Prior to my Media class, I used a lot of things that helped me in creating my magazine. I can use Photoshop, take pictures and I also have a lot of organisation skills. When I was smaller I loved taking photos and posting them on an app called pinterest so I had a lot of practice doing that. Additionally, I also know a lot of things about Photoshop apps like FaceTune as I played a lot on it to see how it actually works. I played around with some of my friends changing our hair colour and also our face shapes, adding make up and seeing how we would look with different colour eyes. I was very interested as I saw a lot of people using it in photos to change their appearance, so I wanted to find out if it actually worked. I am also very organised as a person so that helped me a lot in my day to day life and also in my project. I keep all my Media photos and work in one file, so that I can find what I am looking for very easily. Also it helped me keep my blog clean and easy to search through which makes it easy for other people as well. As I've spent a lot of time doing these things since I was a child, I'm used to them and by taking the Media course I will develop my abilities with them even further.
Even Though I had some knowledge with editing apps, I still found editing the background and deleting different objects from pictures frustrating. By watching Youtube videos about editing I gradually started to understand how it works. Furthermore, something I also found irritating was working with my models. This was because I had to get the timings right when they could actually do the photoshoot and when they had some free time. They were mostly busy as a lot of my models also do Media Studies so they had to work on their blog as well. Also something I found difficult was meeting the deadlines for the blog. This was very exasperating as I was very close to the deadline and my models still couldn’t spare some time for the photoshoot. In the end I finished everything right before the deadline but it was a lot of hard work which left me with little to none free time for myself. That didn’t stop me, it made me a lot more motivated to finish everything as I knew nothing was impossible.
It was actually my first time using the studio and lighting so I had to play around a bit with them until I got the right set up that worked for my magazine. This took some time but with the help of some of my peers and my teacher I actually understood how it worked and learned something new. Additionally, it was my first time on Canva so I needed to spare some of my free time to try out all the tools and look at the fonts and also some of the designs that the app provides. By using my spare time to try the app out, in class I was very focused on finishing my products as I knew how the app worked and design my magazine. Finally, it was the first time working with models so that was a bit challenging as well because I had to figure out which positions worked best for each model and also make them connect to my magazine. In addition, I looked at outfits that match my magazine but that also look good on my models. Even Though, I didn’t know these things I still think I understood them fast and by having some practice I started to be better at them.
I am very happy with my first draft, I did it all by myself and it’s the first time I did something like this so I feel like I did a great job. I will improve it in my second draft but for my first attempt I feel proud. I improved my magazine in my second draft by adding more anchorage text and changing the font to make it more interesting to see and look at. I also added more details like the price, issue number and also a barcode. This will give more the appearance of a magazine rather than a poster, like my previous draft did. I asked a lot of friends to look at my final product and a lot of them said it actually looked how I wanted it to look. Some gave me some important feedback which I wrote down so when I redraft my magazine I could write their improvements as well. This also links to Denis Mquail’s theory of Information as throughout all the work I did I found out useful information about my production and a seeked advice on how to improve my work.