Photo-Shoots (29/10/11)

Photo-shoot ideas and plans

Model-
For my model I will be using my friend Melinda Saunders, who is female and 16years of age. I've chosen to use her as my model for my main front cover image and other photos as I feel she has an individual look that is required for an popular artist of this genre, and is attractive so would appeal to the males in my target audience.

Look-
Photo-shoot 1/2/3) red lipstick, black boots, red jeans, white strappy top, head band

Location-
Photo-shoot 1) In the field opposite my house:

Photo-shoot 2) Against a blank wall in my house.
Photo-shoot 3) In my garden.

When-
I'm planning on taking all my photographs of Melinda Saunders (in the different locations etc) on the 29th of October 2011.
I'm hoping that the weather won't be raining, as some of my photos will be set outside. If the weather is just overcast or cloudy I could try and edit the pictures to make it appear a sunnier and lighter day.

Music magazine flat plans

Front cover

Above is a picture of my flat plan for my front cover of my music magazine. This flat plan includes a main image, of the artist 'Melinda' who will feature in my double page spread, this image fills the whole of the front cover.
Sub-headings include well known interviews with well known artists of the indie/rock genre that my target audience will be interested in (e.g. Ed Sheeran), this will entice my target audience to want to purchase and therefore read the articles included in the magazine.
In the bottom left corner, I've included a bar-code, which would be scanned when a magazine has been purchased. I chose to place this in the bottom left corner as, from the music magazines I have looked at, this tends to be the conventional place to have it. I may choose to include the price of the magazine in this area, instead of next to the date, as some magazines just have the price by the bar code.
The masthead 'Tuner' is also in the conventional place, top left corner. I'm currently planning on have a font that mimics the volume level bars, as this connotates music which obviously links with the nature of the music magazine. Also, if I have the bars going into the red area, this connotates loud music - and the stereotype is that teenagers like to have their music loud, so this should appeal to my target audience.

example of volume bars

In the top right hand corner I have included a promotional offer of a free poster of a popular band in this genre, The Horrors. I found offering free goods within the magazine was a popular way of attracting the audience to purchase their magazines when looking at other music magazines.
Another thing I'm promoting on my front cover will be a competition to win a trip to New York City, to see the Arctic Monkeys perform live, I chose to use The Arctic Monkeys as they are another popular (recently headlined at VFestival) and well known band within the genre. I thought that this would be a good opportunity to use and edit some of my photos from my recent trip to NYC. As you can see from my flat plan, I'm choosing to promote this competition in the form of a Polaroid photo, with the photo from New York in the space where an actual photo would be, and the writing below briefly explaining the competition in a font that is similar to natural hand writing. I believe making it appear like a polariod photo will appeal to the target audience because when they would remember them from when they were younger, and see it as a 'cool' and almost vintage aspect of the magazine - which I feel appeals to the Indie side of the genre.



Contents page

Above is an image of my flat plan for my contents page. My current idea for my layout of the contents page is to have a large picture of the top of a guitar, and the neck. Where the frets are, im planning to continue them off of the guiatar neck and have the headings of the contents sitting on them. I feel this use of the guitar ties in well with the genre of my magazine, as a guitar is a key instrument in rock/indie bands and artists work. I plan to have images scattered around the page, next to or near the relevant heading; this is where I could use my pictures that I photographed at gigs and festivals. I also plan on using my contents page to advertise suscribing to the magazine, as I saw that this is what NME does in their magazines.


Double Page Spread

For my double page spread I am going to have the name of the artist it is featuring (Melinda) fairly slanted, this is to connotate that she's not a plain, regular, boring, female artist; but that she's fairly different and unexpected (just like you wouldn't expect a slanted heading). Im planning on using one of my images from one of her photo shoots on the first page on the left, at the moment I think this will be an image showing her whole body as my current idea for my front cover is to maybe choose a mid shot, the text will mold around this photo. I'm planning to have my first page filled with an article generally about the artist, and the second with a Q & A style interview, which will ask questions which will intrigue and interest my readers. On the second page, in the bottom right corner, I have tried to show consistency of the style of my magazine between this page and the front page by showing some more pictures of the artist in the form of polaroid pictures. 

General initial ideas for my music magazine

At first, I thought it could be fairly unique to create a D'n'B genre music magazine, as I feel this genre is yet to be strongly focussed on in the music magazine industry. But, for reasons such as:

• The target audience may be too niche 
• No ones preferred music genre from my focus group is D'n'B or a similar genre
• And, the existing and popular music magazine I would like to base my music magazine on, does not focus on one specific genre, and if some say it does the genre would be mostly Indie/Rock (E.g. Arctic Monkeys, Florence and the Machine) with some pop thrown in as well. This is follows its tagline of 'First For Music News', which portrays its more generalised genre. 

I've since decided against that idea, and decided to do a more Indie/Rock/Acoustic genre (which I feel are all very similar). The reason I have mentioned not one, but three genres there, is because many artists vary in what genre their music is classified as, depending on the album or song released. By including all three genres in my music magazine the target audience will still like most (if not all) of the artists I include, but I will have more of a range of artists to include and choose from. Also, in terms of the success of the magazine in the long run, having a slightly wider target audience and genre allows for more people to be in that target audience and to be interested in reading and purchasing the music magazine. 

Possible names:

• Rechord

Pun, mix of the words 'record' and guitar 'chord'. The guitar chord aspect I like because it relates to the selected genre of the magazine. I feel that this name wouldn't be liked by my target audience, as it may be seen as too cheesy.

• Vinyl 

Relates to music. I like the retro feel as vinyls were popular in the 1970's, but also, because of this the target audience may not like it as it may appeal to a slightly older audience, instead of teenagers and young adults.

• Tuner - possible tag line - 'Keeping you in Tune with the music world' 

This name relates to a guitar tuner, which also relates to the chosen genre of my music magazine (as a guitar is a key instrument used in rock/indie/acoustic music). I feel that this title would appeal to my target audience because of this. I also like how the title is one word, which only two syllables, so its short and sweet (as most music music magazine titles are short. E.g. Q, NME, Mojo etc...).
I think 'Tuner' is my favourite name out of the three, and so this is the name I will be using for my music magazine.

Slide-show of photos taken in New York (21st-23rd October 2011)

Focus Group Profiles

    

Name: Emil Brant

Age: 16

Hobbies: Drawing, kick boxing.

Favourite genre: Alternative rock.

How many hours do you listen to music a week? 21 hours

How often do you buy music magazines? Never.

What is your favourite music magazine? NME.

 

Name: Jenny Moloney 

Age: 16

Hobbies: Singing, music

Favourite genre: Acoustic

How many hours do you listen to music a week? 35 hours

How often do you buy music magazines? Roughly once a month

What is your favourite music magazine? NME.

Name: Isabel Duce 

Age: 16

Hobbies: Shopping, sailing

Favourite genre: RnB

How many hours do you listen to music a week? 14 hours

How often do you buy music magazines? Rarely
What is your favourite music magazine? No preference.

Name: Hasan Braha

Age: 16

Hobbies: Football, xbox

Favourite genre: RnB

How many hours do you listen to music a week? 7 hours

How often do you buy music magazines? Never

What is your favourite music magazine? Don't know

Name: Josh Beecham

Age: 16

Hobbies: Skiing, film

Favourite genre: Rock

How many hours do you listen to music a week? 12 hours

How often do you buy music magazines? once a month 

What is your favourite music magazine? Q

Name: Harrison Payne

Age: 17

Hobbies: Free running, art, football.

Favourite genre: Grime

How many hours do you listen to music a week? 14 hours

How often do you buy music magazines? Occasionally, when I see something good on the cover.

What is your favourite music magazine? Rolling stone. 

VFestival Photos

After attending VFestival (a music festival held in Hylands Park, Chelmsford), I have looked back at the various photos of bands and artists that I was lucky enough to see. I feel that with some of these photos, I might be able to edit them and maybe use them in some way for my music magazine.

MGMT:

Dizzee Rascal :

The Wombats:

Crowd:

Power point - music magazine press

This power-point presentation is currently incomplete. In future slides I will discuss the current music press, and give some examples of popular music magazines at the moment.

UK Music Magazine Industry - Prezi Presentation

Music Magazines on Prezi

Finished contents page with annotation.

Link to video with full annotation.

Since this is my second attempt at using iMovie and uploading and annotating videos on Youtube, I feel slightly more confident with using them. Because of this, I chose to use 'notes' for annotation, instead of 'speech bubbles' (which is what I chose to use last time), as I felt I should try and experiment and change the way I use the programme for annotating, as the more I try - the more I can stretch my understanding and improve. I also chose to make the 'notes' different colours, so that it's coherent with the magazine colours and school colours (red and yellow is used more in the front cover, and in the school logo). 

As I said, I'm feeling more comfortable and confident using the iMovie software, so was able to change the duration time of the video to 2minutes long, instead of 30seconds like my previous video. I chose to make this video significantly longer because I found my previous video far too short, which meant the annotations could only be shown for a couple of seconds, which allows people very limited time to read them (unless they pause the video). 

Over-all, I feel this video is an improvement to my previous attempt. 

Contents page - sketched flat plan

Here, I have sketched a simple, rough flat plan for my sixth for magazine contents page. Since I have already created my front cover I was able to apply some of the aspects to this sketch, to convey the coherence of the magazine, such as the slight shading behind the 'Contents' heading which represents a drop shadow, and I have also tried to mimic the font that I used for my masthead in the completed magazine front cover. Where you can see the rough horizontal lines going across the page, this is where I plan to have my various subheadings of which tells you what is on each page, and then the page number will be beside it. I'm planning on doing this text in the same font as the font used for the subheadings in my front cover. 

The photo I am planning to use for my contents is still undecided at this stage, but from my original photo-shoot I have various photos in mind which I feel would be suitable. Ideally, I would like a picture with the models slightly to the left of the page (so the text can surround them on the right hand side), and I would like the models to be two girls and looking happy. Ideally I would like two girls for my contents page because although it is a female dominating sixth form, a male is featured on the front cover, so I would like to even this out by having a female dominating contents page. 

To make my magazine coherent throughout, I am planning on keeping the colour scheme the same for this page, keeping to the colours of the school. Maybe, it would be nice to choose an image with a background of foliage to naturally and almost subliminally include SHSG's main colour - green. 

Comparing original magazine sketch, to finished front cover

Link to video with full annotations.

When creating my sixth form magazine front cover, I found my flat plan was a lot of help during the process. I found it helped me because I had spent my time thinking about the layout and general appearance features, and how I wanted the magazine front cover to look when complete already when sketching my flat plan. So in theory, all I had to focus on was taking an appropriate photo, and transferring my ideas from my plan onto photoshop. 

As you can see, my original plan for my main photo was to have a group of two girls and one boy (to portray the mixed gender sixth form) sitting on a bench with the symbolic yellow brick road (path to success and greatness). Unfortunately, this didn't abide by the general conventions of a sixth form magazine, as the photo had to be a mid-shot. So, after the photo-shoot (where I photographed various people from my class who I felt could represent the school, in various 'everyday sixth form situations'), I carefully looked through each of my pictures and decided to choose the one that you can now see on the front cover. Maybe I should have chosen a female model for my main front cover photo, as the majority of students who attend SHSG sixth form are female. 

I also decided to change the font of the masthead, as I felt the one I used for my plan was too plain and boring when I created it on the computer and compared it to other possible fonts I could use. 

I also decided to make the red space for the subheadings more transparent so that it didn't completely mask the left side of the image, whereas in the plan I envisioned it to be more of an opaque red. 

Other than that, I feel I have stuck to my plan and my final product looks fairly similar, which I am pleased with. 

Youtube annotation - finished sixth form magazine front cover.

Link to video with full annotation.

After realising that I had just made the simple error of not saving my front cover as a JPEG image, I was able to simply and easily upload the picture onto iMovie and then onto Youtube where I could then add annotation. I much prefer this form of annotation, as I feel it is fairly easy and quick to read and also allows more space for the reader to see the picture (instead of having a small picture in the middle, surrounded by lots of annotation). I also feel that the reader would prefer it because the way I have annotated it is by using speech bubbles, which can point to the area of the magazine I am referring to, the reader can also pause the video at any stage in order to allow themselves more time to absorb and understand the annotation. Although, saying this, to improve on this form of annotation I would have made the video longer than 30seconds long, as it didn't provide a lot of time for each bit of annotation to appear, and be read, so it might be see as a little rushed.

Front cover annotation - using Word

Due to technical difficulties, I struggled to figure out how to upload my front cover onto iMovie and youtube, so at the moment I'm unable to upload and annotate my magazine pages using that method. So, in the mean-time I have annotated my completed magazine front cover using a Microsoft Word Document. Although this method has already been used before, I feel it is necessary that I have the annotation done, and then when I am able to add the annotation onto a youtube video I can just quickly copy and paste my notes onto there.