Research and Planning: Semiotics collage

In media today we made a collage of different music magazines to help us decide how we want our own music magazine to be. There is a running theme of dark colours with bold fonts to stand out against everything else in my work.

Research and Planning: Shot type research

These are drawings of various shot types I did in class to show my knowledge of camera angles within media.

Research and Planning: Evaluation of my college Magazine

This is my finished college magazine, when looking at it I can see both good points and bad points. I am happy with what I managed to do given a week to do so but I can also see where I could have improved my work. 

I believe I did well in sticking to the three colour rule, I chose the colours of red, white and blue. Using any more colours than this would have made my magazine look too busy.I also feel that I have done well with keeping the same theme flowing through my cover and contents page, making sure they look like they are form the same magazine. 

All of the photo's used in my magazine (minus the school corridor) were taken by myself and I feel that they are all appropriate and fit for purpose.they all stay within the traditional theme of a college magazine. The main image on the cover was a medium-close-up which stayed with the original specification of the task. 

I used stories which were also appropriate to college and the interests of my target audience. I also added a bar code, date and price to make my magazine look more authentic. I took what people had said in my interviews into consideration when deciding the price and what kind of stories to add to it. On my contents page I am happy I decided to use a small message from the editor paragraph. I like the ides and will hopefully use it in a future Media project.

However I feel I could have improved with my font sizes. I think that some are different sizes on my front cover. On the other hand I stuck to a traditional magazine cover layout by making sure that the Masthead was the biggest piece of writing on the cover. There is also a gap on the cover which could be used up by something. On my contents page I think that my writing is too large. It should be font size 14 at the most, this stops it looking like a traditional contents page of a magazine.There is also a small gap at the top which looks like it could be filled by something. I hope to improve next time by making my contents page look more exciting.

Research and Planning My college magazine

 

After one week of working on my college magazine cover and contents page, this is what I managed to create.  I used most of the skills I had been taught in the previous weeks on how to use Photoshop and Indesign.

Research and Planning: Magazine Photo's

These are the photographs I took for my college magazine. I managed to use most of these but others I left out as they were too similar.

Research and Planning: My Magazine Today

Research and Planning: Fonts

In lesson we were given the task to match a font style with a possible Masthead for a magazine. The masthead names we were given were 'Death Metal' 'Popworld' and 'Popcorn' The first thing I did was go onto dafont.com so that I could download suitable fonts for my ideas. 'Death Metal' said to me that it needed to be quite Gothic or with an air of punk around it. I used the colours black and green as they seemed like Punk colours to me.
Then I moved onto popworld, I wanted the masthead to pop out of the page with a really girly font so once I found the starry font I thought it was perfect. I changed the colour to purple as the colours pink and purple seem very feminine to me.
The 3rd Masthead was Popcorn, this to me instantly reminded me of being young or in college, it seemed like a young persons film magazine. Because of this I decided to use quite a young, school-like font in a bright red colour.

Research and Planning: College Magazine drafts

These are my original sketches for the design of my college magazine. I changed a few things during the process of making my magazine but some key elements remained the same. The only change I really made was to make the main image a little bit smaller so the writing has more room.

For example with the front cover most elements stayed positioned in the same place as I had originally designed them. However as I began to make my contents page my ideas changed quite dramatically. I did however keep my small paragraph from the editor.

Research and Planning: My Magazine Today

Today I started to work on my college magazine, I went off my original sketches and adapted my idea as I went along. I have yet to finish the cover and contents page but I have a week to get it finished.

Research and Planning: Interviews about College Magazine

Today we walked around the college and interviewed students or members of staff about their thoughts on college magazines. We created a set of questions to ask and recorded their answers. From our interviews we established that we need to make sure our college magazines are bright, colourful and bold. It needs to include fun pictures, be fun, informative on college events and interesting to read. We also discovered that people would not pay above £1 for a college magazine and it should not look boring or include inappropriate content.

Research and Planning: Medium Close-up Research

Here are some examples of Medium-close up images.

Research and Planning: College Magazine Analysis

This is an example of a college magazine to help me with my research into making my own college magazine. You can easily see that this is a magazine because of the typical things you would see on a magazine.
- A Masthead
- Stories
-A Medium Close up photograph
-A Bar code
-A date of publish
- The cover uses a colour scheme of about 4 colours and stays to this
- The fonts are all either kept the same or similar so that it flow easily

Upon looking at the magazine several things make it clear to me who the target audience is (minus the title of course.) The style of stories written mentioning words such as Fraternity and Freshman. These are related to the American College lifestyle. This way we can see that these stories would appeal to the college audience. The girl in the main image also looks like a stereotypical 'college girl'

Research and Planning: InDesign Starter

Today our media class got our first taste of Adobe In design which will help us with future AS tasks. We learned..
- how to place large amounts of text in the form of columns
- we also learned how to place images
- add a title
- change the background colour of a page

Research and Planning: film Poster

This is my first attempt at using photoshop to edit two pictures together. I am not completely happy with the result but hopefully as I learn new skills I will improve. I managed to import my face onto that of Gwen Cooper from the BBC Sci-Fi drama TORCHWOOD. Matching my skin colour to hers was extremely difficult as her skin was so pale. Each time I tried to lighten my skin tone I would lose my facial features too much. So for the first time I attempted to use the Clone tool, which I found quite difficult. Hopefully with practice I will get a lot better.

Research and Planning: Photoshop Challenge

Today we were given a challenge in Media studies. We were given a sheet of paper with a list of 7 instructions to follow with a tick sheet so that we could keep track of our project. The instructions included changing a background colour, inserting text and a picture and editing the picture's colours and adding a border.

Research and Planning: Skin Tutorial

This lesson we got to be a lot more creative as we learned to use Photoshop. We were given an image of a girl and showed how to fix her facial blemishes. I learned to do this through the spot healing tool. Then we learned how to create clearer skin through duplicating the layer and adding a smart blur over the top. To begin with she looked a little bit like a Barbie doll but then I learned how to change the opacity of the layer to give her a more natural look.

Then we were given a list of things to change about her including eye make up, hair colour, lip colour and blusher. As you can probably see here I had a lot of fun being creative with my editing. I think the brush tool is my new favourite tool.

Research and Planning: Introduction to Photoshop

Today was our first lesson of Media Studies at Hyde Clarendon Sixth Form college. A task set by our tutor was to create a CD cover by using various tools in Photoshop. This was my first time using both a Mac and Photoshop so I learned a lot of new skills in this lesson.

*I learned how to cut images from their background and move them to another.
*How to change the colour of an image using the colour balance.
*How to transform images
*Use the magic wand tool
*Add Text
*Distort a background

In all this was a good introduction to the world of Photoshop and I definately look forward to using it a lot more in future and hopefully becming more advanced.