Production Journal: Magazine Advertisement

Ancillary Product 2: Magazine Advertisement

1) Went through all the pictures we had taken for the magazine advertisement and chose the one that was of best quality and the one we liked the look of the most.
2) Opened Adobe Photoshop and imported the photo.
3) We also imported a smaller picture of our first ancillary product (the digipak) in order to promote it further on the magazine advertisement.

4) We also got our real media artefact and initial ideas blog posts up from our research and planning section so that we could follow on from what we planned and also use the real media artefacts we had analysed for some last minute inspiration. From this we began editing part of the poster on Photoshop.
5) Firstly we inserted the artist name - 'The Chainsmokers' along with the name of the song - 'New York City'. This was done by one of our group members who used the 'Typing Tool' on the left hand side of the Photoshop programme.
6) We then edited the font size, font and colour. We played around here on Photoshop, testing lots of different types until we were finally happy with our decision. We wanted the text to be bold as this was one of the connotations of magazine posters that we found whilst researching them. To be effective it would need to be bold enough to stand out so you can see it from a distance or for it to catch your eye as you're flicking through the pages of a magazine.

7) We then added our social media icons as well as the record labels names in the bottom right and top left corners.

8) After getting feedback and reflecting on our own work we changed the positioning of the image of the CD from the top right-hand corner to the middle of the magazine advertisement. From our own criticism we though that it would make more sense for the CD cover to be in the middle of the advert rather than the top right and it looked pointless and the whole purpose of the task is to promote the album so we thought it would be better off promoting it from the middle of the poster (where it is eye catching rather than top right (where it just blends in with the background).

To reflect, unfortunately our the process of editing our ancillary tasks was long and frustrating and we encountered a lot of problems due to our unfamiliarity with Adobe Photoshop. This meant we had to heavily rely on Google and the assistance of the IT staff at school. As a result a lot of trial and error techniques were involved as we needed to explore all avenues before making any decisions so that we could produce a product we were happy with. I think something that would have benefited us most would have been learning how to use Photoshop to a level of understanding that at least meant we could get the process complete quicker as it would have saved us a lot of time and stress.