How creative have you been in your AS and A2 productions?

How creative have you been in your AS and A2 productions?
Use the marking criteria for G325 to help you:

• Explain what you did and analyse the extent of your creativity.
• Give examples from the texts you created to support your points.
• Use terminology e.g. media terms, creativity terms.

Over the period of the course I have been creative in all elements of my AS and A2 production pieces. For my AS work I used the brief of creating a music magazine and tailored it to my creative ability. This was most evident in the genre as it allowed me to choose or develop a unique genre that is unconventional and not seen on the market before. I challenged the conventions of the genre and developed a mixed genre of past and present music combined into one product. This enabled my creativity thrive through a mixture of intertextuality and combining new ideas specific to my genre. Most evidently seen through my own magazine logo I used two different fonts, a modern hand-drawn aesthetic typography to represent the present element of my magazine genre with a classic Art Deco typography to represent the past. This was an effective use of my creativity as this allowed my magazine to be completely original and would not be reduplicated elsewhere. By adhering to a young adult audience aged 16-24, which is a common convention of the music magazine market, this allowed me to use elements that were more experimental that would be appreciated by that age group. For example, it was effective for me to use bright colour palettes such as the sharp red, deep blue and white that would attract my audience. This allowed me to create my own house style specific to my magazine, and which I could then reduplicate across the front cover page, contents page and double page spread. Although I was constrained to the dimensions of international A4 size and double A4 for my double page spread, it allowed me to use the space and layout effectively as possible. Otherwise I could over clutter my ideas rather than systematically position each element to attract the audience.

The AS product also allowed me to use new mediums to my own preference. This was mainly evident through the use of photography as I used my own artist and props (such as the American flag) to compliment the graphic design my magazine. I was able to choose my own white background and mise-en-scene such as heavy make-up and retro styled hair to appeal to the genre. This allowed my creativity to thrive as the photography was then completely unique to my product and was able to create an effective star image. This photography was a central feature of all pages and I was able to be creative within the post-editing stages of Photoshop and touch-up my artist and cut her out from the background so that my artist would appear seamlessly on the product. For the double page spread I also produced my own text, including the magazine article along with the contents page, sub-headings and cover lines to promote my artist and enhance the information I could provide. This allowed me to represent my artist in an entirely unique way and produce and completely original information. However, I was limited to the spacing of the documents, such as the double page spread where only several column spaces were available; therefore I had to decide carefully which features would be the most important to include.

Photoshop CS5 allowed me to extend my creativity as it provided a wide variety of editing tools to manipulate my graphic designs. For my A2 product I was able to scan a hand drawn image into the software which I manipulated to appear as if it had been drawn with a drawing tablet. I edited features such as the brightness, contrast and relevant levels and then overlayed them onto the background to remove the initial paper background from the scan. Here, the advantage of technology helped develop my drawing creativity to a final end design through the use of Photoshop's tools. My creativity here was more advanced than my previous AS product as all the features I had created by hand and further onto the computer, rather than relying on secondary mediums such as photography to turn out correct on the day of shooting. 

For A2 I followed a similar process for features such as typography and took inspiration from the 1950s era of style and trends. This enabled me to retrieve a specialist 1950s typography which I could then enhance in my own preferred way onto Photoshop by adding effects such as a drop shadow and outer glow. I could further specify features such as thickness and opacity to really emphasise my brand image for my logo. This influence of a different era allowed me to explore unconventional past features that would not have been as common in the present day market and helped me focus on creating a recognisable image. 

However, constraints that were compulsory with  my A2 brief in some way limited my creativity. For example, the digipak required certain regulatory requirements that meet industry standards and can be produced on a mass scale by external specialist companies. This meant that I could not experiment with new forms or irregular forms which could have appealed to my market. For example, I could have made a digipak in the shape of a foldable heart that would have been more aesthetically pleasing to my target market audience of 16-24 year old females. Although, I think working with the constraints of the digipak and the A4 album advert ensured that I did not over clutter spaces.