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.