First skills essay

In my AS coursework I was required to complete a preliminary task of creating a college magazine front cover and a main task of creating a music magazine front cover, contents page and a double page spread. Throughout the preliminary task I learnt the conventions of a magazine that helped me create both my college magazine and my final product in my main task of a music magazine front cover, contents page and double page spread. For example some conventions of a music magazine would be a masthead, a plug, a skyline, and feature stories. During the preliminary task I also learnt about target audiences, who the magazine is aimed at, for example a college magazine would be aimed at students 16-19 years old therefore all of the content will be relevant to them. As the magazine’s target audience is students the magazine will be relatively cheap as students typically do not have much money to spend on things like magazines. This task also allowed us to gain skills in photoshop such as resizing objects, adding text, changing colours and creating objects such as shapes, these skills can then be transferred in to my main task as I will be using photoshop to create my music magazine.

For my main task I created a music magazine front page, contents page and double page spread. The images and text on my magazine must be original (minimum of 4 images) therefore had to learn how to use a camera correctly and how to frame the images. Learning this skill was essential to the creation of my product as the images must entice and engage the reader as well as tell them the genre of the magazine all at the same time. I decided to create a metal music magazine therefore had to look at existing products such as metal hammer and Kerrang! Magazines, this helped me learn the codes and conventions of that genre.

At the beginning of the AS course we learnt the basics of photoshop in our preliminary task but it was necessary to increase my knowledge of the software as it is essential for me to be able to make my magazine look professional by manipulating the images such as airbrushing the image to make the artist look flawless just as they would in a real magazine. Before AS media studies I had never used photoshop so did not know what to do therefore I watched youtube tutorials to help me gain the skills I needed. I now know how to edit my pictures to a slightly professional standard as I learnt how to use tools such as the healing brush, magic wand and blur. I can use the tools such as the healing brush to removes spots or blemishes off of the artist’s skin in the image that came in very useful when I started my magazine.

Not knowing how to use photoshop was unnerving at first but the preliminary task really helped me gain confidence as I learnt the basics of the software and was able to experiment with the images. When I started editing my images the first tool I really learnt about was the spot healing brush, this allowed me to remove any blemishes on my models skin and make it look professional. The next tool I learnt about was the quick select tool, this allowed me to cut out parts of the image and move them around or delete them. The tool was tricky to get to grips with but managed to master it with practice and patience.

Another skill I gained was how to use blogger, I had never used blogger before but as all our work is submitted to a blog I had to learn how to set up and manage a blog with all my work on, I learnt how to change the dates of my posts so that they can go in order and how to change the layout to make it efficient.

After experimenting with the tools in the preliminary task I created my college magazine.  I then felt confident enough to start my preparation and start drafting my main task. I used the knowledge I gained in creating my college magazine to create my music magazine to an even better standard than my college magazine. The photoshop skills I learnt had been perfected to make my final product look professional and the images I had taken had been improved from practise (doing more than one photo shoot) all this work finally paid off at the end of the year as I created a professional looking product that looked a lot better than my college magazine as at the time of creating my college magazine I was unaware of the tools or did not have the experience and knowledge that I gained in the past year.

Overall since I started media studies I have gained knowledge and confidence in using software such as photoshop to create a higher standard magazine. During this past year I have learnt a lot and realised that research is just as important as the final product, such as audience feedback to find out what the audience want withing the magazine content, genre research that can help me construct my final product and product research that allows me to look at existing products in the market that may be similar to my magazine, looking in to existing products to help me create a salable but unique product. The skills I have learnt over the past year has helped me produce a good

magazine that appeals to my target audience as it fits in with the codes and conventions of that genre and has interesting feature stories. The skills learnt this year are also transferable and will be very useful in my A2 media coursework as I will have to use photoshop for my ancillary texts and I learnt the importance of researching products similar to mine before I started creating my final product which I will also have to do at a2 with my music video.