Skills development essay

Over the past year in media studies I have produced many pieces of work, each time I have produced a piece of work it should show development. This is because each time we started a new piece of work I learnt new skills and techniques to make my work better and improve the quality. I also gained time to practice these skills when producing drafts and mock ups. I know that I haven’t always necessarily shown my skills in work when I haven’t worked hard enough and put enough effort into it. There are also times when I have worked harder to expand my development.

When I first started my AS year at college I had to produce a perfume advert, this was the very first project and was the first time for me to show any skills that I already had in media. Now when I look back at this very first project I realize my skills were very weak and the perfume advert was very simple and basic. The camera used was of bad quality and this is shown through the final piece, I hadn’t used Photoshop much when starting my AS year so the program was reasonably new to me, I was getting to grips with the tools and effects that can be used on Photoshop.

I tried to be creative with this project but when I look back to it I think it looks very bland and boring, there was also no real story been told in the image. I did try to link the name ‘funn’ with an image of someone holding a balloon as a balloon can be related to parties and childhood.

In reference to research and planning for the perfume advert there wasn’t much at all, I gathered images of other perfume adverts and then drew out my own plan of how I wanted mine to look, if I was to repeat this I would have done more research such as a questionnaire and maybe gathering feedback off some initial ideas. The lack of research meant that my perfume ad was not specifically aimed at any particular audience and therefore had no real meaning.

Because my convention research was not in any depth I then did not use the codes and conventions in my work. This is a big mistake as codes and conventions have to be used for a piece of media work to look right, sometimes codes and conventions are broken for reasons, examples of codes and conventions that could be used in a perfume advert are to use a close up shot of the model, to stick to a particular colour scheme and not include many more colours in the image.

The next piece of work we moved onto was a college magazine. The digital technology here didn’t show a great amount of progress from the perfume advert. I was disappointed with the final outcome of this piece of work. The photo its self was not too bad. I used a medium close up of a student sat working at a computer. When I started to use the image to create the front cover, I used limited tool on Photoshop. I didn’t edit the photo, in order to create the magazine I just added boxes and text on top of the main image. My Photoshop skills were very limited and I didn’t put enough effort into making this piece of work look a good standard.

The piece of work isn’t very creative and was basic; I produced a college magazine front cover that was no different to any other. I was creative in the fact that I chose a colour scheme that would suit both male and female of college student age.

I put more research and planning towards this than I did the previous piece of work. Firstly put together a mood board of all the immediate ideas that come to mind when thinking about college, this included things such as folders, Books, phones, friends, stationary and other things. I then created a digital mock-up of what my magazine front cover should look like, this is useful when you come to actually put the magazine together as you already have an idea of where everything will go and how it fill fit onto the page. The next thing I did was look for existing college magazines and analyse them in regards to conventions, this helped me to spot things that were good and not so good so that I could take that information and produce my magazine accordingly. It was useful to put more research into this task as it gives you a better idea of what you are going to produce and means you can deal with any issues that you may come across quicker, research leaves you in a more confident position as you have a better view of what the outcome may be.

After producing the magazine I had to evaluate it, saying the good points, the bad points and what I would change if I was to do it again. When I was doing the evaluation i could of asked people for feedback to found out what other people thought about how it could be improved, this would of strengthened my evaluation as it would of told me what the target audience thought was good and bad about the magazine and how they thought it could of been improved.

The next piece of work we had to do was the big coursework piece. This is where I had to really push my skills forward. For this piece of work I had to create the front cover, contents page and double page spread of a music magazine. To create the magazine I had to use my own original photos, so this meant going out with a camera and taking photos that related to the genre of music. I chose rap so I had to take photos in the style of a rapper. I don’t think my photos looked professional enough because i didn’t have the right costume and props for m model, I think if I had spent more time looking for a costume that was Cleary in the right style and genre then the photos would have made the magazine better. Once I had got the photos I then edited the best ones on Photoshop ready to be used for my magazine which I also produced on Photoshop.

I tried to be creative with my ideas, I choose a genre that not many other people had chosen and also one that i thought would be fun to create. I tried to use the skills I had learnt over the year creatively, using tools in different ways and trying to use different effects, this can be seen on my final piece but I think I could have practiced and used these skills even more to improve my work.

Research and planning was essential to create a good magazine, I knew that a lot of work and time should be put into this and know this is a major area of the task that I didn’t put enough time into, my questionnaire didn’t work properly so I never got answers from it, I did do a small focus group to find out what people thought of my ideas, this helped but wasn’t enough. Researching other rap magazines was really helpful as this told me what codes and conventions are commonly found in rap magazines so that I could use these conventions in my own work, when it came to production I did follow the conventions of rap magazines to the best of my ability.

In regards to the production, I believe my skills have shown improvement from my first draft to the final piece, each time I finished a draft I took the feedback on board and I therefore would alter and change the magazine accordingly. By the end I had themes running through each page of the magazine had taken new photos, I had learnt more skills over the process and was able to include these.