Photoshop Tutorial

On Friday 30th January in our media lesson we was taught the basics on how to use photoshop effectively. Our ICT technician appeared in front of the class and showed the "obvious" things such as creating layers and feathering images for different effects. He explained also how to create and alter canvas size and changing the size of images. Furthmore he demonstrated manipulating images to alter the brightness and contrast giving very different effects which may be useful when creating our task.

I learnt alot from this lesson but many of these techniques will need to be put into practise before they are mastered. I will experiment during my Preliminary task to take full advantage of Adobe Photoshop.

Evolve - George Stephenson High School

Whilst researching a student magazine I found Evolve. Evolve is a student run magazine for George Stephenson High School. In the latest issue which I have linked, there are loads of different sections, school events, entertainment and sports.

I feel the audience of the magazine is for all age groups within the school. There are picuturesrelating to Sixth form students and also young year groups such as year 7. Also there are different colours that attract attention and give it an informal appearance. This appearance is carried forward with the different fonts and images.

The first few pages after the contents page are about the school. The current art work being produced by students and the next page is a report on "Just the two of us". This is a singing competition held by the school which 16 duets are competting against each other and the verdict decided by a panel of 3 judges. The language throughout this article is very informal and there are jokey coments that are deliberately inserted for entertainment.

As you can see from the images all the pictures are brightly coloured and attract alot of potential readers as they are extremely eye catching. Layout on the pages appears very messy but at another looked it is quite well organised. They have used an obvious house style which is clear from page to page, the black bar along the top.

The content of the magazine has shown me how effective a house style is for a magazine such as this. Also the brightly colours pictures and bold headings, all these items key for their target audience

The Sheaf Cover

http://www.thesheaf.com/

The Sheaf

In today's media lesson I did my first piece of research. As a class we looked at the University of Saskatchewan's student newspaper. This newspaper is written, edited and published by students for students. It has been the U o S's newspaper since 1912 and is the largest of its kind in the province.

After looking at the main aspects of the newspaper such as distribution, purpose and content I came about some ideas that I thought I could use for my magazine and also some that I could not use.

The Sheafis is a weekly newspaper and is available throughout the academic school year. It is available from stands at busy traffic areas. The target audience for my magazine is 6th form students (16-18 years of age). I decided that my magazine will not be weekly but fortnightly because realistically students and teachers do not have alot of spare time within the learning programme to achieve a deadline of a week to produce a magazine and have time to study/teach.

The Sheaf is funded by the students - the students pay at the beggining of the year for the sheaf and then theyare entitled to every copy of the sheaf. This would be very difficult to achieve because 6th form education is free and therefore there is not any fee's to pay. So I decided that the magazine will be sold for £1 and will be available during morning registration from form tutors.

The content of the newspaper had a variety of entertainment and interactive sections for students to write in and express their views. I will take this into account and advertise an opinions page for sixth form students to comment on the upcoming or recent events being advertised. I will also adapted this idea further and have some sort of competition poll which will reveal a selected winner in each issue.

Using The Sheaf as research I know what to incorporate into my magazine which will work and should attract readers and also what does not seem appropriate due to the target audience.

Foundation Portfolio Introduction

I have been set a foundation portfolio for my A/S Media assignment. This includes a preliminary task, a main task and a presentation of my evaluation:

• The preliminary involves designing a front page and contents page for a school/college magazine. This must include a medium shot of a student.
• The main task includes designing a front page, contents and a double page spread of a new music magazine. Must include a mininmum of 4 orginal images.
• The evaluation must be electronic and can be in the form of a DVD with extras, slideshow, blog, podcast or a mixture of each.

I have chosen to use a blog to present my evaluation. After each lesson i will post on my blog and make notes to the following relevant question:

1. In what ways does your product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real mdeia products?
2. How effective is the combination of your product and evaluation texts?
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

In yesterdays lesson, 19th January 2009, we talked about how we should be preparing for our preliminary task. We looked at different ways in which to keep records of each lesson. As this presentation must be all electronic I decided to write a blog, and I will also be adding videos and a podcast. Further more I will make a powerpoint presentation to evaluate my assignments.