CCR3

Below is my letter to a new media student. This new paragraphs are split from slide to slide.

So… How Is It Going

From the production and execution of my music magazine, I have learnt a lot of new and useful transferable skills. All from the practical work that I will be able to use in later projects and also outside of the classroom in my own personal life. Skills I learnt were:

  • Camera and lighting
    • Settings – what settings work best for the light levels and conditions I am working in
    • Angles – What angles work best for each/my own personal preference and genre
    • Orientation – What shot – landscape or portrait – would be most effective for the picture/ angle I am using
    • Framing – What shot type – long shot, medium, close up – Would work best with the meaning I was trying to portray through my artist and picture
  • Indesign and Photoshop
    • Spot healing brush tool – Air brushing of images to make them look cleaner and smoother
    • Stroke – Allowed me to give graphic design features boldness and definition
    • Eyedropper – Allowed me to copy colours I used on images and use them on text and graphic design features

These features allowed me to make my magazine to as high a standard as possible, but it wasn’t perfect. My goals for next time I use these are:

  • Watch more tutorials and then do trial and error to save time
  • Ask for more peer feedback – Gain different perspectives and experience levels and use/ alter their ideas and use them in my project
  • Spend more time editing
  • Use a layout of a current product similar to the one I am trying to create – giving me a template for my product

 

Design Skills 2

From the making of my magazine, draft to draft, I learnt a lot more skills from the software we were using, both of which allowed me to create a finished product that has an authentic and presentable look. It allowed me t give my overall finished product a more professional feel. Below are some of the skills and tools I developed:

  • The stroke tool – This tool allowed me to give different texts and shapes boldness and definition. This gave my magazine a better design and added more graphical design features to show the the creator (me) cared about the product in hand. This gave the end product a more professional feel and it gave anchors to texts and images that were just floating in their spots on the page.
  • The spot healing brush tool – This Photoshop feature was essentially an airbrushing tool, replacing blemishes on pictures and replace them with a more consistent overall colour. This helped give my magazine a well produced look and showed that the small; features were edited and moderated with care and precision to help make them look authentic.
  • The arrange tool – This tool allowed me to arrange the order – front to back – of the content on the page. It allowed me to move graphic design features behind pictures and text to give a 3 dimensional look to the pages in the magazine, making it look like a magazine which was worked on a lot and cared about.
  • The eyedropper tool – This tool was in both indesign and Photoshop, and it allowed me to select a part of an images colour that I wanted to use elsewhere – in text or in any graphical design features. This allowed me to keep a consistent colour scheme for each page as colours from my pictures match or worked well with colours that I copied or chose for the text and graphical design features.

Design Skills 1

From designing my front cover of my magazine, I learnt some key features and designing techniques that helped make my magazine look well-made and authentic.

One design feature that helped improve the looks of the front cover was the quick selection tool. This tool allowed me to cut my star out from the background with precision and accuracy. Below on the left is the original picture with the background and on the right is the edited picture with the quick selection tool labelled

 

This allowed me to remove the background and keep the parts of the image that I wanted/needed for the cover of my magazine.

Another feature that helped improve my front cover picture and help it look professional was the spot healing brush tool. This tool allows unwanted marks and parts of the image to be removed and cover over, it essentially airbrushed the image, which was helpful when removing the first line of writing on the jumper as it allowed for more space on the front cover for the artists name and information such as free content that I wanted to add to draw in a reader.

My personal targets to improve these skills would be to zoom in on what I am editing. Firstly, because it allows me to see every little detail so I can remove blemishes accurately, this will also help speed up the process of editing.

On indesign, one feature I found useful when designing was the W key shortcut. Pressing this key allowed me to see the design view and the print view structure of my front cover. This allowed me to get a more accurate view of how and where I can move aspects of the front page to make it look more authentic. Below is what indesign looks like before I press W and below the first picture is what it looks like after I press W:

As seen in the first picture, all of the text boxes, shapes, place holder and borders are present, allowing me to see where everything is and where and what I need to press to move it. In comparison, below is the print view, allowing me to see what the page would look like finished and printed in hand.

 

So… I am ready to photograph my star.

Now for the fun part,the actual photography. MY main goal is to present the role of being unique in the hip hop world. I decided to change the dress of my photography shoot to bright colours as it represents being unique and being your own person better than black and grey. My brand idea was ‘The diversity of the Hip Hop World’ hence the colourful dress for my star and my mission statement for the shoot was ‘Wear it, Show it, Kill it’.

After the previous in-school photoshoot, I learnt how I could improve my photography and what settings were ideal for the conditions I was shooting in. For my shoot, I chose an indoor venue with little natural lighting, St. James concert hall. The ideal settings for this environment would be a low ISO, Low F-stop and a slow shutter speed, all allowing as much light from the dark venue to get into the frame and make the picture as bright as possible using the little light I will have at St. James. This would also make the colours that my star will be wearing look vibrant and lively in contrast to the dim, low-lit venue I have chosen.

So… I’m Ready to Make Some Media

When in the process of making my music magazine, I need to consider these factors listed below:

  • The Blumler & Katz Uses and Gratifications Model
  • Mise-en-scene
  • Camera
  • Layout/Format
  • Design (Colour and Typography)
  • AIDA

These factors will have a major effect on how successful my magazine will be. All of these factors will help with the physical appearance of the front cover and of the model I will be using as my artist on the front cover.

Blumler and Katz model

The Blumler and Katz model is the theory of why we use media. The 4 factors are:

  • Information
  • Personal identity
  • Social interaction
  • Entertainment

These will help me to shape my magazine content around the different wants and needs of the readers and audience.

Mise-en-scene

Mise-en-scene will be vital in the design of my front cover model on my magazine. The mise-en-scene of my model will help to define the actual genre and also what may be in the contents of the magazine. My idea is to use the simplicity of a rappers fashion sense, e.g Logic or Eminem, and dress my model up in clothes similar to the rappers style, and have the pose as the rappers would, making my magazine cover look authentic.

Camera

From the camera terms and skills we learnt in the previous lessons, I have a better understanding and idea on how I can present my model on the front cover of my magazine. A lot of the pictures are close-ups of the artists face from the shoulders up, with good lighting and no angle, making the picture flat and simple.

AIDA

AIDA stands for:

  • ATTRACT THE AUDIENCE
  • ENGAGE THEIR INTEREST
  • CREATE DESIRE
  • CALL TO ACTION

These are all important features I need to think about in order to make my music magazine as good as possible. They will help me to look into and find the wants and needs of a reader.

Layout/Format 

This will be really important in the design of my magazine as it will help create an atmosphere and set the tone of the genre I will be writing about in the magazine. This could range from the font and text colours I use to the positioning of the size and positioning of the pictures

 

These terms and skills are going to help me to make my magazine cover look authentic and realistic. These are all ideas that I am going to use to make my magazine the best that it can be. Each will

So… How can an image communicate meaning

When used and executed correctly, Mis-en-scene can represent anyone and anything specific to the genre they are trying to represent. One great example of this is how the characters were presented in the film ‘Chicken Run’. All the chickens live on a farm owned and run by a horrible woman and her companion. All the chicken’s are wearing rags and are all obedient to the farmer when she is doing a role call, as they all run and line up in 2 rows and look uniform.

Mise-en-scene can be used to create meaning and can express different ideas in methods that aren’t usually possible with words or music. For example, the use of a well thought out and executed costume would be able to paint a bigger picture than the character just saying what is happening. After watching a clip from Downton abbey, we composed to sections of CLAMPS, each letter standing for:

ostume

ighting

action

akeup and hair

rops

S etting

Below are my two paragraphs of analysis on costume and props.

Costume

In the Downton Abbey clip, the dress was very formal and was coloured black, connoting high class or a sense of importance or even royalty. The colour black could also have been used to foreshadow the coming events of the news that the Titanic had sunk and the telegraph later acquired that stated that two friends of the family of the manor had died on the Titanic when it sank.

Props

The props used in the Downton Abbey clip were very old tools used for tasks that are fully automated nowadays such as the newspaper iron (used too flatten the newspaper and dry the ink), as everything back then had to be done by someone and by hand. In the opening scene when the servants are all having breakfast, just after the lady of the house wakes up, she rings a bell. This shows that there is no technology as she didn’t call or press a buzzer to get their attention, she rung a bell attached to a long string wired through the walls and too the servants room.

 

After learning the different terms used in Mise-en-scene, we moved onto camera terms. A lot of these terms were the basic shots and angles we could use, and they were:

  • Framing
    • Camera’s distance from the subject
    • Camera’s angle in relation to the subject
    • Point of view
  • Distance
    • Extreme long shot
    • Long shot
    • Medium long shot
    • Mid shot
    • Medium close up
    • Close up
    • Big close up
    • Extreme close up
  • Angles
    • High angle
    • Low angle
    • Wide angle
  • Movement
    • Pan
    • Tilt
    • Dolly/ Tracking shot
    • Zoom
    • Crane
    • Steadicam
    • Flying-cam
    • Ped