Essay

How did the conventions of real media texts inspire you to use new media technology to create the style of product you achieved?

Firstly I will begin to talk about the products that I created within the two years of being in Media Studies. One being the first preliminary task in year 12, for this task I created a my first draft version of my music magazine this laid the foundations out in front of me so I could see where I was going to end up, this process lasted for about a month. I then moved on and started to develop my final and main music magazine from the original preliminary task, this stage took us about 3 months in terms of creating and then we also had an evaluation stage to look back on and review our product. Once all year 12 work was finished we then began to work and gather skills in order to tackling our year 13 coursework, we did this by firstly working on a preliminary task in which we had to record a music video for 'Busted - What I Go To School For' whilst using correct camera angles as well as props/ clothing etc. This finally led to our final music video, during this period we worked in groups whilst research and planning, filming and editing.

One key skill area used was Photoshop,  this was used throughout most if not all of my work but was first used when dealing with the preliminary draft magazine. At first I had a small understanding of how the program worked and therefore couldn't express a lot of professionalism whilst in the making of the prelim magazine, because of this it made my work look fairly amateur, an example of this would be the fonts not matching up.

As we got to the end of creating our draft preliminary magazine there was a clear indication that my knowledge of the program had grown. I noticed this because whilst working my way through our final magazine I had got to know the software, this gave me the knowledge to know where everything is within the program so that I could include and use more tools to get a better outcome upon finishing the final magazine.

The progress within using this program became very apparent when in the creation of my A2 Ancillary products (both Digipak & Poster) this is because of the experience that had been developed from the coursework in AS. On both products I was able to navigate around the software in creation, an example of this would be the inclusion of the white skull that was featured within the title 'Mothership'.

To conclude, I would say that my progress from the beginning of AS to now has gone up drastically and looking back on all products this can be seen clearly. Photoshop has also been a great help in the creation of all products in both AS and A2.