Project Progress- Week starting 27th January

This week I have been focusing on my The Man Behind The Mic DPS. I carried out my photoshoot with Andrew and have also chosen a few of the images that I want to use. A difficulty I had was the background in the images. At the time of the shoot, I thought that the lighting was good enough but in hind sight, it wasn't bright enough as you could see parts of the background. So I then started to cut them from their backgrounds. This editing has taken me longer than expected. I think that the images work well.

I also managed to have a clothes fitting with my model for the article 'I Wear Your Grandad's Clothes. I Look Incredible.' This helped me to better visualise the final outcome of my DPS. I was also able to experiment with various outfits and develop the outfits so that they work in the final magazine and are appropriate/appealing for my target audience.

I also concentrated on the editing of the images from my photoshoot with Andrew. Because the images are an accompaniment to an article, I didn't want to add a background or anything that would detract from Andrew or the article itself. In the editing of these images I spent the most time cutting out the background from around Andrew's body. I used the magic wand tool to do this. These are the edited images that I have chosen to use for my DPS and front cover:

I also started to create my front cover using the flatplans that I created. Originally, I had wanted to merge my front cover and contents page so that I had page numbers on the front cover with pictures from the articles. However, when I came to translating my original flatplanned idea, I found that it wasn't as successful as I thought it was going to be and I just didn't think it was successful.

I think I will now have to abandon this idea for a front cover and create a front cover that is separate from the contents page. I think I will wait a while until I create my front cover so that I can do more research into existing magazine front covers.

 

This week, while trying to create the front cover, I realised that I hadn't done sufficient research into existing magazines. The research that I had done had been for almost a different genre of magazine. I was completely thrown when my original idea for the front cover didn't work. My magazine has developed so much since I first decided to do an alternative lifestyle magazine. Originally I had wanted to create a wacky, edgy, creative magazine filled with drawings but as I went on my ideas changed and so I have now started to create a simpler, minimalistic magazine. This week I started to panic about my whole magazine. I didn't feel that I had a specific existing genre that I was following. My assessor then helped me by showing me a variety of magazines that I hadn't even considered such as Cooler magazine. I had thought that that magazine was too girly for the type of magazine that I wanted to create but I found that it actually had a nice design layout to it that I myself could use. I have also looked at Dazed and Confused to see what techniques they use. I think I want to create a front cover similar to Dazed and Confused as it's simple but it's not boring at all. You can definitely see that it's an alternative lifestyle magazine which is what I want to come across on my own front cover. It has to be able to set the tone of the whole magazine. Because I had this panic this week, most of my time was spent looking at magazines to emulate and so not a lot was actually produced. Even though I hated having this meltdown, I'm glad I had it because it means that I am more focussed as to what I want my magazine to look like now. I can continue to research magazines and decide what elements to take from various magazines.