...And Another Thing

Just before I forget - for my evaluation, I used a prezi instead of something like a powerpoint presentation to show the progression of my Media project from start to finish, the changes along the way, how it eventually turned out... Things like that.

And another thing - since I was using a program / web service that I had never encountered before, I also added to my repetoir of skills learnt during the course. So now I've been given a huge boost to my photography skills, and a newly learnt aptitude for Photoshop, Prezi.com and Blogger as a result of this project.

Oh, you can check out the finished evaluation by following this link; http://prezi.com/guffomjkj0dd/my-media-evaluation/

(If you've never used it before, just click the little "play" button at the bottom to go to the next slide.)

Basically finished

Well, I've basically finished my media coursework. I'll spend the next few days updating my blog on all the technical stuff to do with the magazine, the photoshop techniques and everything like that.

The only thing I'm a little worried about now, besides the evaluation, presentation and the rest of the blog, is the fact that I'm supposed to save my magazine in JPEG format. I mean, that's almost the lowest quality file you can pick when saving an image, and the quality of my magazine is going to suffer because of that. I mean, if we were asked to save them in BMP format or something then I'd be fine, but because we're printing JPEGs, they're not really going to represent the standard of work that we've all been doing.

Yeah, it's a little bit annoying.

But anyway, the main bit's out of the way. Just need to finish up on the blog and everything and I'm done.

Shouldn't be too hard...

p.s Here's the completed pages. In JPEG form *shudders*

Front Cover

Looking back at the design I made for this back in February / March, there's been a lot that's changed. The only thing from the original design that made it to the final cover was the block capital title. What was originally going to be posters of five bands has changed to just the names of three, and the original idea of having a border and basing it on the same basic colour schemes of Kerrang! and NME has changed completely. Throughout the magazine, instead of the original Red / Black / White colour scheme, I've changed it to different shades of blue, white, silvers and a bit of pink here and there. It gives it a more cooled, chilled out and relaxed mood, and contrasts well with the idea of a battle and the image of the band member on the front pointing to the reader in a "Britain wants YOU" pose, definitely reminding observers of the WW2 propaganda campaigns in Britain and in the US.

The figure pasted on the relatively blank background means that they stand out from the rest of what is a relatively blank and uninteresting cover, but the pose of the lone figure means that casual observers will hopefully be intruiged by the mysterious figure that they probably have never seen before and will be more likely to either take an interest or eventually end up buying the magazine.

If this doesn't work, there's also the promise of free music for anyone who buys the magazine. People like free music, but it would probably only affect people who are unsure whether or not they want to buy the magazine in the first place. Someone isn't going to buy a magazine for free music, as it would kind of defeat the point of free music.

Contents Page

The contents page has the same style and colours of the front cover - cool blues, the silver-to-white transitional background, and the simple, sans serif text with straight lines and a clear, clean style. This makes it stand out from most other music magazines, as it involves music that is usually associated with insane colours, extraordinary and eye-catching fonts, and images that pack a punch and usually include allusions to anarchy and rebellion. However, the content of the text and some of the words used makes it clear that most people's first impressions about the magazine would probably be wrong.

I didn't include a page number on the contents page because it would most likely be on the opposite side of the cover, or at least the first actual page in it, so I thought it wouldn't actually need a page number.

Feature Spread

The Feature Spread is my favourite part of my magazine. It follows a slightly brighter colour scheme from the other two pages, as it is not one of the "mandatory" or "official" pages - it's an article, which makes it individual and original, completely different from anything else in any other issue of the magazine, whereas the front cover and the contents page would be something that appears in every other issue ever. You could read a magazine without reading about three bands having a battle for a record deal, but you wouldn't expect to find a magazine without a front cover or a contents page. There hasn't been an "official" magazine without either of those two to my knowledge, but if there are, then they're probably not that important and / or useful or widely read.

With the images on this page, while I'm happy with the images on the far left and the far right, the ones just right of the centre could probably do with a little work. I should probably have left more room to move them around, but instead I've had to bunch them up together in a small group to make sure that they fit and don't intrude on the other band's space. I also had to bunch them up to avoid them spilling over the centre line and showing up on the other page, which probably wouldn't look too good.

Yeah, that was a pretty long PS.

I'm nearly finished.

As you can see from the title of the blog post, I'm nearly finished. Just writing those three words makes me feel great.

Today, I borrowed a friend's camera and took a couple of pictures on our free period, and then again in form afterwards. There were three people I took pictures with first, and since there were good bits in both of them I decided to copy and paste different people from two of the photos I took and put them all together. I then used the two pictures I'd gotten from form to add to the ranks of the first group and then to act as the last band. So that's the other two bands that I've finished, the Elite Four and Felix Uriel.

Basically, all the editing I did for them was using the pen tool to cut them out and paste them onto the blank background, as well as the transform tool to make sure they were in proportion to one another (except one of them, which I deliberately made slightly taller than the others so that they could be seen in the back, and also so they seemed really tall and looked like a guy you wouldn't want to mess with). If I had more time, I would have gone through and edited the exposure levels so that they all looked like the photos had been taken from the same place - as it is, the ones taken outside are far brighter than those taken from inside the building - although the way I've arranged them makes it looks like the photo was taken with flash on, with the people from the brighter photos at the front and the darker ones at the back. So yeah.

Feature Spread = Done.
Contents Page = Done.
Front Cover = ummmmmmmmmm

I have two hours tomorrow to finish the front cover, and I've got all the photos I need. One of the photos had the guy at the front pointing towards the camera, in some sort of WW2 propaganda pose. This'll work well for my front cover, as it's about a battle of the bands - obviously readers will be able to see the picture from a distance, and guess that there's some sort of conflict or battle being talked about in the magazine.

Yep, I'm nearly done. Just a couple more hours to go and it'll be completely done.

Then I'll have to start my evaluation and presentation and stuff. Oh, joy.

Changed a couple of words

Just a quick update - I've literally just changed a couple of words around on my feature spread to make sure I get the coursework done. Felix Uriel is now just a talented musician and frontman rather than a cartoon mascot, and the Wonderband is made up of the hired musicians as well as two or three extra permanent band members.

This is just so that, instead of adding a whole other layer to my coursework and spending time messing around in Flash, I can instead concentrate on taking a bunch of pictures and just editing them. This will hopefully cut down on the workload I have for the next two days. I daresay I'll have to work overtime in order to get everything finished.

Goodbye Breaktimes, Lunchtimes, free periods and several hours after school. Sigh.

Wishing I hadn't come up with such a complex idea now. Ah well, if it works out, it should be a fairly decent bit of coursework.

Messing around with the text tool

So I've almost finished the feature pages, and I'm nearly finished on the front cover. It's just a matter of getting together a few more photos - I really should have taken more when I had the chance.

Well, no biggie. I've got about two images to work with for when I eventually get around to the contents page, so it's all good.

Basically all I've been doing in photoshop has been messing around with the text tool, adding different styles of font and making sure everything aligns using the "view -> show -> grid" as a guideline. I'm focussing more on the actual look of the magazine, making sure it has style and is pleasing to the eye, rather than making it technically good. Probably not what I should be doing if I'm to get good marks.

But yeah, here's what I've got so far for the cover. It's literally just fonts, a gradient, and a single use of the ellipsis tool to make the little circle for the "FREE" thing.

Disclaimer: you don't actually get anything free with this magazine.

Yeah, I just have to add something in the middle. Y'know,
like, the main thing on the front cover. No biggie.

Racing to finish

So I spent a couple of free periods racing to finish my feature spread. I think I've pretty much finished what I can, with the resources I've got at the moment.

I'd already got the headline of the article and the smaller tagline sorted out, as well as the positions for both members of the first band (i.e. myself, twice, both looking slightly different). I then pretty much just used the text tool to copy and paste in what I'd written for the bands, and used the "enter" key a lot to make the text fit into a column. There's probably an easier way to do it than that, but I don't know how and it works for me the way I do it, so I did it like that. Yeah.

I've then been concentrating on making the larger titles and quotes look eye-catching. Using the same two colours over and over again is a bit of a gamble, I reckon - on the one hand, you end up with a very noticeable style, drawing attention to the main parts of the article, emphasising words, etc. But on the other hand, the simple style could also be considered boring. I decided to get around the slightly dull look by pretty much cheating and just using a gradient across the entire background, from white to a very very light shade of grey. Using italics for certain words helps add variation as well, so I used that a couple of times as well.

On the whole, I'm really pleased with how the spread has turned out. Now I just need to gather up a few more pictures and figure out how I'm gonna finish the feature and actually make a start on the cover and the contents pages. I really need to get a move on if I'm to finish everything before the deadline. Goodbye, free periods. Hello, hours of working on coursework.

I've never said this before, but I wish that the school was open on the weekend. Ugh, I can't believe I just said that.

Here's what I've got so far.

Here's the left page (except from that column on the right).



And here's the right page (except that bit on the left).

 So that's what I've got done so far. Just need to get the images on there and I'll basically be done. Hmm, where can I get a camera from...

The Feature

I've started adding more to the band overviews. I'm hoping to make the bands involved seem either rebellious or slightly abnormal, or just over-the-top cocky, because I've decided to change the colour scheme. Instead of doing the rather over-done "red and white and black" colour scheme, I've decided to go for a more neutral and calming colour scheme. Hopefully this will add a stark contrast to the content of the magazine, with stories of people hiding behind cartoon characters, hacking into speaker systems during another band's gig, and just OTT "we're gonna win, no one can beat us" cocky attitudes.

Panic editing

Well, I've decided to only include three bands out of the original five. That's gonna be Pixl Factory (the twin electronic duo), the Elite Four (some four piece indie band thing) and Felix Uriel (the collaborative, virtual Gorillaz ripoff band). So far I've got Pixl Factory's stuff done, so now I have about two weeks to get everything else done.

I'll try and get the article written up and some more pictures taken over the weekend.

I really hope I have enough time.

I doubt it though.

*sob*

Deadline

oh god

Don't look at me like that

Warning: wall of text inbound.

Okay, since I'm a little behind I've just started taking pictures and stuff. This morning I got my friend to help me take a couple for the first band I'm gonna be photoshopping into being - Pixl Factory, an electronic-y, synth-y house music-y band. Not my favourite kind of music by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought it'd be good to get a wide variety of musical genres in, since the magazine's supposed to cover local music, rather than a specific genre.

Thought I'd just let you know what the feature spread of my magazine's gonna look like. Basically, the idea for the spread is a battle-of-the-bands thing, where new local bands get together and battle it out in a series of heats to determine which newcomer gets to win the grand prize of a contract with a top musical producer to record their own album.

Basically it's like a local X-factor type deal, only with more bands with actual talent and a great deal less suck.

But yeah, out of the eight pictures we took today, I'm only gonna use two of them. The reason I'm using two is because they're both of me - I thought an electronic twin duo would be pretty cool, and so I'm doing them first because they'll probably be the easiest band to do. It's two pictures of me, stuck together. Don't start thinking I love myself or anything, I'm just doing this because it saves me having to get loads of other people together for the first picture and means that the only real editing I'll need to do is removing the background and putting two images together.

Here's the two images I'll be using for this one;

The first one

The second one

Yeah, it's pretty obvious that they're both me, but if anyone asks, it's supposed to be a band comprised of two identical twins or something. Okay? Don't look at me like that.

I thought that the idea of them both looking relaxed would give a sense of unity and confidence, supported by the fact that they're both looking in the same direction - up into the distance - showing that they're looking into the future, and are both very, very sure that they'll win the competition. One wears a dark jacket, arms crossed, the other a short sleeved, relatively bright t-shirt and a pair of headphones, hands in pockets. This gives the idea that perhaps the one in the jacket is more mature, or hard working, than the other, and that the one with the headphones could possibly be more talented in the use of electronics and the technical aspects of the sound (possibly like a sound engineer, perhaps?) and is possibly a little less mature.

I'll probably incorporate some of that into the text for them, but obviously I won't have enough space to include it all - which is a good thing, since there has to be an air of mystery around each band that hints at a hidden backstory, without making it too frustrating.

So for these two, the most I'm likely to do is use a combination of the pen tool and the magic wand tool to cut out the background, including the shadows, then paste them both onto a blank background and put the two images closer to one another, so that when all the images are together on the same two-page spread it'll be obvious that they're a band. I might do some editing of the colours so that the one with the jacket is wearing dark blue trousers, so that they're not so obviously the same in both images.

I'm going to have a fairly blank background to stick the images on, primarily to make the images of the people stand out more, but also to make sure that the feature spread keeps in check with the colour scheme of the rest of the music magazine. The background won't be completely blank - I'm definitely going to have some sort of effect, perhaps just to give the page the impression of being roughed up, perhaps a few marks on the "wall" behind the images.

Oh, before I forget, if I have enough time I could also try changing the colour of the hair on one of the images, but I probably won't have enough time. I've got about four other bands to try and take pictures for, so I'm already pushing it as it is. Well, technically one of the bands is a virtual band, so I'd just have to draw a cartoon for that one.

I'll explain more when I get to that stage.





Wow, that's a lot of writing.

Catch up

Spending this lesson playing catch up, with my attention split between the plan for the cover of my Music magazine which I would have finished had I not been ill last tuesday, and writing the article for my main feature which will be in the magazine.

So my magazine's basically gonna be a local monthly publication about the local band / music news from a fictional town. I've decided to call it Amplifier - a bit of a boring name, but it gets across the idea that it's louder than its competitors and is clearly linked to musical instruments and general loud noises. The design so far is based roughly on NME and Kerrang!, with a thing at the bottom promoting FREE posters of five fictional bands I made up. One of the bands is a virtual band made up by one of the people that I made up. The whole situation's a bit like a cross between Gorillaz and Inception (different levels of imagination, made up people making things up basically).

Which, in my opinion, is awesome.

I've also basically finished my cover design - I just have to figure out the photos and text I'll need to get on Tuesday, and all the design stuff should be finished. Hopefully.

Ill

So I was ill and missed a couple of lessons.

That sucks. Just have to catch up on a bit of work and I'll be fine.

Prospectus Cover Mockup

So I've basically finished my school prospectus cover mockup. If I wasn't obligated to include it in my blog, I would probably delete it and destroy any evidence that I ever even tried to use Photoshop to create this monstrosity. But here we go.

It's not particularly good, but since I've only used Photoshop around five times in total I think I can be let off for a below-par front cover.

The cover was basically made by overusing the Pen tool to draw around people in different pictures (as shown by the guy in front, and the four smaller pictures along the left side), cutting them out and using a great deal of feathering to make them appear to blend into the background (well not so much blend into the background, but have that feathering effect that I thought looked good). I then drew a big old rectangle on the right side, coloured it the school's colour, and then copied + pasted in a couple of logos to make it look more official.

I also spent a little time working with the different layers to get the right effect that I wanted. The guy in the foreground was originally just pasted onto the background, but then I messed around with his layer after putting the right sidebar in to make it look more technical. The poorly thought out text on the sidebar completely cancels out that attempt, but seems to level it out to show about the right amount of effort.

Now to do the contents page.

These Titles are just Quotations

Today I decided to rename my blog posts from things like "So Yeah" and "Rrrrgh" to better titles that were actually just quotations from the posts themselves. I also thought that quotes taken out of context could be fairly funny, so I decided to do something like that for the previous post. That's why it's called "Boring Stuff that we 'Need To Know'". It's sort of a sarcastic quotation, but I realise that some people may think that I'm being completely sensible with every aspect of the blog.

Here's a tip - don't take these posts too seriously. Please. These titles are just quotations taken out of context. If you're gonna take them seriously then I'll pretty much have to sacrifice a good few hours at the end of the course to go through and rewrite EVERY SINGLE blog post. And anyway, if there's one thing I know about blogs, is that if they're supposed to be taken seriously, then 9 times out of 10 they're no fun to read. As far as I'm concerned, blogs are meant to be fun to read.

But anyway - Media.

We were given a pair of magazine front covers to analyse. We used the theory from Tuesday to do this, so there wasn't really a lot of theory work we could do other than going over what we'd already covered in the two-hour lesson on Wednesday.

Could someone please inform me why these images
are being rotated. I mean, seriously. This is ridiculous.

It did it again. Hopefully it's just because
these are the images that were sent via Email or something,
since the images in the previous post seemed to be fine.

These are the images that we analysed today.

And these two posts were created in the last lesson of the week, so the lesson's work is basically what you've presumably been reading for the past few minutes.

Boring Stuff that we "Have To Know"

I'm a little behind with what I'm supposed to be blogging about, so I'll just have to write twice as much in half the time... Wait, that's not right. I've still got the same amount of time... Although I am doing twice as much... Yeah.

Look, there's a reason why I didn't take maths for A level.

But I digress (yeah, I took English instead). I'll do this post for Wednesday's work - basically, it was a lesson spent doing more theory than actual practical work, which basically means it was spent "learning" or whatever, doing boring stuff that we "have to know", or something ridiculous like that, rather than the cool practical stuff we get to do with Photoshop.

There was a lot of theory we had to do. I'm talking about around five full pages of notes, with the analysis of a front cover taking up a double page spread. I made sure I analysed the hell out of that front cover. It was all about the basic and the more complicated aspects of the features that are used on the front of a magazine, the ways in which these can be used to make them look appealing to audiences, through the use of colour, font, style and contrast, interesting ways of aligning the features on the page in such a way that stands out, etc.

Basically, we learnt about the four main aspects of Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity, which was related to the positioning and content of the different parts of the cover. We learnt about font styles (basically about Serif, Sans Serif, Script and Display types of font), advertising content, the attention / interest / desire and action needed to be pushed onto the reader by the design of the cover, and finally how to use the Image and the power of words to convince people to buy it.

Yeah, there was a lot of theory.

The magazine cover that I analysed the hell out of.
For some reason, Blogger decided to rotate it around. I hate this website.

Although it all makes me wonder how things stand out amongst other magazines, when they're all designed to stand out... I dunno. That's probably a question for another lesson. Or another class entirely. Perhaps even a different stage of education. I'm rambling. I'll stop that now.

Less Like A Rubbish Poster

Last lesson we were given the task of learning how to use Photoshop in two hours, being shown the basics by someone who obviously knew what they were doing, but hadn't accounted for the fact that the laptops the rest of the class were using were rubbish. Mine, for instance, decided to go into hibernation halfway through the first hour, losing all the (rubbish) work that I'd done up to that point.

Anyway, I managed to learn a little bit of how to work Photoshop. Google could probably do the rest for me.

This lesson, we're trying to use what we learnt to come up with the front cover for a nature magazine. I just copied a cool-looking picture off the internet, cropped it to fit an A4 sheet of paper, added some words in appropriate colours and mumbled something about "minimalism". Here's the product after about fifteen minutes of work and another fifteen trying to resize and upload the bloody thing;

To be honest, I'm pretty pleased with it already (even if the colour is a bit... purple). It's looking a bit bare though, so some more words advertising the magazine's contents would probably make it look better.

brb lol

The text makes it look less like a rubbish poster and a little more like an actual magazine. Bear in mind that I'm not exactly paying that much attention to what the text actually says, and rather focussing on actually including it. Just to make it look good and stuff.

A More Serious Post

So after realising that quickly making my first blog post twenty minutes before the end of the school day was probably a bad move, I decided to log in at home and make a more serious post.

Cue a few frustrating minutes of entering the same login details at least five times before Google decides that, yes, I do in fact have a blog, and lets me access it rather than going straight to the "create a blog" page. I have now decided that I hate this website.

But anyway. What I failed to mention in Friday's post was the actual reason for having this blog in the first place. We (that is to say, me and the other people who took AS media) are going to be designing and creating our own music magazine thing, and blogging about its progress along the way. There will be lessons on photoshop and other stuff like that, as well as research into other music magazines. Which should be cool.

Every single thing that we do in these lessons are supposed to be recorded here - the blog itself will be marked and used to give a final grade, along with the finished product. The amount of marks for each part and the more detailed analysis for what we're going to be doing is in my book, and I'm sure anyone reading this would just find it boring if I listed that stuff, so I won't.

...

Look, I've never really made a blog, so I have no idea how to end a post without it looking like it finished with an awkward silence. Do I give it a conclusion? Do I just write "THE END" and click the publish button? I don't know. I'll figure it out eventually. Until then, I'm just gonna stop typing.

Ten Past Three

Spent a whole lesson in the library, trying to figure out how to make this thing. It's currently about ten past three, and I'm making my first post. Yay.

There is literally nothing to talk about. I've made a blog, and have no work to put on it. This blog is today's lesson. This is literally the most pointless post on any blog ever, of all time. It's like a Facebook status, but with less people reading it. And more words. And better spelling. And less expletives. Okay, it's nothing like a Facebook status (well, nothing like my statuses anyway).

I guess I also kind of read about the specifics for the course I'm currently on, so there's that as well. Just another few sentences to make this post look worthwhile to any casual observers.