, produce the front page of a new school/college magazine, featuring a photograph of a student in medium close-up plus some appropriately laid-out text and a masthead. Additionally candidates must produce a mock-up of the layout of the contentspage to demonstrate their grasp of DTP.

Main task: the front page, contents, and double page spread of a new music magazine.

All images and text used must be original, produced by the candidate(s), minimum of four images per candidate.