Photoshoot Evaluations

Below is a video presenting the reasons behind why I chose my photos and why those close to being picked were not.

Photo shoot evaluation

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Double Page Spread Construction

Double Page Construction

 The relevance of this style is to keep in touch with the rebellious fantasy role model character I have created throughout the magazine. Also the fonts have mainly had floral and fancy swirl type patterns feature throughout so I felt it matched the house style very well.

When first developing I had to often move the text around. I mainly had to manipulate the main font feature (the quote I took from the interview and enlarged) in order to make the placement work well. The language I have used in the piece I wanted to be colloqueal and although it has contained a few swear words I needed it to appeal to a teenage audience, so I had to minimize the bad language.

Placing the main font proved to be a bit of a challenge as with my initial planning of spacing it did not look right as the text wrap made the piece look strange. In the end I manipulated the picture and alligned it left which I feel worked much better.

I feel my final double page spread ended up looking better then I had even planned it. I feel it created the ambience and atmosphere I strived to develop and I feel the cool icey tones and colours reflect the attitude of the piece I have written.

Evaluation Question 5

How did you attract/address your audience?

Firstly, I decided upon a target audience for my magazine. I knew I wanted to attract the 'Indie-rock' trend, as I liked the indivdualism that those particular people empowered and the unique factor that both their fashion and attitudes captured. After deciding this I had to research and look at the genre of music that were favourited among these people, I found that there was quite a wide variety and that I would have to limit my music choices. I chose the artists and bands that I percieved to be most relevant to the cause and began to base my magazine around this. I looked at photos of both models and those I knew that had the fashion associated with the 'Indie' genre and began to think of choices for my model. The two I chose instantly sprang to mind. My friend Charlotte, and ofcourse my main model, my cousin Poppy. She seemed to embody every aspect of my target audience and was the perfect model. Her clothing wasn't a problem as she had many antique pieces of clothing, for example her faux fur coat that had been her grandmothers and other 'Indie' based clothing.

Here is a picture of the fashion that Poppy endorsed.


I knew if I really wanted my magazine to stand out I would need a unique selling point. For example some magazines like NME and Kerrang often promote festivals and gigs.This had to be a combination of both the production and design of my magazine itself and in the music I included. I began wondering how I could capture the confident somewhat rebellish attitude of the genre in a photo. I realised it was all down to the 'micro' detail of shot composition,framing, anchorage, layout, mode of address and register.

In my front cover photo I used a close up of model (as often featured on the front cover of many music magazines) I wanted her gaze to be outwards and provocative, engaging readers. Here is the photo I used and finished front cover:

To convey more of her 'rebellious' nature. I gave her a prop to work with, she held it between her lips conveying power and confidence. In my other photos I shot her from different angles. One of the photos her face is tilted upwards and her arms are behind her back. This gave subtle connotations of arogance, yet rebellion and a 'I don't give a s***' kind of attitude. This is shown by this main quote featured on my Double Page Spread:





 Which is appealing to many young adults going through the harder stresses of life. I also had a few hooks inside my magazine, for example gig offers, festival ticket wins etc. All the gigs offered or promoted I had researched as being related to my genre, and included bands and artists that were in my magazine for example Reading which has artists such as 'Florence and the Machine' playing. I also feel that my cover lines and language helped to induce the readers, I used colloquial language and provocative phrases.

Evaluation Question 7

Looking back at your preliminary task (the school magazine task), what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

 Since starting this magazine project I have developed a knowledge and deeper understanding of many different aspects within the magazine industry, these being:

To begin we started learning about the basic magazine conventions and of course the magazine industry. My basic knowledge on this was very varied, but I began to understand terms like circulation, revenue streams, socio-economic groups etc. I learnt that when it comes to making a magazine, it was a lot more complex then what I first thought. There were many things to consider, to begin there was the basics for example layouts, colour schemes, fonts, housestyles. But then I began to realise that there were more aspects that would affect my magazine. The target audience would contribute greatly to my final product, and the importance of the content itself I had hugely underestimated. 

 The content had to not only constitute that of a real music magazine, but it also had to reflect my genre. It was much harder coming up with all my content that I had ever thought it would be. In terms of managing my time, this took me a lot longer then expected and could have hindered the rest of my work. In general I spent much longer on actually creating my final product then on both my research and planning and my evaluations. This wasn't a good decision as my research would hugely influence and benefit my magazine and the quality of the product.

In this post I have shown both my Preliminary Task and finished task, in order to show my improvement of skills. We can first look at the photos. The photos on my finished product are of much better quality, the lighting makes the picture a lot bolder and more proffessional looking and of course my skills in using technology have developed. Adobe Photoshop has been the main programme I have used, I had no previous knowledge of the programme before I started using it for this project and I feel I have really progressed in my use of such technologies. 

In order to capture my target audience and achieve all the standards set by the project I knew I would have to work at getting the best picture possible. I looked at the composition of my photos alongside the lighting and the spacing etc.

Decision making was a large part of my task, there were lots of difficult decisions to make. For example I had to choose my housestyle, which included fonts, colours, layouts etc. Obviously these had to be related to my genre and model etc. My decisions all also had to be linked to my time keeping. Time keeping had a major role within the development of my project

In order to get feedback from my audience I thought it would be a great idea to make an online poll. Throughout my blog I have videos and rhetorical questions that get the audience involved but I thought this would be one step further into engaging my blog readers. This way readers got to actually help influence the final piece. I've also recorded and included audience feedback throughout in order to show how their comments and creative criticisms have helped to form my magazine.  

Front Cover Photo Analysis

Specific Analysis
Looking at the composition, colours and framing of the front covers and the feature pictures in order to attain a better understanding and idea of the front cover I want to present...

Specific Analysis of Front Covers and the Feature

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First stages of Front cover and contents feedback

First stages of Front Cover and Contents Feedback

Below is a powerpoint presentation of my feedback, containing both pictures and videos/ audios of me documenting my feedback and analysing the changes that need to be made to my work.

Front cover and contents feedback powerpoint

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Evaluation Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Prior to this course I was not familiar with anything to do with Apple Macs or Photoshop. I had no idea how to use many of the programmes featured on the macs and Media lessons have helped to majorly advance my technological skills, especially when using Photoshop and Indesign.

Below is a link to another post which displays the progress of my front page in order to give more examples of the technologies I used throughout.




http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=3138161771538533354&postID=3512130410057273199

 I think I worked best within Photoshop. If I'm honest this may be because I had longer to become accustomed and familiar with all the tools. Photoshop is a complicated programme and on few occassions because somewhat frustrating. This often occured during an episode in which I wished to use the 'magnetic lassoo tool', because the slightest move you made wrong meant that you lost your curren progress. But eventually I grasped the concept of using it properly. I had a couple of small struggles when trying to use InDesign, the programming differed quite a bit from Photoshop and the icons and their uses at times became quite confusing.

These are my front covers. If you look closely enough at my Wilmington Weekly page you can see that I had used magnetic lasoo to cut out the main girl in the picture. The contrast is very obvious and does not look natural or proffessional. Whereas I used the feather tool in my completed task. This tool definitely makes the magazine cover look a lot more proffessional as the hair and hat blends effortlessly into the background. Also you may notice that the contrasting tools have been used in both. The difference being that the clarity, clearness and definition looks a lot better quality in my completed project in comparison to my school magazine project. I feel my use and placement of font in regards to layout has also improved. The cover lines on the school magazine are quite randomly placed and don't work strategically with the rest of the page.

I also used a variety of websites and programmes to create my research blogs and evaluation. I used a website called 'goanimate' to help display my target audience. In which you create your own character, choose a background and write in your text that your characters speak. I also often used powerpoint to present my pictures and feedback from my fellow classmates. For a long while, one of them wouldn't work because I had embedded a video and audio within the powerpoint. So my skills improved as I attempted to overcome this problem.

Below is a video of some of my Website Medias used.

                

Technologies everything used pp

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