AS Preliminary Magazine Task

Production: We took photos that we had planned in our mock-ups, and then we imported them to Photoshop and began editing. We then had to cut out these photos and add it onto the base of our magazine. We then proceeded to add a masthead and cover lines according to our mock-ups. I wasn't really sure what fonts I wanted to use, but I knew that I wanted them to be bold and eye catching, also i wanted the fonts to link to the 'geek' aspect of the magazine by keeping the fonts striaght forward and not particularly edgy or interesting. We were allowed 3 different fonts, so for the title I went for a simple obvious font to make it stand out. For the cover lines, I wanted a less bold, but still easily readable font, so I chose a more subtle font, yet kept it simple. For the competition cover line, I used a slightly more interesting font because I thought this would advertise the competition better and be more eye catching to the reader. Although I had originally planned to keep the colour scheme to greys and blacks, I soon realised this would look dull and uninteresting, so instead I chose to link it to the school itself by resembling the school colours. I chose the lighter shades of blue because they matched the colour of Izzy's top, and I chose the darker shades to contrast with this. I found that a white background was the most effective as other colours made it look either too busy or drew attention away from the other aspects. During the production I found the cover shot and some of the contents page pictures were too dark so I adjusted the lighting on it. I also found that I had a lot of additional space on the cover so I had to make my cover lines bigger. Here is my magazine cover and contents page:

Post-Production: At the end of this task I had produced a cover and contents page for a school magazine. I had learnt a lot of skills on how to use Photoshop as well as what a magazine should look like. I have also found how my mock ups needed to be slightly adapted to make the magazine look better and that how although you can plan the mock-ups very carefully it is important to change things that don’t work well when on the computer. However it is very important that you include a lot of detail on your mock-ups as this both saves time and gives you a better idea of what to do. Overall i think the task went reasonably well. Considering my lack of skills and knowledge about how magazines are designed and produced, as a first attempt i think the end results were ok.

Film AS Preliminary Task

Pre-Production:
For the task we had to film and edit a character walking through, crossing a room and sitting down in a chair opposite another character, with whom she then exchanges dialogue with. The key shots we had to include were long shot, a medium shot, over the shoulder, close-up and shot reverse shot. We also had to keep within the 180 degrees rule. To start with we designed a storyboard of the film, where we had to write all the information about each shot individually, we then swapped the storyboards around so we could film a storyboard from scratch to see how important having a detailed storyboard is to the filming process.

Production: 
We filmed according to the storyboard we had been given, I filmed the close-up of megans feet and also some of the shots of Megan and Izzy's conversation. We found that a detailed storyboard was really important, otherwise filming becomes more difficult and it is much harder to create the desired film. Also we had to film with a camera that faded, we had to work around this to make sure none of the shots were fading as the clip started or ended as this would have led to the film not flowing.
Post-Production: 
We edited our film by importing it on to imovie and cutting it and adding a scream at the beginning, as this was part of the storyboard. I edited some of the conversation and also some of the door opening. The strengths were using the camera and quickly learning how to use the editing software, but the weaknesses were that we had to film some shots again because of breaking the 180 degree rule and filming the over the shoulder shots from the wrong side.