Essay

Jay Bell
Evaluation Essay

Question 1(a) Describe and evaluate your skills development over the course of their foundation portfolio.

On my foundation portfolio I created a music magazine, which was a front cover, a contents page and double page spread. These all contained my own images and writing etc. I choose the type of genre of my magazine and style I was going to base mine around. I also created a Wyke College magazine for like a practice run of when it actually started getting serious and making my music magazine. I made of drafts and re drafts, as I wanted to improve my work as much as I can. When I choose my genre of magazine, I also thought about the price of which my magazine was going to cost and also my target audience. I did this task to in order to achieve the highest grade I could possibly get towards my final grade at the end of the year combined with my exam grade.  Doing the college magazine helped me get into finding out the correct codes and conventions for a magazine, as I explored many different types of magazine. I did this research through the internet and also just picking up different college magazine from my old school. I really went into this task ready for it and wanting to do really well with all my effort.

Before I started AS Media Studies I had very basic skills, as I did GCSE Media Studies which touch upon Abode Photoshop, camera shots and creating media projects. In GCSE I created a front cover for a horror movie using the code and conventions need to achieve a high grade and also a music video with my own choice of song. At GCSE I learnt all the basic camera shots and how to use photo shop in a way not as advance as I did AS. In my music video, I had use correct camera shots to create a good conventional music video like close ups , even such things as using a mobile phone in the video showing a video to show convergence etc. I completed this task and then had to show it to other classes to get my feedback.

Going into AS Media Studies I had slight advantage of knowing how to use certain tools on photo shop or what type of camera shots where been used in such music videos or film trailers. An example of this is when I was constructing my front cover for my music magazine, like deleting the background of my main image I knew to the magic wand tool or the quick selection tool. I already had these basic general skills to help me proceed through my foundation portfolio.

Most of my work was constructed through Adobe Photoshop CS5, which really helped me further my work and really improved upon it. Throughout constructing my magazine, you can see drastic changes, I progressed my ability and skills on photo shop. I learnt how to make my magazine look more professional and conventional to magazines such as NME. Using Photoshop tools such as the quick selection tool, this helped me get rid of the back ground images I didn’t need etc. You can see in my final front cover in using the blur tool, has really help it look more presentable, the text look a lot more professional to the magazine whereas in my drafts it looks very unpleasant. Making my quote smaller using the transform tool allows me to make Jack Kendall the main attraction on my front cover. I used the spot fix tool; you can’t really see how I have used it as I don’t have a previous photo of him without the spot fix tool.


My music magazine is a massive improvement to my college magazine as I used so many more conventions; everything just looks a lot more pleasant to look at. My college magazine is just a complete mess where as my music magazine uses most of the front cover conventions such as Masthead in the correct place where as college magazine doesn’t. Using the barcode, price, date and issue, gives it that more professional look of magazine whereas without it, it just looks like a simple picture. Main cover line and cover lines are good conventions to use to make it look more neat and tidy. Teasing contents with a splash will engage the audience a lot as they will want free product from their favourite magazine. Looking at these images and seeing how much I developed helped me to move on thinking I can further my skills even more as much as they already have over the past year. Other skills I improved upon where my camera skills, trying to picture the right lighting for my image or position of my photo. Using new software/hardware as well such as blogger, I never heard of the thing until I came to doing AS Media Studies  even Prezi as well this become a great tool to use while constructing my AS Media portfolio. When I finished this task, I even printed it all off and got actually audience feedback and also posted it upon my blog, hoping I could receive constructive feedback, people thoughts and opinions and then I took all this in and made the changes I needed to do.

Evidence of the photos shows how many my skills developed through the year. Viewing a lot of different media texts, helped me learn the correct codes and conventions of what genre something was as in my case a music magazine. From a conventional masthead in the top left corner to having the barcode in the bottom right. Due to having previous basic skills from GCSE then moving to A level standard was big jump, I kept moving forward and learning more and more skills to help me achieve a good grade and have knowledge to help me proceed on to A2 Media Studies and do well.