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.