Digital technology is the use of technology that will ultimately enhance the appearance of my final product.

In the case of my music magazine digital technology was mostly featured through production and post production.

During the stage of production, or the Photo-shoot, the use of Haydon’s high tech cameras and lighting rigs.

The overall purpose of using this equipment would be to produce high quality shots that I could edit easily in post production using Photoshop, and eventually achieve professional shots.

In post production the use of in-design and Photoshop created a professional feel as it is the same program used by the industry.

In my production more time was spent editing photo’s than in any other stage, as I felt that the codes and conventions of a rock-genre music magazine would

The creativity involved in the magazine production revolves around the idea of being able to follow the conventions of a magazine, but still in an original way.

This meant that whilst the basic outline of the magazine, such as the conventions of gender, colour schemes and page layout, I still had to use original and interesting photos and the written content had to be intriguing enough on its own.

Throughout its creation, I made sure that I wasn’t copying any current magazines, but made sure that it reflected the same values and themes. I will look further into this in “Using conventions from real world texts”.

The best examples of creativity used in the creation of any media piece is found within the final product itself as, whilst the planning stage is all about the use of creativity, the final product is the creative result.

It is believed that in this age of media, nothing is original. This could be the case as even this photo that I’ve made slightly transparent and placed behind the text can be found in countless works before this PowerPoint was made, and will be use many times after this. But that does not mean that it is not creative. Cheesy maybe, but still creative.

In the creation of anything, it is advised to research into other works like it and plan out your work carefully. This involves researching other similar works carefully as often you can find inspiration in other products.

The research and planning stages are broken down into many sections that we are to complete in an order that suits us best, often it comes down to researching into similar sections (such as other front covers) before we start planning our own. This is a real media technique and all directors have to do this.

Everything that goes into the magazine is planned out beforehand. At least, that’s the idea, nowhere does it say that you cant look at your work and change something last minute that improves the piece of work.

In theory, you could state that you never stop planning your work until you hand it in a final product, as you will forever be working out improvements in your head until the moment it’s out of your control, and you’ll probably still be thinking about for a long time after as well.

In the creation of the magazine, the photo-shoot is the production stage, and the editing and assembling of the magazine is the post production stage.

This mostly involves editing photos and putting together all the different aspects of the magazine, to form one final product.

This involved the use of editing software such as Photoshop.

My specific magazine took most of it’s influence from Kerrange, being the most successful punk magazine.

Taking codes and conventions can sometimes be tricky as instead of looking at something and stealing it directly, such as replicating a photo exactly, you have to try and look to the conventions of all the photos e.g. do they all feature the whole band, or always one solo artist? Do they follow the same colour scheme as the rest of the magazine or do they attempt to stand out? How do the musicians pose?

All of these questions need to be answered during the Photoshoot stage in order to create a photo that suits the genre of the magazine.

As well as the images the masthead and text had to follow the correct conventions, and the layout of the front page altogether took influence from a Kerrange front page (not copied, simply took influence…)