Evaluation Question 7

Q7 Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Taking a look back at my previous work, I feel there has been some improvements along the way. Throughout the creation of my music magazine in comparison to the preliminary creation I feel I have learned more about audiences, how to appeal to them and a little bit more about technologies.

Putting technologies into consideration, I feel one of the main technologies I have learnt more about throughout my progression is the camera. During the creation, taking images was one of the main tasks we had to do. As we planned our music magazines we had to also learn how to use a camera to the best of our abilities. We learned about different shots (long shot, medium shot, close up), different angles (canted angle, high angle, low angle) and the effects of these.

Above are images from my preliminary task and music magazine coursework (left and right respectively)

As I have shown above, the two images differ greatly in quality. In the preliminary task there was unnecessary background in the corner, lack of mise en scene choice and no real work with lighting. The music magazine task on the other hand varies in many ways. The lighting was more greatly considered as to make the background easy to work with, the mise en scene was also further thought out in order to represent the chosen genre through the artist and represent the social class involved. So not only did I have to develop my technological skills, but also my skills in terms of directing and being a photographer.

Furthermore, as I got further and further into the task, I also learned more about how to represent genre within a magazine through presentation. I learned about how colours can give connotations (give a message e.g. red connoting passion, love etc., black connoting darkness, evil, crime etc.), how certain fonts can be associated with certain genres (such as graffiti being associated with hip hop) and how particular mise en scene choices can also relate back to the genre (such as lighter colours for pop or darker colours for hip hop and metal etc.). In my preliminary task I did not know much about this and so in learning about it I feel I have improved my knowledge and been able to apply it to my final product.