My Tour Poster

As we know my genre for my tour poster is rap. I was given the task of making a mood board including some of my favourite rappers’ album covers and tour posters. I made sure the layout was very organised so it is appealing to the eye so I put it in rows. The top 2 rows are of album covers and the bottom 2 rows are tour posters.

This collage will help me and give me inspiration for when I make my tour poster next lesson.

The theme of these album covers and tour posters mostly all include the colour black and the majority of them using a bright colour to contrast this. I will make the background of my tour poster black to portray the conventional colour palette yet it will still be unique in its own way. I will all the headings in bold bright colours and fonts to draw attention and interest to the information. Hopefully people who read this poster will have a desire to attend the tour after viewing this eyecatching, informative poster.

Next I used photoshop to cut out the outline of my model. I then pasted it into InDesign where I added all of the text and created the final copy. Here is my final product!

Finally, I created an evaluation on my tour poster, analysing all aspects of it. Here is my feedback on my tour poster.

My Magazine Front Page Swede

In lesson, we were taught how to use the application InDesign. This is where we made our own copies of some NME magazines, It was really interesting to use all of the tools to create a realistic front cover and I now have experience of InDesign for the future when I make my music magazine. I have gained the knowledge of how to use this so when I make my front cover it should be a lot easier and quicker to create.

I have learnt many skills on InDesign this week. Some of these being how to insert conventional features of a magazine cover. For example, an image and text into the special text boxes you must use on InDesign. Another useful skill I have learnt is how to ‘lock’ an image/piece of text/text box into place; this helped me a lot especially when layering text over an image because it means nothing moves out of place.

It was good to learn all of these skills as I now know how to use the program I will be using when it comes to making my own music magazine front cover.

Here is the original Rihanna NME magazine front cover alongside my recreation of it.

I am pleased with my final product even though it is not perfect. I am happy with the masthead as it took me a lot of time to make it look somewhat similar.

I also like the big ‘Rihanna’ cover line in the middle as I think the font and size is very similar to the original.

Finally I am most pleased with the quote beneath the cover line because I think the placement, font and size looks incredibly realistic to the original.

On the other hand I could’ve worked on the grey gradient in the background, I couldn’t get this fade on the actual image so I just had to make it the background colour.

I also struggled to find an exact font for the masthead to look realistic so I had to find one similar and adjust it by changing the stroke volume,space between the letters and the boldness; the NME letters still are not perfect but I am happy with how it looks nonetheless and I learned how to play with all the fonts.

 

Here are a few videos that helped me get my head around how to use InDesign and useful tricks like inserting images in cool shapes.

The Camera Talks

Once we’d taken pictures around the school in our pairs, we chose the best 9 to explore further. I put my 9 favourite images onto a mood board so I could then annotate the images in detail.

We were asked to put 3 hashtags below each image; one with the type of shot the image is eg. a close up, one with the denotation of the image (what it is), and the last one with the connotation of the image, the hidden meaning.

Here is my 9 favourite images along with my creative hashtags.

The images that match its hashtags with the picture well are image 1 and 4. I like the first one because of the use of the props (the hand and the padlock) and also the lighting as it is dark and mysterious; so the connotation of this image could be very deep.

However I also like image 4 as it is not a close up in focus shot like the rest of the images, it is an action shot and is very effective. The hashtags assist this image to be questionable as the connotation is ‘#Escape’ leaving the audience confused as to what they are running/escaping from. This task has enabled me to unpick images and think about the hidden meaning in great deal.

When making my magazine I may include an action shot because of how effective my action shot image has turned out. Experimenting with the camera has enabled me to explore all the different types of images I can take, and allowed me to explore new angles and movement. I will keep these skills in mind when it comes to shooting and making my own music magazine.

Technical Camera Terms

There are certain things that need to be set in place before taking a picture in order for it to come out as a nice clear image. Some of these being;

  • Shutterspeed – How fast/slow the shutter closes over the lens. A high shutter speed will give you a very clear image.               – A low shutterspeed means a blurry image, it will let a lot more light into the picture.
  • Aperture – How much light is coming through the lens, this will enable the image to be as light/dark as you want.
  • ISO – Automatic, so you don’t have to manually focus the image.

Other aspects that you should consider when capturing a picture are:

Framing 

How far away the camera is from the object being photographed eg.

  • Long shot
  • Extreme long shot
  • Mid shot
  • Close up
  • Extreme close up
  • Wide angle
  • High angle
  • Low angle
  • Point of view angle

Movement

This is a few camera techniques that can be used to take a moving picture :

  • Tilt
  • Pan
  • Dolly
  • Zoom
  • Crane
  • Ped
  • Tracking
  • Hand held
  • Steady cam
  • Aerial

Keeping all these aspects of a picture in mind, we were put into pairs and sent off to do a photoshoot where every picture must tell a story. We attempted to use different lighting, angles and frames . Here are a selection of the images we took.

This picture I think is my favourite and turned out really well mainly because of the background being very dark and gloomy along with the mystery of the trapped hand and the padlock.

This picture however did not turn out so well as it was meant to look mysterious and as if they were trapped, but the lighting and angle didn’t compliment each other so I did not use this image in my top 9.

My image that uses mise-en-scene to communicate meaning.

We explored mise-en-scene by being allocated into groups and given  a theme. The themes given out were punk, rap, folk and pop. My group were given rap. I was happy with this genre because it was easy to create the look and rap is something I have great interest in.  In our group we created a mood board of all things that came to mind and linked to the word ‘rap’.  We put all our inspiration and shared our ideas on this so we could create the most realistic look possible. This board included our favourite famous rappers and items of clothing rappers ‘typically’ wear.

Made with Padlet

We came to the conclusion that when doing our photoshoot we would focus on the baggy clothing, jewellery and little facial expressions.

Next I dressed up as a ‘stereotypical rapper’ and did our photoshoot. Some of the things I wore to enhance my look were:

  • Black Baggy T shirt, rappers tend to put little effort into their clothing and more effort into accessories.
  • Baggy jeans, to disguise the figure of the model, to give a scruffy and careless look and to match the colour of the hat.
  • Black nike shoes, almost every rapper owns a pair of black nike air force 1, so these fit our genre really well.
  • Blue and Gold DC cap, The gold of the cap matched all the jewellery and DC is a rappers brand so this was perfect.
  • Gold chain, very stereotypical but a statement piece of the outfit as all rappers wear a gold chain.
  • Bandana around my face to disguise myself, to portray the ‘gang culture’ effect, disguising my face was key.
  • Other Jewellery such as rings and many bracelets, to come across as rich.

This helped me understand the concept of how media communicates meaning because if I didn’t dress like the ‘stereotypical rapper’ my meaning/message wouldn’t be portrayed well; my aim was to look as realistic as possible and this wouldn’t be effective if I couldn’t communicate and pass my meaning on to the audience.

Here are a few pictures of my final outfit, posing like a rapper:

Next, we asked our classmates to write adjectives on post it notes and stick them on each person that dressed up. This is so we can evaluate the looks of the models using words relative to their appearance. Some of the adjectives that were stuck on me included:

  • Thug like
  • Criminal
  • Chav
  • Filthy
  • Defiant
  • Gangster
  • Rude
  • Offensive
  • Independent

Doing this shoot and experimenting with mise-en-scene within my look has really helped me to grasp the concept of everything that pulls a look together. This has helped me develop my skills so when beginning shooting for my music magazine, I now have some knowledge so my shoot will turn out well.

 

 

Print Media that Communicates Meaning

The 5 parts of ‘mis-en-scene’ creates the word CLAMPS.

  • C- Costume
  • L- Lighting
  • A- Action
  • M- Makeup and Hair
  • P- Props
  • S- Setting

This allows us to unpick images, videos and posters etc. In Media we need to be able to identify all these things within an image. I had a go at this when I was given the task to evaluate a tour poster by myself. CLAMPS helped me do this as it gave me a guideline of what I needed to focus on and what to start writing/unpicking. I chose to evaluate the Clean Bandit ‘I miss you’ tour.