Sophie Griffiths AS media studies coursework: October 2009

The preliminary task we were asked to do, consisted on making a school magazine front cover and contents page, using the typical codes and conventions of a magazine. Some of these codes and conventions were needed and some where not as important and could be broken.

some examples of codes and conventions of the front cover that shouldn't be broken were ; A main image, masthead should be at the top, should have a particular theme. I included these codes in my magazine because otherwise it may not have seemed like a magazine, although it is different to some codes and conventions because I haven't used a background from the image or a coloured background, instead I have put my mid shot image in front of a blank background. I have also used a colour scheme, but have added red font with a green glow for the word Halloween to show that it is different and something special. My contents page follows most of the codes and conventions of magazine contents pages such as ; and editorial, making it clear that it is a contents page, columns, plain background, cover story's focused. Some of the codes that I forgot to use was the issue date, and I didn't use a main image, I also used small images to show what some articles were about but I didn't use them so they looked neat so overall the contents page looked messy and a bit unorganized.

The programmes we used to create the magazines where Photoshop and Quark. Quark was a new programme for me to use and at first I disliked the programme because I was used to using Photoshop, but it was much simpler to make a contents page on it. It was a good experience using a new programme because I will now know how to use it for my main task music contents page.

My strengths of Photoshop where good because I had already used Photoshop in previous years, using all the tools i was good at because I knew what a lot of the tools where and why you would use them, like the polygon tool was to cut a shape out of and image for example I cut Chloe's body out from a picture. My weaknesses were on a couple of things I had to ask for a bit extra help because I used some things that I hadn't used before, for example I had never used the history tool , or the magic brush, so someone in my class who had used it showed me how.
My strengths towards Quark where not very good because I had never used it before and found it quick tricky and frustrating, but after some guidance form other members from my class, Ms Swindell and Camilla, I learned very quickly how to use Quark and all the functions.

Overall I think my Preliminary task went well considering it was done at a fast pace that I wasn't used to and the new programs I used, this will now help towards my music magazine and I can see from the the mistakes I made in this task, to make my main task better.