JS: Reflection on Production - Music Festival Poster

Reflect on your use of photoshop. How does it enable creativity? What were the challenges? How did you overcome them?

• Using 'Photoshop Elements' was highly useful for creating a music festival poster
• The software allows you to 'start from scratch' before adding a multitude of layers - for example - pictures from the internet or using tools to make shapes
• Having these allow you to be freely creative and make anything that you have in your mind
• However, there are many challenges to using such modern software, one being applying some techniques to my work, such as 'the magic wand'
• I overcame this challenge through practice, making new documents and testing the variety of tools on the new new documents

List the techniques used in Photoshop. To What effect?

• The Magic Wand - this allows you to delete unwanted parts of an image, by selecting parts of the image of a similar colour. This is extremely useful and effective, as with a touch of a button, you can have a picture the way you want it, for example, getting rid of the background for a band's logo
• The Crop Tool - this enables you to re-size an image; eliminating parts of the picture you do not want when you reduce its size. This is again useful, as you can use the exact part of an image you wish to use
• Horizontal Type Tool - this ensures that you can include text in your work. This is effective, especially when you apply styles and effects on afterwards, as the text can look even more bold and appealing, which is what a music festival poster needs to capture the focus of the public
• Brush Tool - allows you to paint on your work. This can be useful for 'tidying up' your work, which makes it look more professional and presentable
• Paint Bucket Tool - allows you to colour your background the way you would like. This tool is simplistic and is essential for making your work look the way you wish

Evaluate your finished product in terms of the brief. How successful were you?

• Overall, I believe that my finished product is relatively successful in relation to the brief. The poster is conventional in a number of ways; it features the name of the festival at the top in a larger font size than the other pieces of text; it features the festival dates; the year and band/solo artist logos appear clearly too
• This is conventional and is similar to many other contemporary music festival posters, such as the 'Reading and Leeds' festival
• It would appeal to the target market of teenagers because of the bands involved and the summer theme, which features a yellow background and dates in August
• For the use of I.C.T, I had a limited opportunity to use the 'Paint Brush tool', however, I was able to use tools such as the 'Clone Tool' effectively, which demonstrated an ability to use the technology well

Moving on to print production for the digipak and advert. What advice would you give yourself?

• When I move onto print production for the digipak and advert, I will make sure that I will make it more original and creative, instead of a more conventional approach
• I will also aim to use more of the tools and be more experimental, as this should help my work look better overall