Evaluation Q2

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

As the main focus of my work is skateboarding and BMX, I would say that the combination of my main product and ancillary text was very effective.
The video is used to present skateboarders and bmx riders in London, so to make the video promotion more effective, the front cover of the magazine features a BMX ridr, which will appeal to those who enjoys these sports, aswell as those who enjoys the alternative/rock genre and art ie graffiti.






Printscreen from video






Magazine Cover












The foreground of the magazine cover, you can see that the location of the picture was captured at Southbank Skatepark in Waterloo. This is mainly where my video footage was shot, so you can further see how my main product and ancillary text compliment each other perfectly.



Finally, as my magazine is combination music, sport but also art, there are a lot of shots in my main product which feature graffiti in the background. I decided to use this location of Southbank for my Digipak cover.

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Evaluation Q1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Many Alternative/indie magazines are presented quite similar and simple in regards to layout and amount of text used on the cover. The main purpose of this is to bring focus onto the cover artists, by the use of images and bold font.
Most Rock/Alternative rock magazines are quite simple in terms of text, so the cover is not to over crowded and the pictures are the main focus. This is to attract their targeted demographic by focusing on their interest.
Below are examples of magazines of this genre.


Kerrang magazine features many subgenres of rock, for example metal, punk etc, so tend to use more of a darker colour like black, with white and yellow font. The magazines cover artist, which is Fall Out Boy's ,ost popular members, takes up the majority of the cover space, with the intent to draw in consumers.








Taped Magazine











Every magazine has a theme to their covers that it associated with their cover artist, which is presented in the form of background colouring and font, basic design layout.


NME Magazine uses:

- Bold Lettering
- Mostly neutral colours like white
- Central positioning of cover artist
- Light background image of building landscape - Used as relation to the bands latest destination

For my magazine cover i've used similar techniques and conventions for this type of music genre.
* I started off with the use of bold font.
* Red, Black and White for font colour.
* Image associated with product - picture of skateboarder and BMX riders
- Placed in foreground
- Overlapped with minimum text
Since my magazine is a combination of music, sport and art, i've included:
* smaller pictures similar to product like: Graffiti, more skaters etc
* also added an Exclusive interview with the band - Silver Sun Pickups.

My Magazine Cover

DigiPak Cover

For the DigiPak Covers I took a picture of Southbank skate park to use as the background for each foldered cover.
The front cover shows the name of the artist i'm using, which is Silversun Pickups, plus the album title Swoon and the video soundtrack "Sort Of".
To add text to the picture i uploaded the image on to photoshop and then used the 'Horizontal Typing' tool, clicking onto the picture and then dragging across.
After typing in the text I manipulated it by changing the angle, by bending the words.
i did this with the artist name, album title and so the song title.

After adding text to the picture this is what it looked like, with the bright red font to standout. This picture will be used as the front cover of the digipak.

Filming

As my video is based on an outdoor sport like skateboarding, I was faced with problems like the weather, being a lot of rainfall, that my chances of filming were on occasion limited.
I have also have troubles with the resolution and the overall appearance of some of the footage i've edited because of where i've had to convert the files.

Photoshop - Magazine Cover

When creating the magazine cover for my production, I used Photoshop to edit various photos, by extracting from the image and changing the overall appearance.


Here is a picture I took of an BMX rider, which will be the main cover. Before I began editing on Photoshop I resized the image.




















I then began adding text the the cover.

First was the title of the magazine, Alternative Press, which was made to stand out. I clicked the 'Horizontal Type Tool' in the tool box to the left, wrote in the title, then increased and coloured the text.


I continued doing this to add in more text onto the cover, changing the font size and colour. As the genre of music i'm doing is Alternative Rock, i've chosen dark colours like black and red for the font, with a few text in white.



I've decided that my magazine is a combination of music, sport and art so i've decided to include small pictures on the cover as features of the magazine. This includes graffiti art and pictures of the skateboarders, as a free poster.

To do this I uploaded the picture of the skateboarder onto Photoshop, and extracted the actually skateboarder from its original picture and placed it on my magazine cover.
On the middle of the cover I added more text by introducing the band name of my video, as an exclusive interview, with a picture of the band beside it.

To finish off the cover I included text of offers like free tickets to concerts, upcoming extreme sporting events and news on other Alternative Rock bands also a feature on 'Girls Who Skate' as a way to broaden the audience.




















The idea of a magazine cover is to have as much information on it as possible to attract the attention of consumers, with what they would find interesting to them.

Photoshop Test

To familiarise ,myself with photoshop I took images relating to my production work, like skateboarding stances, so I could practice editing manipulating photos by cropping, cutting, changing colour schemes etc.

This is an original picture which I took.

I then decided to play around with different colours to change the effect of the photo, like for this photo I turned it pink.

This was a test before I started on the real photos.

Filming Locations

I have indentified two of the locations I will be filming at, being in Clapham Common and South bank Skateparks.

Clapham Common Skatepark



SouthBank



Here I will be filming specific shots like tricks performed by the skaters, done in a variety of close- ups and long shots.