Evaluation D

Evaluation D

"Provide an evaluation of the production practice and management skills that you have demonstrated in the realisation of your Unit 5 project.”

Throughout the stages of the course time management has been a necessity that must be kept up consistently, Whether it be through the research and planning to the actual completion of the products during production.  There was a continuous effort made to stick to deadlines set and mainly stuck to them. This is an evaluation of the whole process and my efforts at managing the barrage of tasks set at each stage.

Pre-production

Throughout pre-production, tasks were relatively small and simple based on research and compiling guidelines and conventions for future usage in designing products.  I found genre research easy to perform as it mainly revolved around analyzing content from magazines I enjoyed reading. I looked into both film and gaming genres originally and aimed to choose a category I would rather use.  Although I find I conducted in-depth and detailed research on both genres, my mindset was biased towards gaming, as this is my preferred and more knowledgeable topic.  When it came to deadlines I had to complete all work to the set deadlines including holiday work and class set work.  This research was invaluable when designing the product and the picking the conventions to follow and ignore. Conventions such as article content, the stylistics of the generic gaming magazine that could be incorporated into mine. This included gaming imagery necessary, informative article depth and simple design. This easily benefitted the product as it provided me with guidelines to follow when designing a product that would stand out amongst competitors whilst appealing to my target audience. This was the same for front covers which I should have paid more attention to when producing the front cover of my product as it would have saved time and editing.

I had slight issues when conducting audience feedback as there were delays when getting responses and it took a while to organize a focus group with my target audience. Once it was performed though I gained valuable improvements to make to layout and content based of their feedback and applied such improvements to my products.  This would highly improve little details in most of my products and lead to a complete overhaul of my front cover to be more visually appealing to the audience and improve its professional value.  This was for mock-ups and general concepts as again my intended audiences were either busy or too far away most of the time. The concept was accepted and the mock-ups were praised. Well one design was that I decided to adopt and use in the product whilst the other was criticized for its mocking style and weird background. This feedback shaped the second DPS as that variant of the article was accepted.

 When researching the client and audience I learnt the rules my magazine would have to follow in order to please both my target audience and the clients.  This again proved valuable when producing the written content of my magazine as it regulated the language quality and style to get the product printed and maintain the interest of my audience whilst alerting them to problems in the industry around them.  I had to analyse my audience’s interests through their tribe, buying habits and daily spending allowance. This was to tailor the product to their price range and interests whilst also finding potential advertisers and companies to promote in the magazine. I gained this data through use of a questionnaire set on socrative that worked out the gaming and cinema habits of my audience whilst gaining information about spending habits. This culminated into an audience diagram that showed their key interests in one place.  The knowledge of audience aided my final decisions on the content of my magazine and focus on which content to research. There were slight issues collecting varying data types as there were only online and magazine sources with the information I needed.

For the mock-ups I decided to experiment with two different writing styles and two different aesthetic styles. I intended to find which of would be the most effective, most preferred and most like my audience.  This proved useful as it saved a lot of work on article two as I just updated the aesthetics of mock up 1 that was preferred for its unusual layout and serious yet sarcastic writing style.  The written content, other than a few grammar checks, required no editing as the audience positively received it. I did need to re-do the image but other than that the DPS was pretty much untouched. The mock up process also gave an indication as to the writing style to adopt when writing other serious articles such as the is war the answer article.

Finally the last valuable part of pre-production would be the treatment. This was covering all bases and expectations of the magazines content, quality and audience. It served as a reminder of the products status, ideology and intended impact of the product whilst covering the commercial aspirations too. This set out the ideas in a realistic layout and allowed me to fix any abnormalities in the product. This was a relatively time consuming product but I still managed to get it done on time.

There were several other documents that needed to be completed during this time that all befitted planning the magazine and the content of the final product. This included: the pitch; which allowed me to explain to an audience the key principles of my magazine, its commercial viability and place in the market. The PCC constraints work that covered any legal issues I may run into and how to avoid them. This included the conventions I would need to follow and the regulations that go with such codes and conventions.  Lastly was the content research that was conducted to find the necessary information for my articles. These were examples of reviews for the GTA article, information on selected games I had chosen for my articles. This provided me with facts to use, sources to quote and examples to use in positive and negative lights throughout the articles.

Planning

Planning started by setting up a realistic schedule tailored to my work rate and expectations. This was relatively straight forward to start with as I filled in the necessary dates of photo shoots and with my articles written before planning actually started it was more a case of editing articles, taking photos and creating the products fully. This originally left me with a week spare or blank lessons in the schedule. This proved problematic and was overly optimistic. After editing, I found ways to improve it and make the sessions more varied and more useful.  This was a valuable planning document as during production it kept me on track and served reminders every time I had homework to finish. The amount of detail in this schedule differed per week based on the tasks I had actually had to do on that week, as some tasks were pretty self-explanatory. There were also days when I didn’t follow the schedule as a problem occurred with some of the production work or I found other more important tasks to get on with.

I feel I have been more organized with my models as in the original photo-shoot for my review article I had to use contingency models as my original models were unable to make the time set. This would have been avoided if meetings had actually been conducted to avoid confusion over times. Luckily as was said my contingency models were free and the shoot was still conducted. With all models it was mainly a here’s the time, location and that was it. I did provide regular reminders but never held any real meetings that probably would have been effective. Luckily most of my shoots were conducted outdoors and so timings could be slightly more flexible than being conducted in a studio.

The photography plans themselves were actually well set out though only crude drawings. I should have re-done them to a higher level of detail to show the full extent of costume, pose and extra effects such as fans and props. These would have made preparation quicker and easy though this vague planning allowed for more experimentation with poses that might have been more effective than the original design.

The main problem that occurred during the planning phase that really affected my production work was the flat plans. I originally designed some outlandish and alternative flat plans that ignored conventions and in my opinion looked

cool. Upon attempted creation however, there was a need for changes to make them aesthetically better and much more professional.  This was the case with DPS 1 and the contents page. Both were completely redesigned with DPS 1 become my most professional looking article and the contents page being converted from a single cramped page to a DPS.  Both improved the quality of the product but still consumed time through having to completely re-start the articles from scratch.  This was the key error of my whole course and although manageable ate up a week of production time trying to create better designs.  There were slight alterations with position in the GTA article, which only varied from the original design slightly. The only article that fully stuck to the flat plan was article 2 that already had an alternative design the target audience liked.  Although slightly problematic it was a worthwhile experience and I gained much better articles that are much better quality.

 

Creating contingencies was an easy task as I had already prepared many during planning. These included stockpiling props, having reliable contingency models and backing up work.  Writing these down was no harder and the task was completed within a lesson.  Throughout production I only had to use one contingency and that was as explained earlier utilizing my back-up models as my original models dropped out on the day of the shoot.

Article plans were also easy to create as the articles had already been written and were mainly a case of writing in what my tone, voice and read speed had been. This was a retrospective and did not take very long to do. 

Production

Production was relatively controlled in terms of time management and organization. I had to make compromises on certain dates and activities to better suit my models/contributors schedules. I use the term contributor loosely as most were just general conversations with games design students on their knowledge of the industry and opinions surrounding it conducted through social media. I also used the same students for feedback later in post-production. One of which provided their faces for the pre-order nightmares article and the GTA review.  I had to re-use models for multiple shoots as I said before I had limited access to realistic models in the local area.

This leads into the second key production problem and that was photography. I had to take the best photos in one shooting as most models were only ever able to do one shoot meaning if quality lacked then I was out of luck. Despite owning my own camera I was limited to local locations meaning travel to meet other possible models was almost out of the question due to financial limitations.  There was one key location used in direct proximity of the college meaning the photo-shoot was pulled of during a models lunch break. This did mean the shoot was short and informal but the photos were gained and they did not negatively impact my product. Since I gained a diversity of photos from this shoot I could use some to illustrate other areas of my magazine, namely my contents page that beforehand had several areas of whitespace.

In terms of handling technology I had no real issues. I could use both Photoshop and InDesign from first year that the skills were easily transferable to this product. I was also fine with using the studio cameras as well as my own personal camera (which should be expected) to create the photos I needed.  Utilizing the available technology I created a product that lives up to its name and looks relatively professional without looking pretentious. It has a common man look to it and if the cover was glossed as designed would appeal to the intended higher-class audience too. This project helped me develop the already existing skills I had with the software and allowed me much more freedom to experiment with editing techniques that again aided my products aesthetics and design.

When completing production time management was key and this meant that every week certain tasks needed finishing. This was dictated by the schedule and I attempted to stick to this though certain tasks were completed quicker and some slower. This meant that sometimes I had free time to improve current products or start new tasks early. Some were completed late but this never negatively impacted my product as everything was finished in time for hand in and the blog was completed to a relatively high standard.  I kept accurate monitoring posts each week that indicated my current tasks and progress made. These were almost always positive except for the issues with my models and photos.  This was beneficial as I would be aware of the problems I may have faced over the weeks and a reminder of how the client would feel and the progress I personally had made. This was motivational most of the time and would sometimes push me to do extra work or continue to work well.