Our Magazine Prelim

Our second preliminary was about magazines. As you would expect, we therefore had to make a magazine on Adobe Photoshop.

I found the experience mostly easy, as I am quite experienced with Photoshop, but the only problems I did have were where I was expecting a tool or function to be somewhere in the program but it wasn't because the version of Photoshop I'm used to at home has more available. Basically, the main issue was that I found the school's version of Photoshop to be much simpler and basic than the version I have, which makes sense as some people are not experienced at all, but I jumped in at the deep end when I first learnt how to use Photoshop, and this time I found it hard to take that step backwards.

On our magazine we tried to follow the generic conventions to keep it looking as professional as we could. We made it so the masthead covered a small part of the main image as is the norm with many magazines. We also mentioned celebrities in our cover lines, as well as many real life human interest stories as that often appears on front covers. We also kept the colour scheme to three colours (excluding white), which were blue, green and black. The main image also filled up a large portion of the page.

The target audience was school students, and we tried to attract them with cover lines that would make them laugh, cry, be disgusted at, etc. Either way our main focus was to ensnare their interest and make them buy the magazine. Making it a pound will have helped too.

Our beautiful front cover and contents page

(warning: contains facial hair)

My First Preliminary Task

Yay this is my first blog

For our preliminary task, we had film a person walking into a room and then proceeding to engage in a conversation with another person. The shots that we needed to include were:

• 180 degree rule shot
• The person entering the room
• A shot of them coming through the door
• Walking across the room
• Them having a conversation with the other person

Editing wise, we used several features of iMovie to (possibly) enhance our work. For instance, at the beginnning we used a type of titles which looked as if it had been typed on an old computer. This made it look as if it was some form of serious sci-fi/action/drama-type text, i.e The X-Files. We used the 'flash' effect a couple times in order to add impact to the action at the time e.g. Aidan kicking a chair across the room and slamming his fists on the table while shouting "For the love of Zac Efron!" We also used several filters and paused frames to make Chris seem more sinister than he already looks.

In terms of sound, we only really used small section of music at the start to set the scene, but from then on we used only diegetic sound as I felt that any other music would make it impossible to make out the conversation, which would then only make all the actual dialogue completely pointless.

Overall I found that it was an enjoyable experience, as I thoroughly enjoy all the filming and editing that goes into making a short piece, no matter how unprofessional and weird ours may have been.