Media Studies Foundation Portfolio Evaluation

Media Presentation

Evaluation commentary

Commentary

This is my double page article. The photo was the last photo on the camera, which was quite lucky as most of the other photos weren't good enough or were out of focus. Michael's face is slightly out of focus, as the camera was mainly focused on his hand and finger pointing at the camera, which gives it quite a cool look because it's as if he's connecting with the audience. The other image I used I found on my camera which I took when I was out with some friends one night. I quite like it because it's quite blurred and looks as though the people could be enjoying the music from DJ Mick Swiz. I chose to use different colours on this page, as my magazine isn't all based on one thing and the other backgrounds on my other pages were both white so I wanted to add some variety and introduce new colours that are relevant. The article is written in the same font used on the contents page and is easy to read. It is based upon an interview I found on the internet with DJ Tiesto.

Double page spread sketch

This is my double page spread sketch which I did on Adobe Illustrator. It is extremely rough as I did it very quickly because I wanted to start with the main double page as soon as I could. I looked at an issue of Kerrang! magazine's double page article and sort of based my sketch on that, but jumbled it around slightly so its not exactly the same layout.

Contents Page

This is my final contents page. I followed my sketch as much as I could. I feel I've made it a simple layout, making it easy to understand how things are organised, and it is easy to read due to the font being a very basic 'Arial'. I started off by creating the empty version of the contents page, where I just had text boxed and image boxes, so I would try and keep it all to size. I then added in my photos to the image boxes and changed the sizes of them accordingly. After this I then added in my features list, and the 'exclusive' over the picture. I then went on to adding in the title, as I was unsure of whether I was going to use a separate font but in the end I decided I preferred it when it used the same font as the rest of the page. After all the main text was down, I then changed the colour of it to bright colours which would be associated with the dance music genre. I kept the title the same shade of red as the front cover title to keep some sort of them going as they looked quite separate pages without the red. I was then left with an empty space in the bottom left which I filled with the editor and designers names as this is in a number of magazines I looked at in the contents page, although maybe not taking up so much space. I was told by someone that the black outline boxes of the bottom image and the names in the bottom left were not lined up correctly, but I had a problem with the computer and on the screen it looked aligned although when printed it never was 100% exact.

Contents Page Photos

This image was an unused photo from the front cover photo shoot. I thought I'd use this picture as it looks quite natural and he looks as though he is enjoying himself. Also, as the main article on the double page spread will be about him I wanted to add another page reference to the interview showing his importance in this issue of the magazine. This image is completely unedited and uncropped.

I created this using logo for the 'dance4life' campaign using Photoshop. I wrote the text before editing the colour and changing the inner and out glows to get the white. I chose not to have a photo for all three pictures I'm using because it would be hard for me to make three photos in a straight line look right on the contents page, which I found out after attempting to use another photo I had which turned out to be no use to me.

This is an image I found on my camera but it had a horrible background, so I decided to use the magnetic lasso tool and remove the background leaving just Sam in the photo. It doesn't exactly make too much sense, but it doesn't need to as I am not producing an article on him, or his jaffa cakes. I quite like the image, but the outline is quite jagged if you look closely, which could be a problem if noticed by a lot of people.

Contents sketch

This is my Contents Page sketch. I created it in Adobe Illustrator CS4. I tried to make an easy to read layout with some order to it, so it's easy to read from. I want to use the same colour scheme as the front cover, but I decided not to add colour onto the sketch because I haven't yet decided on the colours. I am happy with my sketch, but there may be a noticeable amount of white space next to the text. so I may fill it with a background picture of some sort.