Victorian Evaluation.

‘The Victorian’ Evaluation Josh Venton

For our task we were told to create the front cover of our school magazine,

‘The Victorian -(2008/2009).’

As simplistic as the challenge sounded it was actually slightly more difficult than what I personally first perceived as the photography for the front cover actually required a diverse range of editorial skills using the programmes iPhoto and Photoshop. The skills were, however, picked up swiftly after being shown the basics and reading an information sheet.

For my front cover I decided to go the obvious route with an enlarged photo shot of the College itself, as anything else would have look unnatural.

To shoot for the cover of the magazine, I, alongside with my colleague -

Mr. Michael Medway decided to venture up the college grounds, up the lawn, towards the main entrance. It is here where I stumbled across the idea of also including a medium/close-up image of me presenting the college. Michael and me took a wide range of photos and headed back to the media hut were I preceded to select a photo of the school and myself my method of trial and error of which looked best combined. Upon reading the above I feel that I have not made it entirely clear that I did in fact choose a photo of me posing for the front cover and also a separate shot for the school itself. I choose to do things this was because it would give me more options, as I will begin to explain shortly.

I began to work on the editing of my shot of the school. I worked on a slightly medieval look, with a yellow tinge so as to preserve the schools traditions whilst also incorporating one of the schools main colours.

The next task before importing the medium close up picture of myself was to introduce a title, ‘The Victorian’, in a suitable to text to which would reflect the schools ambience and character. To fulfil this expectation I decided to randomize with a wide selection off editing options on Photoshop until I reached my desired text. Next I decided to important a cropped version of me from my other photo using the ‘magnetic lasso ‘ tool on Photoshop. I precariously positioned a miniaturised version of me to scale on the bottom left hand side of the cover. It helped importing a smaller version of me onto the cover as a pose to taking it in all one picture due to the fact that I could position myself wherever, and if I wasn’t happy with the photo, I could move it.

To complete the cover, I simply used a range of tints to ‘glaze’ over my presentation to give it a ‘antique’ feel, to which I thought really was fitting with the school general demeanour.

The second major step with the project set was to compose a contents page for the school magazine.

Before I decided to start on this part of the task I thought it would be wise to form a brief set plan of how I would create and lay out the contents page. To do this I set out a mind map. On my mind map I included thought of a detailed and also concise nature. I eventually decided I would include a background of one of the shots I had previously captured. The picture itself was taken from just inside the main college entrance, a mere few metres back from the open door. I chose this picture to fit as my contents background as it was significant in the way in which it stood out to me. It seemed to symbolize an opening or ‘gateway to opportunities’ which is why it seemed fitting with the school magazine.

Again, like my front cover of the college I did intent to do some minor editing with the photo. By editing, I really mean fiddling around with the editorial options on iPhoto and Photoshop due to the fact my skills in that area are limited, so originally, I had intended to keep the morphing of the picture to some what little or nothing even. However, after a considerable amount of tweaking and trial and error I decided to stick with a certain frame on Photoshop as I really made the photo look as un-bland as possible, however, I kept in mind that the main focus of the contents was the listed contents and page numbers itself so I tried to make the background photo not to attention grabbing compared to the bold yellow text itself. I chose the colour of the text for two reasons. The first obviously being that it is one of the school’s trademark colours, the other being that it contrasted the background colours (mainly consisting of black red and partially white) well.

Originally for the text my main plan was just to make a personalized list of features in which would be included in the magazine, however I found it too challenging to come up with such a wide range of components so I decided to simply borrow a Victorian magazine from 2008/2009 (last years) and copy out the contents of that, I found this helped and I worked well and consistently with this.

Although it would be expected to be input first, the finally element of my task was to incorporate a title saying ‘contents’ which wasn’t difficult at all.

Like the main title, ‘The Victorian,’ all that was needed was to import the desired text using the text icon on Photoshop. In doing so I managed to stumble across a text in which was aesthetically pleasing and also stood out from the background.

After I had completed this final part of my project I proceeded to save both Photoshop projects as separate jpeg images, ready to upload on to blogger before beginning to set in motion for the current evaluation.

My project challenges the conventions of previous issues of the Victorian in the way that it includes a tint along with a picture of just one student, in medium close up on the cover.

My media project represents the particular social group of middle/upper class semi-private school with a lot of heritage and history due to the fact that the cover is of a 150+ year old building with a distinctive Victorian look and feel to it’s general demeanour.

The audience for my media project is the parents of the pupils participating in education of the school along with those parents considering or wanting to enrol their children in the school in the future near or far.

I attracted the attention of my audience by delivering a vast range of colours and with a bold outlook giving details of a wide range of activities ranging form sports events to CCF to matters of academia. This made the school look very appealing and seemed to draw the audience in.

Through the process of my task I have learnt a considerable amount editorial skills and how to use Photoshop in particular, which is a skill in which I feel will come in very useful to me in the future.

Although I was unable to really gain some genuine audience feedback I did in fact manage to ask my peers what their opinions were of the final outcome of my project to which most of the responses were positive, although I was told I could have ‘maybe improved on the layout of my contents,’ which was a pointer to which I strongly, strongly disagreed on.

Mock lay out of the project was simply made up of three factors for the cover, the title and the medium close up picture of myself.

The contents were simply made up also of the background, the text for the title along with the text for the page numbers and features etc.