Evaluation Section 3

“What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?”

Technology

While creating my product, technology was very helpful in the areas of:

• Editing pictures• Research• Putting the final product together• Feedback

Technology- Editing picturesIn order to make my magazine look professional, I had to ensure that the images I used looked good. To edit my pictures, I used a website called Picnik. This was especially useful for ‘touch up’ tools, which I made great use of.

As shown here, I could use the eye colour editing tool to change Penny (my model)’s eye colour. I had fun manipulating the image, and made Penny’s eyes a brighter blue for the cover photo.

Penny’s eyes (original)

Penny’s eyes (on front cover)

Technology- Editing pictures

As well as editing eye colour, I used the mascara tool to make penny’s eyes more bold and defined, so that they really stood out in the pictures.

Technology- Editing picturesI found that something as simple as editing contrast and exposure can make a huge difference to how a picture looks. By using Picnik, I was able to make images look bolder and brighter.

I really like this photo because it is full of colour. Since I photographed it myself, I decided to use it in my magazine. To give it an extra burst of colour, I turned up the exposure and the contrast, which made a huge difference, as shown above.

Technology - ResearchResearch was essential to creating my product, as it allowed me to look at the different styles of music magazines, and ensure that I used the same codes and conventions. Throughout this coursework task, I constantly referred to Google and Wikipedia to make sure I was on the right track.

Designing my productI started off the process by making a ‘template’- a sample magazine with pictures of celebrities rather than my own images. This allowed me to see how many pictures I could fit on each page, how the layout worked, etc.

By creating this template, I was able to try out different layouts, even though I hadn’t taken any photographs yet. I spent a few hours playing around this way before taking my original images.

I also made a sample contents page and double page spread, using images of existing musicians.

I drew out some ideas of how I wanted “Penexo” to be written. I wanted to use a different font to make it look like a logo, and distinguish the artist amongst the others.

Technology – Making My VideoI wanted to make a video to go on my media blog. However, I did not want to merely shoot a video of myself talking to the camera about my product. I thought about what kind of video I should make, and eventually settled on making an advert for my magazine. I wanted the advert to be appropriate for internet or televisual viewing.

To create my advert, I used Windows Live Movie Maker. I found this program relatively easy to use. After making a few mistakes, I started to get to grips with how to use it to insert pictures, text and music into my video. When I became more confident, I put various effects on the transitions to make the whole video run smoother. Using a program that was unfamiliar to me was daunting, but I enjoyed the challenge. I worked on my video for hours, and am very happy with the final result. The link to the video is displayed on my media blog.

Comic Life- Pros and ConsThe Positive

I really liked this tool on the bottom right. It allowed me to access my folders and simply drag pictures from there onto the magazine. This made it quicker as I had all of my photographs right there next to the magazine the whole time I was working on it.


Comic Life was extremely flexible, and offered a tool that allowed me to change the shapes of words. In the end, I did not use this tool in my magazine as I wanted everything to look straight, but it did open my eyes to how much difference this can make.


My favourite part of Comic Life was the fact that it managed to keep the quality of my images high, even when the images were stretched out to quite a large size. Most of the time, increasing the size of the image makes it blurry, but on Comic Life, the image stayed high quality, which was essential to the appearance of my magazine.

Comic Life- Pros and ConsThe Negative

One thing that irritated me about comic life was the fact that when text boxes overlapped, selecting one often meant that the other would become selected as well. This meant that I was sometimes moving around more than I wanted to, and had to put the feature back in its original place and start again. This greatly slowed down the process of creating my magazine.

Comic Life- Pros and ConsThe Negative

Another fault of Comic Life that made it extremely hard to work with was the fact that it sometimes closed for no reason. I often found myself having to re do half an hour’s worth of work because the program had crashed. Plus, it sometimes failed to save my document, and I had to go through very long processes to ensure that my work had saved each time. However, I managed to work through these problems and complete my magazine to a standard that I was extremely happy with.

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

Progression from Preliminary Task

For my preliminary task, I used Comic Life, as a friend had recommended it to me. I did find it difficult to use at first, and I was glad that I had the chance to practice using the program before starting work on my main task.

During the main task, I learnt a lot about editing photos to make them appear more professional, and how to put together a colour scheme that worked. In the preliminary task, my writing was often hard to read, as I had not spent enough time trying to find a font that worked well.

I also learnt about how crucial the layout is, as it can be the difference between a full looking magazine, and one that has lots of gaps and appears empty.

Another big lesson I learned was the fact that even the tiniest details make a huge difference. For example, changing the position of a picture even slightly can dramatically adjust the appearance of the magazine.

All in all, I am extremely happy with my finished product. I put in a lot of hard work- more than I would have predicted- but I think that it has paid off.