creative critical Reflection
Question 1) How does your product use or challenge conventions and how
does it represent social groups or issues?
=
For my component, I chose family magazine. Ever since I was developing- since I felt like experimenting my interests, and create a better understanding of the genre I am not too familiar with. In this type of magazine, family magazines are considered to be a general interest type of styled magazine. I was not really against their conventions, instead I've used the conventions of the family magazine.
These conventions are usually the families in such magazine look happy and lively. From my understanding, they make it seem like having a family can be a healthy choice, and in magazine covers they always make the models of a family smile to the camera with their children or spouse in a rather clean environment.
Throughout my discovery, there is not really much in depth of going through the magazines specifically. I don't think there is much to talk about actually, but the way I interpret what a family magazine should be okay.
From what I see and thought when I made my component, the ways a family magazine can represent issues though is by the setting. As similar as what I have mentioned before, the family magazine covers usually show a family smiling, and it is like giving a rosy reality of families. They always seem well dressed, and they look polite. Even though it is not as compulsory to do so, the darker side of being in a family is not really shown when it comes to family magazines. The content of these family magazine are shown calm and collected pieces of information such as family activities, helping out with functions of a family, education, health (even though I did not really bring this topic up that much, which may or may not go against what I was supposed to go for. But due to the limited amount of time I struggled with it).
Question 2) How does your product engage with audiences and how would it be distributed as a real media text?
= It would be displayed to adults, specifically a parental age that would have a generally normal range, which are people from the age of 20 to 40 years. The cover would be shown of a mother with her child with formal wear, (they are both in Malay clothes) to represent where they are from, and or what culture they are in. In my magazine it presents Bruneian culture. While the mother is wearing a shawl and baju kurung, and the child is wearing baju cara Melayu, they have taken a formally worn photo for the magazine cover. From what I believe people will see them as two adoring family members, sitting in a spotless living room together as she holds the child's hand. The quote in the magazine is supposedly an inspiring take on lifting someone's spirits up on being in or create a family.
Looking through the contents page, I would like for it to set up to be a magazine with a simplistic format and style. Everything about it is just simple. Having the first few pages introducing family life, and then going through specific and additional information like the educational and entertainment which they both spend about almost 30 pages wide. As simple as it gets with their design, this may not interest the reader as much.
The double page spread shows an interview from a school teacher. He was reviewed, talked about his hobbies and some things that he likes before beginning to talk about the ways his school works and the concerns that should be held to solve related to student problems and the school's health. It should be shown like an actual interview, like as if his answers were written through a text to speech.
I would like this magazine to be sold somewhere in a bookstore. An example from seeing a few magazines being sold is from Best Eastern. A bookstore that sells out different types of books (simply describing it better as different sections of the store), other materials such as normal and colouring pencils, small branded toys that hang in cars, toys and so on. Plus promotions can be multiple copies of them in different stores
Question 3) How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
= Throughout this project...I can confirm that I knew less before it even started- Once I understood that films are way more complex than they seem behind the scenes, my view on watching and or reading any media feels like a different vibe. Before understanding, I used to be less aware on how they create / behind the scenes other than for movies themselves.
During the making of the preliminary exercise though I took some time to understand different shots of films. Remembering watching that one certain film for that exercise I feel like I am now capable of questioning more about how they are made.. not just the ways they are differently shot, but the sounds.. background music, what the plot of the film is and so on.
Making the magazines for both preliminary exercise and the official component were quite a challenge for me, but in the end they both gave me an experience to design a selling book!- The preliminary exercise seemed to spark more fun with it though because I have invested my time better into doing so. Even so, both made me understand better about how arrangement of texts work, and I had to refer to real magazines to see how they are made to do so. I struggled the most with this part though since there was a lot to do just to edit a few photos with texts.
The vibe of the entire project differs from the beginning exercises and the final exercise, but both have tested my digital art and narration skills. I could say with the timing the both of them are tested for me, and I had to do with whatever I can to make the final products seem interesting to see and interact.
So...I have ended up learning on how the grid of a camera works once I have gotten used to taking photos with a phone, and also recording videos with it too.
Question 4) How did you integrate technologies - software, hardware and
online - in this project?
= IbisPaintX, mostly for the magazines. Both beginning exercise and the actual component. Plus edited the short film on the preliminary exercise with Capcut. They are both applications on my phone.
I did not know if my laptop could take editing softwares well (since this is a very old laptop), but I am more skilled in doing edits on my phone, so I did have to justify about that in this component.
So when I use IbisPaintX for my magazines, the texts that are added onto a canvas is usually separated from the actual layer itself, making it easier for me to move around any text and to edit them. Overlaying is also a powerful tool that comes in the application. An example of the overlaying tool I used is when I was doing my magazine cover for the family magazine. I used some sort of pink overlay (with low volume) to make it more aesthetically appealing.
For CapCut's part, the way I used it- and recorded the last clip of the preliminary exercise was with my camera application on the same phone. It features sound effects, animation frames which allows creators to move around clips, texts, overlaying objects anywhere in the editing process, video effects that can make smoother transitions.
What is most important though is how the information to help out working on this blog (which is by research through Google, and to save our progress in this Wix blog. This blog saves up any work done for Media Studies, and that requires time and good connection. After all of that, the project was quite an interesting experience. Even though I may feel neutral about my final products though, it was lovely making them.