Unit 3 Final Production

Print Skills Audit



My Own Pictures

Before the project, me and some friends went out and decided to help develop our skills and have a bit of fun with the settings on the canon camera's. It was just to basically try out different techniques and to see what happens. I like this photo because the aperture is very low depth of field which means it is letting more light into the lens. The shoes are very focused compared to the background. I was difficult to get the aperture setting correct on the camera as we didn't have a great skill yet or know how to do it correctly. The little cup and the shoes in these aperture pictures look great in focus and i like how the background is blurry.

This picture seemed like the perfect opportunity to get a long shot image, especially with the nice background

In these pictures, I wanted to capture movement in my picture using slow shutter speed. The picture is took on an average digital camera though, but it still did work a little bit, and it captured the movement well. I like all the different colours that are captured and makes the photo look busy. The photo could look even better if it has a bit of editing in Photoshop to make the colours stand out even more.



Production Monitoring Blog 5th April

Last week I finally started finishing off the last little touches on Photoshop for my front cover and my double page spread on In Design. I feel that I have progressed a lot throughout this unit and my skills have gotten better at a lot of different things for example, sorting layers out on Photoshop and inserting text and images in In Desing.

I've also used different shapes for backgrounds for some of my text such as a circle shape for 'Exclusive Info!' to go in my double page spread. I got this idea from a fashion magazine, and I thought it has made it look much more professional. I have still being trying different fonts, to get the most appropriate one for my target audience and to make sure it goes perfectly with the genre of magazine. After a while and a bit of practice, you get used to Photoshop. I found it very difficult at some points, such as cloning the right layer and moving images around. I hadn't really encoutered any problems as such which were a disaster to my project, however I did have to ask for help as I got stuck on Photoshop a lot when adding an effect or something just would'nt go right. This is an advanatge though because I kept on learning new skills.

Because I am nearly finished my project, I just need to go over the whole thing, making sure every little detail is corrected and I can upload my final product. I need to proof read my article thoroughly too, as last time I realised that I had made quite a few spelling mistakes in it. I think that I have everything I need on the front cover and double page spread, just it may need tidying up and a bit more thoroughly structured to make it look more professional. Some problems I may encounter this week is just the fact that Photoshop and In Design go very slow and are time consuming when they're loading up. If anything goes wrong, I have my teacher to ask for help and Chris the technician who helps the computers run smoothly.

Production Monitoring Blog 29th March

This week I hopefully will have completed a lot of my double page spread and have had a lot of critisism from my teacher and peers. Last week I was thinking about different heading that would be used for my double page spread such as this one,

The font is quite funky and quirky that wil attract the youth, however it is not very girly and won't really catch the eye of the female target audience and the will just lose interest in the article. Last week and also this week I have been learning more about columns and how to use text flow to make the article go on through to other column boxes. I also have being able to use a drop cap to start of my article. Next time I come to work on my double page spread, I will do it mot quickly as I think it is taking too many lessons to get everything perfect and for it to look professional.

This is what my double page spread looks like so far. I had to change a lot around from my first idea and when I was drawing out the text boxes and image rectangles. I found out how to use the margins more easily too, they're very helpful and are a good way of getting everything which is on the double page spread accurate and in proportion. I am well on the way of getting it finished now and I hope to be done by next week. I have chosen the images that I am going to use and know exactly what I need to do. I have given my images on the double page spread a drop shadow to give off a bigger impact and it looks like it's jumping off the page, wanted to be looked at or read. I will try out different effects this week to see if I find a more suitable or better one, but I think I will probably just stick with the drop shadown effect.

Downloaded Fonts

 I have downloaded many different fonts for my final project of unit 3. I downloaded fonts such as 'a yummy apology' and 'gabrielle'. These fonts are very girly and very appropriate for my magazine mast head font. I also used these fonts in my double page spread for the headline and sub heading before the article. I chose these fonts because they were the most ideal for my target audience of 15-19 female teens. It was difficult at first to upload them to Photoshop, but once I learned how to do it properly and had some practice, it became much easier.

I also downloaded this font from http://www.dafont.com/ which I decided to do some editing on in my spare time to help develop my skills in editing text in different ways before it comes to editing my real unit three project. I followed a tutorial from the internet on how to do this effect which helped a lot. I enjoyed practicing my skills on this and I believe I could use an effect correctly now on Photoshop.

Production Monitoring Blog - 22th March

This week I am going to work on my article for my double page spread inside the magazine. As well as this, I shall be working on the front cover, developing my skills on photo shop and practicing knowing the tools and how to do different elements on the programme.  Last week I achieved getting all the photo’s done and choosing the ones that I will be using for the magazine. So this week, I shall also be uploading the pictures and starting to place them in Photoshop and work on my front cover.

I want to create an effect where the image looks like the same person, and is the same picture, however they are infact different pictures, just moulded together. I did try this, but I found that the task was definitly too hard to do so I decided to fall back to my other idea of having one body overlapping the other on the front cover. I have also started on my double page spread and article, but not quite fnished to put in in place yet.

I have had no errors yet along the way, however I keep changing my mind about ideas, when I just need one idea fixed in my head so it doesn't get too confusing. This week I will hopefully have my article and other elements in place such as images and sorting the structure around. Also I will hopefully have a fixed idea about my front cover of magazine and think of different sell lines and colours.

Production Monitoring Blog - 15th March

.At the beginning of last week, Monday the 7th March, I took the photos for my magazine front cover and for the double page spread. The photo shoot took around half an hour all together. This is one of the pictures that I took on Monday. The photo shoot went very well and all went to plan. There were not very many contingencies at all, except for not really having a solid idea in my head of what the photo shoot was going to include and how I was going to take the pictures. Other contingencies that I encounted was the fact that I forgot some make up for the model to wear for the photo shoot. We couldn’t do the photo shoot without it so we had to go and borrow some off a friend. Other than this though, when we had everything, all the props and costume, the photo shoot ran smoothly and I got all the pictures that I wanted. I used one of the canon cameras from the media classroom for the photo shoot because they give good quality results and make the photo look professional. Using this camera has given me more skills with the camera and I have learnt how to handle it and where to hold the lens to keep it steady while taking the photo. Chris, the lighting manager helped with the photo shoot a lot because I needed a while backdrop and specific lighting.

This week I will have done my flat plan and rationale of front cover and double page spread, and uploaded the photos for the magazine onto the computer, and start experimenting on Photoshop and ID. I will have a structured and definite idea in my head of the fonts and other elements that are going to be included in my magazine, ready for the making of the production. After this week I will have also started writing my article and structuring the layout of my double page spread. The article will be suitable for the target audience, been very colloquial and appropriate for teenage girls. They will be a lot more interested in the magazine if the lanuage is like this because it is suitable for their lifestyle and they will feel up to date about what is going on as it includes fashion too.

Skills Development Blog. Aperture. 11th February

For this picture, I had took the shot in a higher aperture. This means that you can see all of the things in the picture and everything is clear. I learned a lot of skills on the camera while learning how to do aperture. It was fun to do and interesting to learn how it works. However, it took a long time to get it right and get the picture to look proffetional and the perfect sperture in the picture. This picture is took at around F22 with a thin depth of field.

This picture was took around F9, showing the product that is up close, still clear to the eye, however the background is a little blurry, showing medium aperture. It took a while to get it perfect and getting the focus at the correct aperture as we were just experimenting with different depth of fields, to see which one was worked better.

Finally I took the final picture at a low depth of field, letting more light into the lens, making the object that is closest to to camera very focused, compared to the background, which is very blurry. Again it took a little while to turn the dial to the right aperture level, but I got it in the end and got the result that I wanted. I have learned how to use the aperture level now on the canon cameras and this will help me in developing my skills even more.         

Skills Development 9th January

When I had finished the double page spread practice that we had done during a few practical lessons, I had learned lots of different skills that will help me during the production stage. I learned how to use columns and how to keep or take off the column lines. I also learned how to use drop caps, instead of just making the font larger for the letter. These skills will benefit me during the unit 3 production and I will be able to use different colours and shapes of the drop caps. Another skill I learned was how to import images to the double page spread. This was a weakness of mine because it took me a long while to get it right and know exactly what to do. Text wrapping was fun to do because it was a challenge to get it right. I believe this was one of my strengths because I understood it well on what to do. When I come to do this task again, I will be sure to do it more quickly because it took many lessons to get everything right and get it to look exactly like a double page spread.   

Skills Development 20th November

This is the final production of my magazine front cover practice. When we went out to take the pictures, we were told to leave enough space around the image for the headline, sub-heads and sell lines. However I had done the mistake of taking most of the pictures landscape instead of portrait which means that I couldn’t use them for the magazine front cover. However, instead of going out and taking more, I just cropped a couple of them on Photoshop, which made it look natural and as though it had been taken that way. For the first few pictures I took of my model, I made their eye line in the top half of the picture to create dominance as he was playing the part of a lead singer in a rock band. Later on, I experimented with the tilt of the camera, standing on a wall and looking down onto the model. This made the suggestion of him being vulnerable to the camera, which I didn’t really want, and then I made the camera look up at him, which worked a lot better and kept him dominant. However I included the vulnerable picture on the front cover of the magazine, in the top left corner, which would grasp the target audiences eye, as it would usually be the first thing you see on the magazine, reading from left to right. Also it is unusual because this is the space that would usually include the headline. I did this on purpose to create a different effect. It was actually quite difficult to control my model because I didn’t have a fixed idea in my mind, and I was just controlling him to go wherever looked the best, when I was looking through the lens. If I were to do something different, I would wait until I had a good idea of what I could do, before jumping straight into it. It did work well enough in the end though. The lighting for the pictures were all quite dark because of the time of day and cloudiness, so instead of changing the settings on the camera, I waited to get them on the computer, and change the contrast on Photoshop, which would develop my skills more. The Photoshop tutorials had helped my skills a lot, if I hadn’t of watched them, I wouldn’t have developed my skills as quickly and as good. I downloaded a new font to use for my headline because I wanted something grungy and dark. The website that I got it off was http://www.dafont.com/. The tutorials on how to create the effects such as the dripping and block boldness were all very helpful and helped me achieve the affect I wanted. I experimented with the clone tool a lot to get rid of some random things that were on the bottom of the picture like some plants. I experimented with the hue tool for the main image, which was very different and interesting, and was sure to catch the audiences’ eye, but I decided against the idea, and made the image simply brighter instead because I thought it was going to be too much going on, on the front page. I controlled the text alignment easily just by aligning to the right. However I hadn’t aligned the left sub head to the left side of the page. This is something I would have done differently. I imported the bar code from Google and hadn’t taken anything else from anywhere else. The language that I used in my sell lines is short, snappy lines which grab the reader’s attention, also with the use of exclamation marks. By offering the competition of winning free tickets to a festival, would also help get the audience to buy the product. The connotation that the colours are reduced to three, being black, red and yellow, shows power and simplicity, but boldness because of the colours, which also helps get the readers eye.  I also included some enigma. For example where it says. ‘Odd Rock INVADES The UK’. The fact that it only lets on a little bit of the story, makes the audience want to pick it up and read more about it.