Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have

learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

• In creating my music magazine I went through three different stages:

• Research

• Planning

• Production

• I have found that Research is a very important part of creating my product as it gave me a platform to work from. Research was essential for me to gain knowledge of what my audience were looking for in a product, this therefore helped me to create my product so that it was suitable for my target audience. In the process of researching I created a survey and conducted an audio interview to find out the needs of my reader.

• I didn’t undergo any research when working on my preliminary task, therefore I think that I was a lot less prepared for producing my product as I didn’t have a big enough range of knowledge to know exactly what my audience were looking for.

• I have also found that Planning is a very important part of creating my product as it allowed me to clearly present my ideas in a pitch and helped me to organise my ideas and research. Planning has taught me the importance of creating flat plans, a pitch and a style sheet.

• In the process of planning I created flat plans of how my magazine was going to be laid out, this is useful as it can be helpful in organising how to design your magazine. I didn’t stick to my original flat plans when constructing my product as I feel it looked more effective in another layout. I also created a pitch to showcase my ideas and give reasons for the features I had chosen for my magazine. I also created a style sheet to plan out possible fonts for the main text, subheadings and Masthead. I presented my chosen colour scheme and also gave examples of the types of artists I would be including in my media product.

• I didn’t undergo any planning when working on my preliminary task, therefore I think that I was a lot less prepared for producing my product as I didn’t have a specific idea of how I wanted my product to look.

• I have also found that Production is a very important part of creating my product as it allowed me to use a lot of different tools and effects to make my magazine look more advanced than my preliminary magazine. Planning has taught me the benefits of using programs such as Photoshop to construct my product.

• In the process of production I used Photoshop to create my magazine cover, contents page and double page spread article. This software was very useful as it allowed me to change the background colours of my pages, use layering effects, cut out parts of images and use a gradient effect as part of a background, I was also able to create shadows on my images to try to make them look more natural.

• When producing my preliminary task, I wasn’t aware of how to use Photoshop and the benefits it has on the production of my product, therefore I used Microsoft Publisher to create my magazine which wasn’t as effective as there weren’t as many tools and effects available to me to make my product more advanced.