The tasks we were given were called the preliminary task, the main task, and the music video. These were all final products that had to be looked into very deeply to get the product that we wanted. It was a lot harder than I had predicted but I had to have good time management to make sure things went to plan.
The preliminary task proved to be a challenge for me as I had had no recent contact with any form of editing software whatsoever, but I had a brief understanding about what a magazine cover should look like. I looked deeper into the main aspects of a magazine and understood that the positioning of the picture and masthead can easily divert someones attention to or from your magazine. I looked into similar magazines and saw that the masthead is usually large and at the top of the magazine and the main picture is the main story. I took pictures around the school with a Canon 5d and a lense that I wasn’t familiar with. This helped me significantly as I was able to work with this structure and try different colors and sizes to make it look more attractive but I could have made it better if I had chosen a more suitable lense.
The preliminary task really helped me in gaining knowledge about magazines and what actually goes into them. Also it gave me soem hands on time to practice and play around with some of the effects. This was good, but I needed to look more into what goes into the research and planning of magazines. My style of magazine was urban and the type of music it was based around was grime/hip hop which is known to attract a young urban audience. Knowing now what style I had chosen it helped me target the correct audience which would influence my codes and conventions meaning a lot of research was needed to be done.
I looked through similar magazines such as Vibe and XXL and found that the colours that they use for the artists are usually red, black and gold. Now that I had looked at colour connotations are I understood that these represent blood/death, darkness/negativity and wealth. These were 3 colours that would be perfect for my magazine as I wanted to show how a young urban boy was living in a negative environment and is now rich. After taking the photos of my model I used the crop button which helped me remove the background, then I used adobe lightroom to make the picture seem dark behind him and at the same time really putting his face in a positive light as he is looking forward and upwards in the picture.
My magazine was progressing well but the organisation of it was slacking slightly. My teacher recommended that we use a site called www.blogger.com to keep track of what we had done and to make notes on what we had learnt. This was new to me as I was not familiar with any blogging site but it proved helpful as I started to manage my time a lot better and set myself targets. This then was used in my final project which was the music video. The music video was a task which involved making a visual for a piece of music and to target it at a certain audience. I decided to use an urban style of music yet again and developed a clear understanding of what I should be looking to do. The camera I wanted to use was called a Canon 550d, this gave me the ability to shoot in HD and also go have a lot of frames per second. This was perfect for me as my music video consists of lots of slow motion actions such as smoke and laughing. I researched into slow motion and found that it is most effective when something is shown such as an emotion or a movement that wouldn’t be so spectacular if shown in normal time. Along with slow motion i would use close ups, i found out that these would highlight emotion and would pinpoint certain aspects of my video.
I would have to say that overall I gained a lot of experience in making magazines and music videos and have gained an understanding of what they consist of. Also I am familiar with technology such as DSLR cameras and editing software such as Adobe Premier and Adobe Photoshop where as before I had no knowledge at all.