How do I think my creative skills have devloped in AS?

 My AS media task was to create a music magazine, although this was a very exciting task I realised it would have its difficulties. The magazine was highly dependent on creative skills so it was important for me to develop these throughout the project so I could create a magazine that was going to reflect a professional look.

 The daunting task all began with the planning, where would I start? How would I even begin to plan? The planning was the beginning of my creativity as I wanted to create a broad plan of all my choices, As I was working within a group I did find this very beneficial as normally I would only consider going down one route whereas this time we were all very considerate of everyone’s ideas and it enabled me to think in depth of what I wanted to.

Researching was the next step, our group researched the main genres in the music industry, we looked at genres such as rock, indie, folk music, and R&B, we then thought it was important to look at how much money each genre had generated, who had sold the most albums. We also used a questionnaire that was very influential in deciding what genre of music we would choose to use in our magazine. We created the questionnaire ourselves and asked friends to complete them; the research concluded that we would use Indie music as our genre. As Indie is such a dominate genre in the music industry there were many magazines that we were able to research into such as NME and KERRANG, the research of these magazines were extremely helpful for me, it helped me realise that it wasn’t just the pictures I needed to focus on but everything from the colours, fonts, structure and layout, all of these factors would be important in creating our magazine.

The practical side of the magazine involved us finding a room that was suitable for us to fit all of the equipment in and had the appropriate lighting. At the beginning this was quite a difficult task as many of the rooms were occupied. Organisation was very important in this task as well as we relied on borrowing our equipment from different departments, such as cameras and lighting effects. This was a great opportunity to experiment with different creative ideas.   

Using Blogspot was very benifical for me as it made me realise you dont always have to use a pen and paper to express your ideas, Blogspot allowed me to experiment with different layouts and structure. 

In conclusion my AS media year was essntial for me to devlelop my creativity skills and I hope I will be able to expand on them in my second year.