Canon- Production and post-production diary

 Production

Friday 17th February 2023:

Today, I began taking photos in the editing room at Sunderland College which I ensured was available and that there would be no issues many days prior to today as this would allow me to not have to worry about being disturbed as much. Due to the fact that the photos I wanted to take were all internal shots only, I did not have to worry about the weather as it did not effect the production as I checked to ensure there would be no issues linked to this and thankfully there weren't any natural issues I could foresee. I also decided it would be in my best interest to use a tripod, a canon DSLR camera and made sure to bring my SD card. To make sure there would be no equipment issues, I ensured all of the equipment was fully charged so then there wouldn't be a debacle involving the camera as all I had to worry about was setting the camera up which had  no complications. 

Monday 20th February 2023:

Today, I continued taking photos however I did so under a different location that I was allowed to take photos in which was my house. At the time, I was the only person in the house thus I could crack on with taking photos without any interference. 

However, I decided not to take the camera and tripod with me as I wanted to experiment with using my phone to take photos. Before I dived in fully, to ensure the quality wouldn't be drastically different, I took a few test shots which only took a few minutes in which I figured out if I took the photos landscape, there was no noticeable difference between the photos thus I took more photos using my iPhone XR. The main reason I wanted to experiment and use my phone was so that there would be no complications involving unnecessary equipment unless the quality was head and shoulders above what I could produce using my phone. Moreover, battery would be a far less stress-inducing issue as I can quickly charge my phone whilst I do something else where as I don't have the tools to re-charge a camera's battery. On top of this, a SD card wouldn't be a factor either significantly reducing any technological errors/mistakes. Using the phone, there were no technological issues in regards to my equipment. However, I had to overcome lighting issues as due to the area I was taking photos at (my games room in my house), the lighting wasn't the best. Nevertheless, I corrected this issue through closing the curtains and turning on my LED lights which I feel added a lot of atmosphere into the photos and added a lot to them. 

Tuesday 21st February 2023:

The last thing that I needed to do for the production phase involved preparing what I was going to say in the advertorial. The subject I chose was a YouTube journey so then I would be meeting the requirements of the brief as in the front cover and advertorial, I had to focus on the theme "journeys." Due to me being experienced in content creation and having a 4 year YouTube story I can tell which also helps to promote Canon as I have used Canon products in my videos (which are some of my better performing videos), there were no issues in  this stage of production as this was the easiest section of the production which is shown as it only took me roughly 90 minutes however I will more than likely revisit this in the post-production phase to ensure the best quality front cover and advertorial whilst also ensuring what I've wrote can actually fit into the advert. 

To conclude the production stage, the reason why I did this the order that I did over the span of three days was to ensure the highest quality product through dividing my attention equally through the three main parts of the production which was using a camera in the editing room at Sunderland College, using my phone at my house and creating what I want to be wrote in the advert. I did this so then I had enough time with all three parts of the production as even if the photos I took in the editing room weren't as good as the ones I took at my house, I still have more than enough selections for the advert. 

Post-production

Monday 27th February 2023: 

Today, I began editing the front cover for Canon. This was the first time I used Photoshop thus I had to learn and grasp the basic fundamentals of Photoshop in a quick and timely manner which I believe I managed to do. I ran into a few issues due to this being the first time using Photoshop which includes an image refusing to shrink down (which got resolved by deleting it and opening it up directly in Photoshop), along with lots of test failures where I attempted to experiment using Photoshop which most of the time didn't go well. Other than that, today was a very productive day full of learning new skills such as learning to use things such as the selection tool, colour editing/adjustments, clone tools which allowed me to hide things in images, magic selection tool which removed backgrounds, an eraser and background eraser, shape tool, paint bucket, a magnetic lasso which removed the important parts of the photo and get rid of backgrounds, the eye dropper tool and finally, I learnt how to download a font.

Tuesday 28th February 2023: 

   Thanks to the new skills I had learnt yesterday, I managed to finish the front cover with several previous iterations to gather feedback on to help finalise the final product as the first iteration of my front cover was more positively received than the second iteration. Overall, there were no main issues as most of the problems I dealt with yesterday was linked to me being new to using Photoshop and now I have experience with Photoshop, nothing came up that proved to be a problem. 

Wednesday 1st March 2023:

Today, I was originally planning on starting my advertorial but, due to the fact I was in a different room and the computers were very laggy, I decided it would be in my best interest to take today to update my blogger and refine what I was going to say in my advertorial which turned out to be heavily extended from  how much I was going to put in comparison to the first iteration of the text. Other than that, they were no real issues as today was a preparation for Friday. 

Friday 3rd March 2023: 

Today, I completed the advertorial however it was a very complicated process with a multitude of issues. Firstly, before I did anything else, I refined my sketch of where I wanted everything to be in Photoshop which didn't take long to do. After that, I tried to copy and paste the writing I completed on Wednesday however this did not pan out the way I was expecting it to as I could not put it in a a paragraph format thus I had to try and use alternative ways to get the writing in the advertorial. 

Ultimately, I had to put the text into power point and adjust it accordingly for the final product. Apart from the text issue, there were no issues in regards to the rest of the advertorial. This allowed me to gather feedback if I needed to change anything on either the front cover or the advertorial.