How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
Before starting this project I had some skills in photoshop as I edit pictures for commercial use along with using it as my main drawing app however besides that I have very little experience in illustrator, Lightroom, photography and editing said photos.
In the beginning of this project we were tasked to do some preliminary work in small groups, this not only acquainted us with possible future teammates but also broke the ice of media production. I recall one task specifically being very useful as it made us experience the cycle of production more than the rest, we had to make a movie poster with the prompt “behind the mask”. After splitting up in small groups and brainstorming we took photos which helped us practice some photography even if it was fairly limited, editing the photos and adding them to photoshop which got us more acquainted with some features in the app such as using the smart select lasso tool, various color filters and so on. Ending with us putting everything together after finding an interesting font on google and finishing the poster.
After doing some practical work we had to do some theory in order to expand our knowledge on conventions and trends of magazines. We had to research a couple magazines of our own choosing, each from a different field/genre in order to get a better grasp of a larger variety of conventions and the reasoning behind their use. This not only helped us better understand the thought process behind the making of these magazines however also aided in our decision making regarding what genre of magazine we wanted to create. We saw that fashion magazines allowed messages to be portrayed with more artistic liberty and room for experimentation, the topic range was also far greater than say a sports magazine.
This being a group project (for the most part) definitely raised some challenges, in order to effectively create a solid magazine I had to improve certain aspects of myself such as communicating better with my team, participating in open minded discussions, being able to give/receive constructive criticism and explaining things a couple of times if needed. It was challenging at the beginning however I can confidently say that I have improved in those areas and can better help my team during this production process.
Overall my production skills grew tremendously in every area. I learned how to take pictures with a proper camera during the photoshoots, how to frame the said photos adequately, the importance of the background and lighting in the final products, and so on; along with how to edit them in Adobe Lightroom. It was my first time using Lightroom and it was slightly overwhelming at the beginning.
After experimenting with the dozens of options I started to get a better grasp of what I was doing, how to better use the exposure meter in order to get a darker, more grim effect or the opposite, a brighter softer picture. I noticed myself using the various “point curves” to get funky colors and mess around with the aesthetic of the pictures I took along with changing the highlight colors from the “color grading” wheels, helping me change some colors of 2 different photos to match, therefore letting me use them on a magazine double spread.
I strengthened some of my previous knowledge of photoshop when making the mockups for the magazine, I got a better grasp of how to utilize smart object layers and inverting colors when needed, this happened when I was adding illustrator pages on the mockups provided by our teacher. Overall I've gained a good amount of experience in the field of magazine making, I'm more acquainted with the magazine making progress. I've had some obstacles when planning the photoshoots as unforeseen problems arose: models getting sick or weather problems occurring almost every week, forcing me to postpone and eventually relocate to my plan B Location in order to complete the photo task in time. Although inconvenient, I did learn a lot regarding how to react properly and reschedule/change plans on a short notice. After this experience I noticed that even though I did have alternate options of what photos to take and where, it wasn't enough. I believe my main problem was over relying on these specific models, it would've been more efficient if I had some backups as in a period of 3 weeks at least one model was sick/feeling unwell or simply couldn't make it due to personal reasons. This greatly hindered production and is no one's fault but my own for not planning more.
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