Evaluation.

Pre Production, Production & Post Production

As the project is coming to an end and I have completed my magazine, I am going to go through and discuss everything I have done, the reasons for those decisions, what I like, comparisons, key elements and what I can improve upon for next time. I have decided to split my evaluation up into sections, this will make it easier to read and blend together.

Pre Production

Mind Map

 The pre production for my FMP started at the beginning of March. We were given the brief of what we need to roughly stick to, and from there my ideas began to flow and expand the more work I completed. My whole initial idea was to produce a printed magazine, based on fashion with a mixture and strong influence of photography, that would inspire and show others fashion, but photographed in  a more interesting manner ( in my opinion) to the ordinary fashion magazines. To start off I gathered some inspirations I would base my magazine around, they consisted of publications such as Paper Magazine and Vogue. From here I was able to plan and put into action the thoughts and ideas I had. I decided to do this online, creating mind maps, consisting of inspirations, colour themes, photography styles, influencers and more. At this point my research was extending, every time I produced another mind map or blog post I had the idea to go more in depth to things such as layout as I found it intriguing. After this secondary research I decided to go on and produce my own primary research, allowing me to make it more specific and personal to my own project. By creating an initial questionnaire and sending it to my target audience I was then able to dive into the world of content. As I knew from the beginning my magazine wouldn't be very 'article' based this time around I was also able to put my focus on to photographers, lighting techniques and more.

 From this chunk of work and after looking at all the different fonts to fit my aesthetic, I could then put all this research into practice. Consequently producing a large number of experiments, all available to view on my blog. All of these came in handy as when it came to the actual production of my magazine I was familiar and happy with things I was going to do. My work continued on, me producing more mood boards and photoshoots, as well as sketches for layout and more, before the production began.

Behind The Scenes test

 Above explains my work from March to around April, all of which was a key element to producing a project that is successful. Taking inspirations from publications such as Paper and photographers such as Dean Sherwood, along with my own personal style and ideas, I was able to being my production. So before discussing this I wanted to pick the things out that were and were not a success. What I think did work well was my experiments in particular. By doing test shoots and playing around with editing, watching tutorials and more, I was able to learn all the way along pre production. My mood boards/ mind maps also communicated my ideas visually. It gives a good idea of aesthetic, style, content and personal pathway in the project, which is important to those that, for example, are not interested in this section of work I have done and perhaps can't relate, therefore by viewing my work I have included a lot of images and screenshots to try and portray my ideas and journey. In addition to this, by doing multiple experiments it enabled me to develop my idea further than I could have thought originally possible. For example, when experimenting with lighting techniques, I was able to see what would happen if I used two colours of strong light influence as opposed to one. Then what they looked light with natural lighting. That meant that when I later came to experimenting with editing my images, I could not only enhance and adapt the experiment shots, but I experimented by merging the two together, further developing my project and research!

Test Shot

Things that were not as successful, or perhaps helpful, were a few questions in my survey. By having such a wide variety of people in my target audience, I got a lot of responses from those whom would never in the first place find themselves buying a fashion magazine based around women! So when I got responses from them, it was difficult to try and interpret them, however despite this I managed to think about 'on the other hand...' and use their responses in a positive manner.  From this pre production I have discovered that I need to come up with some more challenging questions for surveys and try and send them out to even more people to get a larger response. Throughout the process I have also become increasingly better at Photoshop. I realised that I needed to know things I did not, so by taking that into my own hands and researching tutorials I was then able to delve into things such as the blending options on text to make them blend to the image, adding a glow and experimenting even further!
 If I could change something about my pre production side of things, I would want to look deeper into my own research with things such as focus groups, instead of limiting myself to a Google Form and sharing it on Facebook, from this I know that next time I will improve this. When I look back to the Statement Of Intent I filled in, I can clearly see that when I discussed research I would do, I talked about other pupils work and comparing my work to theirs. Upon beginning my FMP I soon discovered that for me, looking at other's work doesn't help as much as I had initially anticipated. This being that we have different ideas, and different ways of thinking, so although it it nice to see if you are 'on track' and roughly creating the same documents for example, the work itself didn't help. As we were given some guidelines I decided to take it into my own hands and everything I created and researched, to produce a blog and what ever else I found appropriate. However, by looking at others work it also helps you become better at critiquing. This being that if you are always looking at someone else's work you can notice things they may not have included, therefore hopefully meaning you can add this to yours to make it 'better'.
 Of course then on the other hand I did discuss that I wanted to research bloggers and influencers, this is something in which I have completed and am happy with. I went into a lot more depth than may seem necessary, but by doing so it really helped me find what I truly wanted to produce!

Production

 When it came to the actual production of the project I felt fully prepared due to the amount of research and experimentation and effort in which I had put in before hand, therefore not feeling any necessary 'pressure'. A large majority of my pre production experiments consisted of me using photoshop to create multiple mock covers and inside pages, again all things in which really helped my final production.  So I was then able to book out the studio, set up the backdrop and all the equipment, and begin my final shoot. Whilst doing this I took some extra pictures on my phone to create a 'behind the scenes' blog post in which discusses the process,step by step, of what I did and why, as well as what could have gone better and what I would want to do next time. In addition to taking over 200 new pictures, I was also happy because by keeping the images that I really liked from my test shoot in the pre production stage, it allowed me to have something to 'fall back on' which was somewhat comforting. Ironically I couldn't actually get the same lighting effect I had initially got in my test shoot, so I actually did end up using 2 images combined in my final magazine. 

 Just before I had done my final photoshoot I briefly research the printing options available to me, this helped as I knew after I had put together everything I was confident with the final look I wanted to achieve.
 Once I had my photographs I uploaded them to my computer and edited them using Lightroom. This was one of the things through the whole project that was really interesting as I had no experience with using it, therefore by doing some research and playing around with the application I was able to successfully find the things that worked for me and the images I took. I was able to bring out certain tones and shades to enhance them, without it coming across too strong. However saying this there were some images that looked a little bit 'washed out' even when enhanced, so I tried changing the colour of the whole image, this however did not work for me and is something for me to learn from.
 I decided to use Photoshop to write my articles and put together my pages as I was able to use the tools and effects to enhance and really make the magazine look how I want to. I initially did try using InDesign to make my whole magazine, however I could not get the right text effects that I could in Photoshop, so opted for that instead!

Behind The Scenes of shoot

 Once my photoshoot was completed and I had put it together I decided to do a print trial. I decided to do this using my printer at home, this was so that I was able to see what my final version would look like and any alterations I would want to make that I thought didn't suit. Soon after I made my alterations, some of which included adding things and taking away things that were unnecessary. Therefore I had my final magazine on Indesign to the standard I was happy with. At this point I wanted to create a questionnaire to gather feedback from peers and my target market to anything they would prefer to see or have changed, however as I did not have a printed version and couldn't include all the screenshots on the Google Form I decided to publish it online, therefore viewable to others online easily.

  Something that was successful was the editing and actually photoshoot itself, I was very pleased with it, however did realise that if I were to do another one I need to keep in mind that for things such as a front cover I need to change the orientation of the camera so that when I stretch the image to fit, we don't lose half of the person in shot! This is really important as I realised soon after I needed to have taken more portrait images to fit my A4 portrait magazine, again this is something I will learn from and ensure I will change for the next project I do. The only minor thing that went slightly 'wrong' was when I had completed my magazine on photoshop, then exported it as a photoshop file, consequently meaning that the quality was poor when I added all the pages to InDesign. Despite this I was able to rectify this by going back to photoshop and exporting them as PNG, meaning that the quality was high on both images and text, and that when I later sent it to print there would be no quality issues.

Post Production

 Lastly, the post production side of this project wasn't as large as I had initially anticipated. The last few stages once my magazine had been sent to print was to gather feedback on my final product and evaluate my work. Once the magazine had arrived I was really happy with the choice of paper (coating and thickness) as it really gave the effect I wanted it too! By photographing the final piece and asking my target audience questions, I took down some notes and was able to produce some data on their opinions (see this blog post). This was helpful as I could then evaluate my work purely based on others opinions of it.
 The last stage of post production I have to complete is my evaluation that you are reading. I decided to split my evaluation into this blog post, as well as as a self evaluation on the tasks I did and what I want to do next time, and finally one evaluation using the results from my focus group and peers, evaluating my product from a different point of view.

 As a whole, the project has been a success in my opinion. Looking at what my idea started as and now looks as a final piece I think it all ties in together. I feel like my work has been consistent and the fact that I enjoyed the process also helps as it pushed me to do more and make it even better. I would say that if I were to be set the same task again, I would want to expand, both in my articles and in actual size. I think I would like to do it based on something a bit more 'me', less fashion based, but still photography based! This would be really interesting to expand the articles as I would have a better voice over the subject matter if it was something more personal / had more experience with.