Draft Evaluation- Question 7.

7) Looking back at your preliminary task (The continuity editing task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

Looking back at my preliminary task, I was a beginner at using magazine making software and cameras etc. I was also a beginner at how to start thinking about designing a magazine to look professional, structuring pages to look neat and tidy and how to make my magazine appeal to my audience. Although my preliminary was not a huge failure, it has taught me a lot to get where I got to today with my final RAPTURE magazine. I have learnt to take control of my time in order to spend specific time guidelines on certain tasks that need more attention.

The preliminary task was a very good task that was set as it allowed me to go off and just create a magazine from my own perspective using my little knowledge at the time. Without any research, planning or knowledge of how to use magazine editing programmes I created a school magazine. Looking back at this, it looks very unprofessional and the layout and structure is very basic and you can easily tell it isn’t well put together. Comparing it next to my final magazine, there are huge differences in the quality of the overall magazines.

I think without doing the task of the preliminary, I think that my final magazine wouldn’t be to the standard that it is. This is because I believe I was able to have a practice, and learn from my mistakes to then create an improved more professional magazine. My preliminary task was also very rushed; I rushed the entire magazine cover, left major jobs till the last minute, and threw it all together. This taught me that doing that doesn’t help the look and quality of the end product, so I therefore learnt to improve my time management skills in order to meet specific deadlines I set for myself.

The overall outcome of my final Rapture magazine is a success in my own eyes. My progression has come a long way from the beginning, and you can clearly see a huge progression within my work. It’s clear to see an improvement on using technology, research skills, general magazine structures and making a professional magazine.

Planning for my magazine was vital for the success of the task. I did numerous planning and research techiniques to have an understand of current magazines in the shops today. I looked at each magazine of a similar genre to mine, and focused on their layouts, text, language, images, fashion of models, structure etc. With this I began taking little aspects from each magazine, whilst giving them a twist with my own ideas, and began to create my own magazine.

The layout of my magazine was chosen from my research of looking into the magazine of "Loud and Quiet" - This magazine I found quite a nice style and layout to follow, especially for my front cover. It was simple and bold which is exactly the style I was going for. My contents layout I got from the magazine MOJO, I thought this was a nicely structured page and wanted to use it in my own magazine but with a twist, so I added in a few of my own ideas. The double page spread is just a page of which I have put together as I thought it worked well. I got ideas from all different magazines for this.

I used Da Font to collect my main headings. I found these fonts during the planning stages, and I picked out all of the fonts I liked the look of and that I thought worked well with my front cover, contents page and double page spread. 

For the colour of my magazine I used a main 3 colours. I used black, white and red. I used these because they are a well known 3-colour palette. They stand out well, work extremely well together, and are very eaasily recognised. I did add in a twist of colour, by using a yellowy gold within my pages. I think this added a little more personality to the magazine. I got this idea from MOJO and from Q magazine.

The images for my magazine were taken by myself.  I used two models for my magazine, that I thought looked well together. I dressed them up into clothing and make up I believed suited best, and whilst taking the pictures I wanted my models to act comfortable to avoid looking as if there was tension on my images.

The time management of my planning stages was taken quite well. I managed my time in order to complete my tasks ontime, and when they needed to be done. I did a lot of my text writing to begin with, then began moving around my magazine layers on photoshop, and eventually fixing everything together.