Evaluation

Evaluation

My finished media project is a front cover and contents page that could be used for a college magazine. My media project uses conventions of real media products because both my media project and a real media product are so similar. This is because of some of the elements on the project like the banner on the front cover and the way the columns on the contents page are the same sort of layout as they would be on a magazine you could buy in a shop.  On my front cover and contents page I have developed my work by looking at some magazines so I can get ideas of how I could make mine.

I used new media technologies to make my media project with Photoshop and QuarkXPress. I experimented with different settings on these programs to make my finishing project look more interesting. I used settings like the pen tool which selects parts of the photo which I can then delete. I learnt how to add borders to photos and how to add a banner and make the writing so it curves or dips down.

 At the start it was difficult for me to add photo’s because the Photoshop I learnt to use was a different version so some of the settings were in different places. It made it difficult because I couldn’t find the free transform setting but when I finally found this setting I quickly found that I could then experiment more with the photo’s that were inserted and change parts like in one of my photographs I didn’t like the way it was just there so I learnt to use a setting the rubber tool that would change the hardness of the rubber and would look better and would look softer toward the photo and the background under the photo.

On Quark I thought this was a challenge for me because I didn’t know how to work the program and I had never used it before and it’s very complicated. I have learnt new techniques like how I to insert a photo but to get it the right size I have to be able to make the box before the right size for the photo so it will be able to fit right. I have also learnt how to use drop caps which is a setting that can be used to make a word or number at the start of a sentence and make it so it is bold and bigger than the rest of the sentence it is in.

In this project I think my strengths are that it was easy for me to make my front cover because I have used Photoshop before so I already knew how to use most of the settings on it so it was easy for me to get on with producing it. Also weakness of the product and my use of new media technologies is that I can normally learn new skills quickly so it’s easy for me to use new programs but with Quark I thought it was more complicated to learn than it normally is for me. Also taking the photographs for the media project was strength for me because I think I am quite good at taking photo’s so this wasn’t difficult for me to do. The camera’s I used was a college one which was a Samsung and I also used mine out of college which is a Fujifilm Finepix S1500.

Overall I think my media project turned out better now I learnt how to work a new media program and some skills I can use on there to make future projects look better. I’m glad I got to use Photoshop for my front cover because I think it gave me a chance get better skills for it that could help me out in the future with other work. I think that doing this media project before doing the real one has made it good practice and I hope that my next project like this one will turn out better and I will learn more skills again.